Question of Evil

[jack]

If 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,

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

If God were good, why would She allow evil universes to persist?

(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.

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

I only did the pronoun to be mildly provocative ;)
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.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

standard answer to Why does God allow evil things to happen is that there's a parent/child thing going on....this is a reasonable-ish response to pain on an individual level, when you get mass famines, wars, disasters... I'm not convinced it scales terribly well.... Unless you also add in the idea of an afterlife

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.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

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,

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.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Have your read any Olaf Stapledon ?

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?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Stapledon: I strongly recommend you read Star Maker. Though Last and First Men, you also should, on general literary grounds.

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.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thank you.