Question of Evil
May. 6th, 2008 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackIf you were the God, and all possible parallel universes existed side-by-side, what would you do? Would you delete most, or transform them into copies of the one where people were happiest? Or let them run?
To me, that thought experiment relates to several questions:
* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")
* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance. This has bad effects, that far away tragedies can get ignored, but good effects, that people can choose to help some people close to them, even if this is a drop in the ocean compared to everything else, but a lot better than just freezing up. But if all possible parallel universes existed, it would make it obvious how every thing you chose to do was an essentially arbitrary decision about how people close to you matter more than everyone else,
To me, that thought experiment relates to several questions:
* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")
* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance. This has bad effects, that far away tragedies can get ignored, but good effects, that people can choose to help some people close to them, even if this is a drop in the ocean compared to everything else, but a lot better than just freezing up. But if all possible parallel universes existed, it would make it obvious how every thing you chose to do was an essentially arbitrary decision about how people close to you matter more than everyone else,
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Date: 2008-05-06 03:11 pm (UTC)That's a deeply weird premise and I'm not sure I can even begin to tackle it without quite a lot of clarification. What is causing all possible parallel universes to exist in the first place?
Was it some underlying metaphysical principle? In which case, if I delete or modify some of them, will the rest come back, or will another infinity of possible parallel universes diverge from the ones I leave as starting points, or what?
Or did I cause all possible parallel universes to exist? In which case, my motivation for so doing would presumably be relevant. Or was it my predecessor in the God job from whom I've now taken over and have the chance to enact changes of policy? In that case, did he leave any mission statements, design notes or other useful documentation regarding what he was attempting to achieve thereby?
Are we inside or outside time? If outside, how does deleting a parallel universe help anyway – surely, merely from its existence at any point in my subjective meta-time, its inhabitants have already existed and undergone all of their happiness and/or suffering and it's far too late for me to do anything about it?
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Date: 2008-05-06 03:24 pm (UTC)Hm. It's a thought experiment, so I don't really have any answers, but fwiw it's analogous to the question of "if He exists, why doesn't God just do away with bad things" that people ask, and most people find intuitive. Whatever the premises for that would apply to this (though I don't know what those premises would be)
I think it's implicit that you find yourself in this situation, and cause there to be more or fewer universes if you choose (the question is irrelevant if you can't prevent there being universes). Or maybe it seemed natural to experiment creating parallel universes and then said "whoops, I only just realised the moral implications, now what?"
did he leave any mission statements, design notes or other useful documentation
I think obviously you'd look for design notes if you could -- "why is there evil" would be cleared up entirely if you found a comment in the code explaining why it seemed like a good idea. But I think it's equally clear that you don't have any such things, as the question is "what do you think is right"
If outside, how does deleting a parallel universe help anyway
I think it's just as interesting either way. That would be one of the questions to consider: if God creates the universe all at once and then edits it to be good, maybe this universe isn't edited yet, but it's "too late" as it "exists". This is very Egan...
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Date: 2008-05-06 08:45 pm (UTC)Unless, of course, the comment is something along the lines of "/*DRUNK: fix later*/".
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Date: 2008-05-06 09:41 pm (UTC)PS. Have you seen the anecdote recounted in the antepenultimate paragraph here?
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Date: 2008-05-07 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-12 02:21 pm (UTC)It went to: http://blog.plover.com/physics/faucet.html
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Date: 2008-05-06 04:18 pm (UTC)* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")
It just reformulates the problem, though. If there exists a set of all possible parallel universes, why has the postulated value of God chosen for this iteration of me to experience this particular parallel rather than any of the trivially imaginable ones that are better than this one is some straightforward obvious ways ?
* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance.
I have a strong query against that "naturally", and an even stronger against it being a reasonable basis for moral consideration if it happens that it is in our nature.
