TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part 1: Incompatibility
Follow up to: The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time; The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully, Part II; God, Babies, Hell, and Justice; The Contradictory Failure of Prayer, Part II; There Are No Religious Facts
I’ve been running a Weekly Link Roundup series for quite some time now, currently in its twenty-fifth article and on track to grow further. In these series, I post whatever well-argued things that strike my fancy, and this has traditionally included a lot of arguments against the existence of God that I hate to see not given more prominence.
The arguments in question come from a series of YouTube videos by user TheraminTrees called “There are no gods”, that set out to explain what TheraminTrees used to believe about gods, and why he is an atheist now — including which gods he rejects, why, and with how much certainty. I want to single out these arguments here to give them a bit more prominence, but also to discuss them and analyze their success. I also think it’s good just to get them written up in text, since some people (like me) prefer reading a lot more than watching.
The Three Videos
He starts in the first video by outlining his time as a Christian. While it contains some interesting mentions of unsettling Bible passages, it’s nothing that hasn’t been covered in my essay “The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully” or Adam Lee’s essay “The Abraham Test”.
Instead, I’d like to get to the really interesting arguments found in his second video about which Gods he rejects on the basis of them being impossible, which employs the only Incompatible Property Arguments (arguments which hold that God cannot exist because some of his properties are logically contradictory to some of his other properties, like a square circle) that I find actually good. Then I’d like to talk about his third video where he follows up on atheism as applied to gods we cannot really know much about. As a cumulative case, TheraminTrees ends up outlining a rather compelling account for atheism in response to a wide variety of god concepts.
Omnibenevolence vs. Hell
TheraminTrees starts out his first video on impossible gods by pointing out what makes a god impossible: incompatible traits. God cannot both have a trait and lack a trait. So simply find those incompatible traits, and you’ve disproved that specific God as logically impossible.
TheraminTrees’s first example is that Prince Phillip is Vanuatu’s Volcano God is falsified because the volcano god is said to be born in Tanna, whereas Prince Phillip was born in Corfu — because the birthplaces are contradictory, they are therefore incompatible, and therefore this god cannot exist.
Likewise, an omnibenevolent god can be said to be incompatible with the concept of Hell, and thus no “omnibenevolent god that allows people to go to a hell” can exist, because the concepts are logically impossible. While TheraminTrees doesn’t elaborate and takes this argument to, I suppose, be more or less obvious, I make this point in lots of detail and answer many objections in my essay “God, Babies, Hell, and Justice”.
More comment doesn’t seem necessary here, so let’s turn to the next claim.
Omnipotence vs. Immortality or Moral Perfection
TheraminTrees then turns his attack toward omnipotence and starts discussing its incompatibility with a variety of different concepts, outlining what are called omnipotence paradoxes.
TheraminTrees agrees that certain ideas of tasks, like “creating a rock that cannot be lifted”, are indeed silly challenges for a God. But I think he’s a bit too hasty in dismissing those, because they do force a redefinition of omnipotence. God is no longer the kind of entity that can do anything, but is now just the kind of entity that can do anything which is logically possible. I agree that this move is trivial, because an entity which can do the logically impossible is itself logically impossible so of course God isn’t like that, but it’s a change none the less that starts a fall down a slippery slope to absurdity.
Can God Commit Suicide?
So what’s the next part of this slope? Asking if God can commit suicide. If yes, God is not immortal in the sense of being absolutely impossible to kill. If no, God is not omnipotent, because he can’t kill himself.
This task is interesting because it points to something God cannot do that we humans can do — all of us can commit suicide, yet God cannot. Yet, this argument is still potentially unfair, because none of us can kill impossible-to-kill things. Thus we might be looking at the same kind of rock task we saw earlier, asking God to do the logically impossible.
This response is stronger than TheraminTrees and others, such as Nicholas Everitt in “The Nonexistence of God”, make it sound: they typically respond that since it is logically possible for God to not exist, then God can kill himself. But to me, it seems easy to say that while God could have never existed, it is true that “If God exists, God cannot fail to exist”. Or rather, one could simply argue as many do that God is a metaphysically necessary entity. So we’re left looking somewhere else.
Additionally, it seems easy to disarm this by simply denying that God is immortal in the absolute sense, and instead argue that God could bring about his own nonexistence, but is immortal to all other forms of death.
Can God Sin?
Thus TheraminTrees calls omnipotence over a bit prematurely. However, I think his argument can be saved by pointing out that there are indeed logically possible things that God cannot do. Can God create a second God, equal in power to himself? I don’t see any logical impossibility in that — all it would mean is that polytheism is logically possible, which I think it is. Yet, people say that God cannot create other gods.
