This is well done and apropos of our upcoming episode on Candide (to be recorded Friday):
-- Wes Alwan
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I like Stephen Law’s argument from a recent philosophy bites podcast on the same subject; mainly that the problem of evil is that there is so much of it, which rather invalidates the notion of a loving god.
I agree, specifically the recent historical event of the Holocaust can not be reconciled with any amount of good it could have also brought about. Another evil that I find difficult to understand is the early death of many young, innocent individuals who never had a real chance to live any life, some which might die in such an absurd and lonely way as to leave nobody with so much as a memory of their meaningless passing existence. Quentin Meillassoux refers to the problem of explaining these kinds of lives as the spectral dilemma. The problem of evil is not just that evil can not be reconciled with the good in general, it is that the evil we have been faced with in this world empirically could not be balanced out by any amount of good still to come.
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/07/marjorie-perloff-to-change-your-life-wittgenstein-on-christianity/
At the risk of starting a debate on ethics and free will , I think the big issue with this flowchart is the assumption that there is such a thing as “evil” and that it exists.
innocent children dying of hunger or terminal desease, I think we can safely call that evil. I am a believer with faith (an uncertain rational position), but denying the existence of evil is not cogent. God is mysterious, let us not be glib.
meh, denying that Evil exists is entirely cogent but to deny violence, suffering, and such is to deny reality.
How is simply declaring that your God is mysterious not a glib gesture in a philosophical context?
denying the existence of needless suffering (that will do for evil – come on) is glib in any context, barring trivial argument about the meaning of the word ‘evil’ and other anti-intellectual sophistry regarding language games.
In brief…
1. “Then why didnt he?” silly assumption to exhaust possible answers by either ‘free will’ or ‘to test us’.
2. Omnipotence does not mean God can perform logical impossiblities eg. make 4+2=7 or coinciding free will and no evil (though the latter incompatibility is not obvious).
If God is both all-good and free (as most theists believe), then it’s logically possible for other beings to be both all-good and free too. Therefore, a perfect and free God could and would have just cloned himself infinitely many times. So why are we flawed mortals and not gods?
If God is all-good but not free, then having free will does not have any intrinsic value. For otherwise God would have it. Therefore, a world where people have free will is not intrinsically better or worse than one without it. So the problem of evil remains and the free will defense fails, I think.
coinciding free-will and a world without evil is not a logical contradiction.
God allows people to suffer and die because we’re better off than not living as mortals. Our mortality defines living like no other factor in life. Life is frail, and necessarily so.
I feel like there’s some things wrong with this picture. I can’t really lay my finger on it exactly. It might regard the definition of ‘evil’, it might be because ‘not wanting’ to stop evil doesn’t point at him being all loving or not (the bible mentions the virtue of inaction), it might be that it’s giving human rules to God.
“Giving human rules to God,” is just in this case saying that we understand His motivation. A very natural response is to say that why on Earth would we possibly understand His motivation, given that He’s a fundamentally different type of creature?
I think this is sensible, given the definition of God as infinite, and so beyond our capacity to know or understand. However, then you can’t say God is morally good, as we only understand this term as it applies to people. This is the Euthyphro dilemma: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/11/16/episode-46-plato-on-ethics-religion/. …and if you admit that God is beyond good and evil and should not properly be personified at all, then that way lies Spinoza: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/08/24/episode-24-spinoza-on-god-and-metaphysics-3/
Recently I had a discussion about the Euthyphro dilemma with a Catholic who believes that the doctrine of divine simplicity (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity) is true. I’ve always had a hard time trying to figure out where to go with the dilemma after someone claims that God actually is his own nature, and somehow his nature is Good, although this somehow involves other properties as well (e.g. Justice), even though – according to the doctrine – all of the properties of God’s nature somehow unite into a single property and are ultimately interchangable. This does seem a bit Spinozan, but the doctrine of divine simplicity also states that god has nothing to do with matter.
This would undoubtedly be true if there is anything like a God but does that not also makes it one not worth recognizing? As any value it might offer us by way of thought must also some how first be apprehensible to each of us personally. The counterpoints offered in the article are interesting although they seem more like the kind of cruel intellectual facades you would expect to be produced only by very highly alienating entities, which certainly is a possibility given our ugly history but leaves us with little left to do philosophically.
Saying God is his own nature seems to be a tautology. Then saying God is good is also a tautology, since Good would be defined as according to Gods own nature. That leaves the door open for God to be any number of horrible things we would consider immoral, but in turn would then be moral since it is in his nature.
The topic of Evil (or Good) seems to be such a big topic that it is hard to determine its meaning without having each person define their use of it. Far be it from me to define its essence. What seems to run together with “Evil” is maximum judgment of the Bad. So if we proffer up God, as on the Evil Flow Chart, then we get to judge “Him” to be responsible for maximum judgment, since he is thus of maximal responsibility. What seems ironic to me is that the very act of judgment (esp. maximum) itself seems to be at the heart of taking the stance of “evil” “bad,” separate and negating. So I may screw up, and anyone who knows me, knows that I screw up (and if they are human, they screw up also). But when you declare that my screw up is evil, or Evil, then that judgment is devaluing of another (rather destructive, evil?), separating, and self-righteous elevation of one’s own value at the expense of the other. From this movement, the next question might be then what is the opposite of evil, destructive devaluation of the other; which starts to get interesting: what is the good? Well, perhaps the good is impossible for us screw ups, but at least we may not take refuge in “better than” judgment of others. Maybe evil has a lot to do with the human tendency to judge others?