It seems pretty obvious to me, looking at the general course of human history, that the ability to build a civilisation, with all the advantages of civilisation such as penicillin, the internet, the rule of law and so on, requires an expansion of the range of empathy, of what counts as "us" and what "them"; if you're incapable of grasping that anyone outside your little hunter-gather tribe is also a person, you're never going to be able to build a city. This indicates that this aspect of human nature is mutable and to my mind the logical extension of this is that one maximises potential by regarding the entire species as "us"; nationalism seems to me to be a particularly weird aberration on a scale intemediate between the city and the species, and the sooner we can be rid of it the better.
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Date: 2008-05-06 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 08:48 pm (UTC)But there's another factor apart from moral worth: what Levinas calls responsibility. Sure, it is morally correct to regard people on the other side of the world as people, but you're not responsible for them in the same way you are for your family and friends. Most people wouldn't think much of someone who let his children starve because he was spending all his money on helping victims of humanitarian disasters in the third world, for example.
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Date: 2008-05-06 10:18 pm (UTC)I agree completely, but I think such people may be wrong. If I allow people to starve in this country but save others from starving in another country I see that as no different from preventing starvation here while not preventing it abroad.
What is it that makes us responsible for family and friends but not people on the other side of the world? Is it because of distance? In todays connected world of banks and aid organisations that isn't a practical issue. Is it because I'm related to my family more so than the person abroad? If so that doesn't explain why I ought to care more about my friends than the person abroad. Perhaps the answer for this cuious behaviour lies in kin selection.
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Date: 2008-05-07 02:39 pm (UTC)I'll agree that the responsibility there decreases, but that is a function of shared history and commitments; yes, I am less responsible for some random stranger in Calcutta than I am for my immediate family and close friends, but that is by virtue of having built relationships with family and friends and conscously assumed the responsibilities thereof, of a life with a background of choices already made. It would not make it any more morally acceptable, were I to suddenly and strings-free come into possession of half a billion dollars tomorrow, for me to spend the entirety of that on my family and close friends.
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Date: 2008-05-12 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-12 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 09:27 pm (UTC)I'd have a harder time arguing about the motivations for the advances themselves, although I'd probably go for something along the lines of delegation of responsibility for decisions to those people who's objectives most align with my own.
Personally, I ascribe my large-scale decisions to an intellectual attempt to improve something large and impersonal (the species, the system, the world) rather than to better the lives of any particular individuals. I can't comprehend that many actual real people, so it can't be empathy. I'm left with 'neatness' and my abstract desire for balanced systems.
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Date: 2008-05-12 02:36 pm (UTC)Exactly. But I felt some understanding of a "God" who would allow all possible parallel universes to continue (leaving aside for the moment the question of bringing them into existence). And previously I had felt no understanding of any God who would allow a universe like this one. (Also see quote to minipoppy :))
Thus it does reformulate the question, but from a question to which my only response was "It's impossible, there cannot be such a God" to "Hm, maybe those assumptions are not contradictory after all".
Which I thought was sufficiently interesting to ponder. And curious to know if other people would agree. (So far it seems mixed.)
why has the postulated value of God chosen for this iteration of me to experience this particular parallel rather than any of the trivially imaginable ones that are better than this one is some straightforward obvious ways
That is, in the parallel universe case, I felt I might possibly have let them exist. But am still unable to put into words why (or I could just have said that). But felt it likely that other people, presented with the same premise, might feel the same way, and either be able to explain better, or at least see something new into the question.
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Date: 2008-05-12 02:48 pm (UTC)I know what you mean. I think I was referencing in passing something I've wibbled about at more length elsewhere. But firstly, people plainly do feel like that, right or wrong.
Definitely expanding "us" as fast as possible is good. Both from a "he has human rights similarly to me" argument, and a "game theory, if we work together we both win" argument.