This aside, another question asked by Nicholas Everitt is asking if God is capable of sinning. While it’s easy to imagine a God that can sin but simply always chooses not to, many theists insist that it is impossible for God to sin (also see here), because doing so would go against his very nature. Thus it must be asserted that it is logically impossible to deny one’s nature, but I don’t think that claim works. What is contradictory about simply changing your nature to a different nature? Why, exactly, can’t God become evil?
Thus it seems we have tunneled to a new definition of omnipotence: “An omnipotent being can do anything that is (1) logically possible and (2) not contrary to its essential nature”.
What is Left of Omnipotence?
Here’s where TheraminTrees’s argument kicks back in from the detour constructed for it: if an entity can be omnipotent despite not being able to deny it’s own nature, then humans are omnipotent. Given that it’s part of the essential human nature to be incapable of things like breathing water or sprouting wings, the inability to do this is no mark against human’s omnipotence.
TheraminTrees follows this up by quoting the Bible’s Genesis 11:5-6 saying that “[i]ndeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them”. This does makes it sound like that if humans speak one language, nothing they propose to do (such as breathe water or sprout wings) will be witheld.
I think this is a bit suspect as an overly literal reading of the passage. But returning to Everitt for another detour will really sell this home: imagine a being (affectionately called Nullipotent) that has an essential nature of being incapable of anything, other than existing. Such a being is omnipotent too by the new definition — while it can’t fly, doing so is contary to its essential nature, and thus does not make it loose omnipotent status.
Additionally, we could imagine another being (called Semigod) that can do anything God can do, except is furthermore not morally perfect and thus capable of sinning. Perhaps this being even sins once or twice, by saying something blasphemous or taking physical form and masturbating. Such a being is also omnipotent, also logically possible, yet has even more capabilities than God!
Thus omnipotence emerges as a concept contradicted by absolute immortality or absolute moral perfection. So any God that wants to survive this argument must be at least capable of suicide or sinning, even if such a being never actually does.
More to Come…
So what have we done? Using the basic incompatibility structure, We’ve ruled out a bunch of gods: those that are born once yet in two different birth places, those that allow people to go to Hell, and those that are omnipotent yet absolutely immortal or morally perfect.
That said, we’re not even close to finishing the first half of the video. No wonder I admire how dense this is! Next, TheraminTrees moves on away from omnipotence to discuss another omni-attribute, omniscience, or knowing everything. In the next installment of this series, I’ll follow him there.
Continued in TheraminTrees’s Atheism, 2: Omniscience
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Author’s Note: On June 25, 2012, I split this essay into two parts — one for omnipotence and omniscience.
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I now blog at EverydayUtilitarian.com. I hope you'll join me at my new blog! This page has been left as an archive.
On 7 Mar 2012 in All, Atheism, Christianity. 27 Comments.
8 Mar 2012, 10:03 pm
“I think the universe is fully determined” – though what I got from my fairly long chat, with Bryan White and yourself on “Continuing Comments on Randomness and Naturalism”, was that this is not necessarily “one event causes one event to follow it, to the exclusion of all others”, but “one event causes various other events, to which we can assign distinct finite possibilities”.
“allegedly impeccable medical knowledge contained.”
Sardonic Americans scare me.
8 Mar 2012, 10:40 pm
That chat is definitely not over — I’ve been meaning to revisit for like a forever and a half, but sense Quantum Mechanics is such a dense subject, I haven’t been able to make much headway among a busy schedule.
That being said, my personal current view is one of strong determinism. While it’s not really accurate to say one event causes one event to follow it, since events don’t correspond in quite a one-to-one ratio, it is accurate (I’m pretty sure) to say that there is only one possible future, and it is fixed. I admit that I haven’t provided a robust demonstration of strong determinism yet — this is somewhere I want to look into in the future to see if it really is a tenable view, but it honestly only makes sense given the B-Theory (tenseless, eternalist) of time, which I accept.
See “Ontology of Time”, “Timeless Physics”, “Time (Stanford Encyclopedia)”, and “Causal Determinism (Stanford Encyclopedia)” for a lot more discussion and where I would begin to draw my demonstration from, but I warn you that it hurts nearly all heads, including mine.
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As for where probabilities come from, those express uncertainty in your mind because you don’t possess all the relevant facts, they don’t express anything about there being literally multiple, different, equally probable outcomes, from which one is selected at random. Thus the second part is still accurate and not mutually exclusive — we still can assign distinct finite possibilities to future events, even if there is only one actual future event.
For an example, consider shuffling a deck of cards thoroughly, without looking at the cards. Then ask yourself what the probability the top card is the Ace of Spades, and decide on an answer before peeking. If probability is in the mind, it makes sense to say 1/52, even though the top card is already completely determined and is sitting there waiting to be seen. If probability is out there, then it sounds like the universe has made fifty-two decks and will choose one for you at random, but only when you actually get around to looking.