And something being natural isn't sufficient for it to be good, no: we've decided lots of things we do naturally suck. But I morality must be derived from what we think -- from what else could it be? (I need to rework some old posts that I no longer quite agree with, but things like http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/62407.html)
That is, point #2 in the original post, is based on the idea that it might be ok to place people closer to you with more importance. And a metaphor for why.
Reflecting I see a lot of this is duplicating comments to hilarityallen's post, I'll go down there and look at those comments.
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Date: 2008-05-06 04:51 pm (UTC)Is a God running an experiment able to be a Good God?
Those seem to me to be the obvious problems with the first associated question you rise.
As for the second, it seems evident to me that the long term survival of the human race is predicated precisely on the ability to make decisions based on a more-than-local morality. We devise governmental systems that are pretty much dependent on an idea of the common good.
As for your main question, I think that you're actually asking whether God has empathy, and if so, does it override your experiment? Does God regard humans as independant entities (as we regard ourselves) or as we regard bacteria (i.e. entities governed by a set of simple rules and conditions)?
(Actually, that last makes me ask the question: are we making unwarranted assumptions about the sentience of bacteria and other species?
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Date: 2008-05-06 07:07 pm (UTC)(Yes, I apologise for "He", I had to pick some pronoun, and went for the most traditional one as hopefully being less distracting :))
Well, exactly. That's the question: would a good God do so? Is that a problem with the question? You seem to have a clear answer.
I could see two opposing arguments. On the first hand, that bad things are bad, so God should remove or alter universes with many bad things.
But on the other hand, many people would rather exist than not: should you just stop "bad" universes. How bad? If God controlled this universe, and couldn't change it, just let it go on, or stop it, should he stop it? I think most people would say "no". What if you transform each "bad" universe into a "better" universe. If that "better" universe already exists, have you really done anything different than just stopping the other universe?
This is all very sophistry-like questions, ones I might not have asked before watching the matrix and reading a lot of Greg Egan. And in some sense they're completely irrelevant, in that almost certainly this universe is all we have the power to affect. But it seems to me like there should still be answers.
it seems evident to me that the long term survival of the human race is predicated precisely on the ability to make decisions based on a more-than-local morality
See also a response to Rysmiel. But I know what you mean, I think we do and should strive to become less local.
But I've touched on this before, that as correct as it is in the abstract to say "all people should have equal worth" (what previously I would have unhesitatingly said) we have to accept how people actually do behave, and that that is to prioritise close people.
That civilization is expanding that circle of "close" people wider and wider, which is good, but that we may have to start by working with people close to us, and may never get to making all humanity a single civilization, but that doesn't mean that what we did do was worthless.
Question #2 was thinking about this. Supposing you aren't God, but can view, or maybe travel to, the parallel universes, you're faced with an infinite amount of humanity. In a Zelazny novel the protagonist can walk between worlds, and finds a knight wounded, and helps him, and commented that if he walked on he would have found a world where the knight had lived and the attackers had died, but chose to help the knight he saw, and said something about that being his humanity, that he couldn't turn away when the knight needed him.
And I emotionally completely agreed with that viewpoint. Even though, if you said all life was equal, there was no point helping this particular person, just because he was there, when he could have walked on to a world where he could have helped someone else -- or several people.
The only justification I can find, is that sometimes it's ok to prioritise someone because they're right there.
As for your main question, I think that you're actually asking whether God has empathy
That's interesting, I didn't see it as that at all. I imagined a God who would help people if he could. But if you think allowing the infinite universes is clearly wrong, then the only question is if a "good" God is in any other way justified not helping people if he can.
(Actually, that last makes me ask the question: are we making unwarranted assumptions about the sentience of bacteria and other species?
That's also interesting. If you ever read the sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, it discusses the idea of life you cannot ever communicate with. It doesn't provide any answer, but my impression was that the characters thought (a) you should consider that it may always be the case that you haven't reached any communication yet and saying never is a failure of imagination and (b) if however it's truly impossible, you have to accept that. If we assume we can never reach any amicable agreement with bacteria, then we are justified in doing whatever necessary to understand them, since an unchecked bacteria could wipe us out.
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Date: 2008-05-07 07:13 am (UTC)Of course the standard answer to Why does God allow evil things to happen is that there's a parent/child thing going on. No sane parent would allow their child never to be afflicted with pain/something hurtful in their entire lives, because they wouldn't have a child then, they'd have some form of jellyfish pet. However, while this is a reasonable-ish response to pain on an individual level, when you get mass famines, wars, disasters like this thing in Burma or the tsunami a few years ago, I'm not convinced it scales terribly well. Unless you also add in the idea of an afterlife, in which God can 'rescue' you from a bad world by killing you and granting eternal life. Eternal life there being a sort of get out jail free card.
Of course, that mentality led Marx to say that religion was the opiate of the people, and allowed considerable abuse of a compliant population by its masters.
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Date: 2008-05-12 02:56 pm (UTC)Well said, I'd agree with all that.
No standard answer being acceptable to me (other than the one I actually believe, which is that there is no God, or at least no good, omnipotent one), I mused in my post that point one might suggest another.
Personal responsibility rings true for me in Narnia, but not in this world (where mass bad things are more obvious). The afterlife is logically an answer (the one that applies to Bujold's Chalion theology, which is wonderfully conceived), but most people, even people who claim to believe it, can't really seem to find it palatable.
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Date: 2008-05-07 02:50 pm (UTC)There does seem to be an underlying assumption here that it is appropriate to hold a Creator and their creations to the same moral standards, which I think is not unquestionable. Or if it is, several characters in my fiction are lining up to kick the hell out of me.
This is all very sophistry-like questions, ones I might not have asked before watching the matrix and reading a lot of Greg Egan.
Have your read any Olaf Stapledon ? Star Maker is notably relevant to this chain of thought.
And in some sense they're completely irrelevant, in that almost certainly this universe is all we have the power to affect.
I don't see Eganesque virtual universes being outside our ability to affect in the medium-term future, granted not having a crash.
That civilization is expanding that circle of "close" people wider and wider, which is good, but that we may have to start by working with people close to us, and may never get to making all humanity a single civilization, but that doesn't mean that what we did do was worthless.
That we are finite beings, with finite amounts of energy to bestow on problems, and should apply some level of tactical thinking to which problems we can be of maximal use in addressing, makes perfect sense to me, which is why I do what I do for a living.
The only justification I can find, is that sometimes it's ok to prioritise someone because they're right there.
The "sometimes" is the rub, because I would have a serious problem with it becoming an "always".
Actually, that last makes me ask the question: are we making unwarranted assumptions about the sentience of bacteria and other species?
It seems likely to me, personally, that there is an irreducible, objectively determinable, mathematical identifier for sentience. I am noodling in fiction with some of the implications of this, so I don't want to go on about it too much here; I think the real difficult questions there would arise not if one found bacteria to be sentient, but if one found some subset of the human race not to be.
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Date: 2008-05-12 03:02 pm (UTC)Oh yes. I was implicitly considering the question could there be a God good by our standards.
If you don't require that, a God in a relationship to the universe of an author to a book is another potentially valid resolution of the question of evil. It's consistent. But most people do not find it a satisfactory one -- all we know of God (if anything) is his interaction with this world, and people who say "good", generally mean in his relationship to us.
Have you read one over zero (http://oneoverzero.comicgenesis.com/d/20000827.html)? It's one of my favourite comics. And despite being not very serious, it seems to illustrate a God in this position interacting with his creation better than anything else I've ever seen.
But while it's a consistent theology, I don't think it's consistent with any religion claiming a "good" God. God may or may not be justified on his own terms, but if he doesn't care about us individually except in special circumstances, I don't see that we should worship him.
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Date: 2008-05-12 03:04 pm (UTC)No -- now I certainly want to :)
I don't see Eganesque virtual universes being outside our ability to affect in the medium-term future
True, this thinking could definitely be relevant then. I was imagining interacting with universes parallel to ours, just to admit to hilarity that I know what I'm saying may sound irrelevant, but I think it's worth thinking about anyway.
which is why I do what I do for a living.
What is that?
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Date: 2008-05-12 05:52 pm (UTC)what I do for a living: bioinformatics web databases. priimarily used as tools for drug design. Tools or making tools to save lives, in other worlds. While I could, theoretically, be affecting the world for the good more directly in many ways, I am satisfied that in doing what I can do, strictly in not-for-profit publicly accessible contexts, I am a) using a skillset I have that is not as widely available as many and b) exerting myself in ways I can continue to do long-term, as opposed to, frex, the sorts of doing helpful things that would burn me out rapidly like suicide crisis hotlines; I greatly respect people who are capable of helping others that way, but I do not have that particular kind of strength, and it seems morally preferable to apply some tactical thinking to using what strength I do have in the optimally effective manner.
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Date: 2008-05-13 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 04:52 pm (UTC)The people who complain about Local Council, some arbitrary Them who are failing to do things, but once you've met Pete and June and Adrian they aren't a Them any more they are a person doing their best and don't deserve this random criticism...
The way people in backwater Scottish villages treat you as a friend when you amble into their village shop and people on the London commuter trains treat you as a tree.
Anyway, apparently it's a feature of our brains, although I don't think that can be quite true, at least it's possible to learn to care more, I think.
As for the all possible universes thing, it seems to me that if they did they would *have* to, somehow, that they would do because that would be the way the
worlduniversemultiverse worked and you wouldn't be able to just delete some of them at random, or change things in one without something popping up elsehwere.(I don't mean that this is a logical requirement of such a thing or anything, only that that's what I think would have to be the case. ugh.)
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Date: 2008-05-06 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-07 02:55 pm (UTC)This is clearly an over-simplification, though; there are, after all, clearly people whose brains are wired not ever to really grasp that anyone other than themselves is not a tree, in that sense. It seems very clear to me that there are people who are wired for more and less broad-ranging empathy, wherever the average may fall; if nothing else, I'm not prepared to believe that absolutely everyone who is a vegetarian because of extending their empathy to non-human animals is lying or deluded about this.
The way people in backwater Scottish villages treat you as a friend when you amble into their village shop and people on the London commuter trains treat you as a tree.
And that this is not purely an issue of scale can easily be established by comparing the hostility to strangers in some bits of smalltown Ireland with the sense of welcome, and of people being aware and ready to intervene if there's any aggravation, on the metro in Montreal more often than not; both of which I have lived with for periods of years.
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Date: 2008-05-12 03:09 pm (UTC)The point I took was that I cared about some finite number of people personally, and have made a decision to extend that to all people (and to a lesser extent animals). So that I place value on everyone, but more value on those I know in person. And my instinctive reaction to someone on a tube may be "don't get involved, don't have enough caring tuits", but that I can decide to do something in some circumstances.
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Date: 2008-05-12 05:35 pm (UTC)- go and have a lovely holiday on a Scottish island, get friendly help from total strangers, and get in the habit of smiling and acknowledging everyone I passed (I say lovely holiday because I was consequently in a good/happy mood)
- return to southampton via rush-hour London (yay sleeper trains) and find myself on busy trains with this attitude of smiling/nodding at people and finding that they were all stonewalling like I (and everyone else) were so many trees, and quickly back off into doing the same myself
- shortly after that read about the monkeysphere
so I guess I fed the monkeysphere thing straight into my recent experiences. it's still stuck with me though. i also think of it when my sweet gentle sister is swearing at the other drivers down the motorway...
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Date: 2008-05-13 12:11 am (UTC)Although come to think of it, there are actually very practical reasons to be blank on the tube: not getting trapped into a conversation if you'd rather not. (There's definitely also a monkeysphere inability to empathise with fifty people at once, and an embarrassment at singling someone out.) But is there any good way of saying "Hi, hey, I'm human, I hope you're having a good day, but I don't want to talk"? Maybe wearing earphones, but nodding/smiling at people?
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Date: 2008-05-06 05:13 pm (UTC)I'd have a lot of different worlds running at once. In fact, I think I'd be a sort of divine The Sims player. I'd do lots of experimenting with history, and then I'd understand Dr Who.
But seriously though, if I were God, and I were good and omnipotent and omniscient, I'd create mankind and then leave them to it, and there would only be one version of that. I think.
But I think maybe you're giving me too much control over the situation ;)
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Date: 2008-05-06 05:52 pm (UTC)I were God, and I were good and omnipotent and omniscient, I'd create mankind and then leave them to it, and there would only be one version of that. I think.
But if you were good, wouldn't you feel bad about all the suffering? This is a standard philosophical question: does it make sense for there to be an omnipotent god given the existence of suffering. I can see the argument for creating a world and letting it evolve it's own way.
But most people say that if God were good, he wouldn't let the large number of people starving, etc, in the world do so. And that if he were good, and able to, he would have to intervene, unless there's some other reason why he shouldn't.
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Date: 2008-05-11 01:26 pm (UTC)To me, the concept of God is weird enough anyway without applying rules to him that *we*'ve created - the whole point of the theory that God exists is that we don't understand him, right? He's there to explain what we don't understand through science and so on. Or at least that seems to be the way in which religion grew up originally, AFAWCT.
Applying rules to God seems a bit like applying rules to time travel. I mean, whatever God might be, if he even exists, we just don't know - we posit his existence it the same way we do perishable materials used to write ancient texts, or aspects of quantum physics. So by all means let's have lots of LJ posts about it, I just don't think we're going to get anywhere very fruitful :)
But you were asking what *I* would do, and *I* think I can cope with the concept of being good *and* allowing people to suffer.
But most people say that if God were good, he wouldn't let the large number of people starving, etc, in the world do so.
Isn't that an argument from an atheist point-of-view? I don't think even now that atheists (even atheists + agnostics) outnumber people who believe in a god or some gods, do they?
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Date: 2008-05-12 03:20 pm (UTC)I think that's probably natural (and good, and what most people do).
Sorry, I don't want to criticize what anyone believes personally, but since we're here, I'd like to explain what I was trying to say. I think most people who believe in a good, omnipotent God, accept they're not certain how God and suffering can coexist, but either think some answer is mostly right, or that it makes sense for a reason we can't see.
Isn't that an argument from an atheist point-of-view?
Well, yes :) Or rather, not quite -- I think medieval christian philosophers asked the question, and proposed various answers. Possibly the answer that God is not good, not omnipotent, or not existing is more recent :) But just because it's believed by fewer people doesn't make it wrong :)
Hilarityallen's last post made a very good summary of the position.
Basically, I see what you're saying about suffering. If I was in charge, I don't know what I'd do specifically. It's quite possible that a good God would have a world with some suffering for all the reasons you name.
But that doesn't seem to explain why some people have some suffering, and some people seem to have nothing but suffering. Some people are born, live for a couple of days or a couple of years, and die, with no chance to do anything at all. Surely the world would be plainly better if they were given some chance?
I don't mean that's conclusive, but I think that's the question the "question of evil" is trying to ask. And I think we have a number of potential answers, including yours, including some other traditional ones brought up in the thread, including the one my post #1 point hints at, but none feel quite satisfactory (to most people).
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Date: 2008-05-12 05:45 pm (UTC)Or rather, not quite -- I think medieval christian philosophers asked the question, and proposed various answers.
IIRC, the answers they proposed boil down to a number of fairly simple positions:
a) There is justice in this world, really.
b) There will be justice in the afterlife.
c) God's reasons are not for us to know.
d) Free will.
e) A universe containing human beings has to work in ways that allow the existence of human beings, which necessitates the existence of the other things in the universe that are consequences of that, including sickness, natural disasters, &c.
I am inclined to reject the first three pretty much a priori, as the first seems self-evidently false and the other two dodge the question. The latter two really seem to be fudging on the omniscience and omnipotence criteria.
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Date: 2008-05-13 12:12 am (UTC)Pretty much, except that I didn't think I'd be able to list them exhaustively (it's quite possible nuances or other answers existed I didn't specifically know), I just wanted to make the point that the question existed.
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Date: 2008-05-07 02:58 pm (UTC)You think humans are up to governing themselves for the greatest good; or that if not, that their freedom of choice is a greater good than the absence of suffering ?
I think the free will argument is also specious, fwiw. It seems that it should be trivial for a posited omniscient omnipotent deity to set up circumstances such that the choices all the finite beings within the context freely make combine to produce a world with no suffering.
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Date: 2008-05-11 01:14 pm (UTC)Yes. Er, I mean, the second of those.
My personal philosophy is a bit of a hotch-potch of things that I think are important and/or sound plausible - and that does include the probable/possible existence of some kind of supreme being or beings, but without comment on how much control he has/wields over the lives of people.
My own take on the free will argument is that it's entirely useless when people try to use it as *proof* of a divine being, but that it's entirely possible, hypothetically speaking, that it applies to a divine being if one (or more) exists.
Purely personally, I think I do hold free will as having a higher value than the absence of suffering, though this is largely because I've bought classic(al) and romantic ideas that life doesn't mean much without suffering and so taking it away would just leave us with highs and no lows, which would a) be a bit boring, and b) perhaps have a lessening effect on our ability to enjoy the highs.
Anyway, given that I have this opinion, I don't see why it's *impossible* (I'm not saying that it's probable) that a god would also have a similar philosophy.
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Date: 2008-05-12 05:36 pm (UTC)Fair enough. I think I lean towards thinking removal of suffering would be a more significant moral imperative for a putative three-omni deity; largely because I remain entirely unconvinced that humans do actually have free will.
Purely personally, I think I do hold free will as having a higher value than the absence of suffering, though this is largely because I've bought classic(al) and romantic ideas that life doesn't mean much without suffering and so taking it away would just leave us with highs and no lows, which would a) be a bit boring, and b) perhaps have a lessening effect on our ability to enjoy the highs.
I'm out of sympathy with that; which is not an argument of position, just an emotional reaction. Partly because I'll take boredom over even what suffering I've experienced, which is trivial compared to any number of readily suggestible examples, and partly because I am uncconvinced that suffering is the only route to the relevant kind of emotional wisdom leading one to really value the highs; love gets there too, I think.
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Date: 2008-05-06 06:58 pm (UTC)If I were an extremely powerful being in charge of the universe, well. I think I probably wouldn't create the universe in the first place. Because any possible form of existence could always be improved upon. I could create a bunch of sentient beings for the sole purpose of experiencing eternal bliss, I suppose, which would mean I'd create heaven without creating earth. But I don't know how much of a point there would be to that. Anything short of that, though, could lead to my creatures questioning whether I was really good.
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Date: 2008-05-12 03:21 pm (UTC)LOL :)
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Date: 2008-05-06 09:09 pm (UTC)At this point, it all becomes a matter of probabilities, and my maths is only sufficient to return NaN.
(BTW, how are you dealing with the universes in which there are no parallel universes?)
no subject
Date: 2008-05-09 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-12 03:25 pm (UTC)That's the point. Some people have an instinctive reaction that you should get rid of the bad universes. Some people think you should keep them, for your reason.
The second hints at a resolution to the problem of evil, since in this thought experiment, we have a god letting a world with much suffering go on.