This is also how the universe can be completely fixed and yet completely unpredictable, since it’s just a fact that any attempt to predict the world is in itself an event that needs to be accounted by the prediction, and no prediction can account for the influence of itself without spinning around in an infinite amount of recursive calculations.
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What do you mean?
9 Mar 2012, 12:10 am
“As for where probabilities come from, those express uncertainty in your mind because you don’t possess all the relevant facts, they don’t express anything about there being literally multiple, different, equally probable outcomes, from which one is selected at random”
Well, 2 small points:
1) that might be the limit of what we can measure, hence falsify.
2) it seems to lean heavily on the particle like properties of matter-energy, and ignore the wave like properties.
“sense Quantum Mechanics is such a dense subject”
What a polite way of pointing out that it’s a total mind-screw, especially when trying to think about it with brains that evolved to climb trees, and map territory to successfully run down prey.
“but it honestly only makes sense given the B-Theory (tenseless, eternalist) of time, which I accept.”
Thanks for the links! I’ll read then, I’ve currently in recovery from reading a collection of b.russell excerpts, when I’ve finished the slighty trashy Peter F.Hamilton book I’m leafing through now I’ll give it a go.
“What do you mean?”
Argh! You did it again.
Thanks for cleaning up the errors.
9 Mar 2012, 12:16 am
If I’m right about what I think I am, strong determinism is specifically required by the best theories of time and quantum mechanics in modern physics. Thus determinism would be falsified by demonstrating different theories of time and quantum mechanics that specifically require in-determinism, like what would be the case if the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics or the A-Theory (tensed, presentist theory) of time were true.
I’m not sure what you mean by invoking the wave natures. Perhaps this means you disagree with me about the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics. This just makes it even more of an imperative for me to get back in the discussion on that other essay!
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I’m confused.
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No problem!
9 Mar 2012, 12:37 am
“Thus determinism would be falsified by demonstrating different theories of time and quantum mechanics that specifically require in-determinism,”
That is truly intriguing.
“I’m not sure what you mean by invoking the wave natures”
Wellllll…..discussing/describing matter as perfectly spherical particles is a mathematical model. I’d say it’s the one our brains are best adapted to understand. Discussing matter as waves is another mathematical model. Neither mathematical model has exclusively “won”, we tend to use whichever model is easier for a given situation. You could describe the path of a football (british) after a footballer kicked it in terms of a wave, but the added complexity would mean you’d not bother.
The mathematical model used to describe a situation does not always tell you what is actually happening, or is not guarranteed to tell what is happening.
“you disagree with me about the Many-Worlds Interpretation”
I wasn’t swayed particularly, though I’m not in favour of the Copenhagrn Interpretation either. I’m a quantum agnostic.
“I’m confused”
In the interests of less confusion, and never explaining a joke, I’ll chalk it up to a simple misinterpretation of the tone of the original sentence on my part.
9 Mar 2012, 12:41 am
Also never Soccer, unless a British person says it first, and never, ever Soccer-ball (maybe if you have a note from the Queen explaining that you are being ironic, and even then only on independance day).
9 Mar 2012, 12:45 am
Quantum agnostic is an interesting concept! Also, no hard feelings on not being swayed yet. Hopefully when I get back to the other thread, I can do a bit more to figure out how we differ here. I’ll make sure to talk some about waves too! I don’t want this comment thread to become all about determinism and QM, because, after all that was just one mere side comment of mine. Not that I’m not glad you brought it up to discuss, of course!
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Tone just doesn’t fly over the internet very well, I’m afraid.
9 Mar 2012, 12:52 am
Yep, I’ll get on the theories of time bit and watch all the videos before further posting, and write “I must not surreptitiously derail a thread” a hundred times on a blackboard!
As for the accurate transmission of tones…perhaps we need an agreed upon emoticon for irony. How do you represent Dr.House in ASCII….?
9 Mar 2012, 12:56 am
Not at all. I apprechiate you bringing it up and don’t view it as malicious derailing, but I find it a bit weird to talk about it at length here when we have a perfectly good thread to continue the discussion elsewhere! I just am a bit picky about keeping related topics bunched together so that everything’s nice. Maybe this is just a blogger’s dream, but I’ll keep to it when I can.
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؟ (Wikipedia on “Irony Mark”)
9 Mar 2012, 1:08 am
Yeah, that’s a lot more pragmatic than this:
http://ibx93.deviantart.com/art/Dr-House-ascii-123213321
If it can be done, I’d give my consent to these comments being moved to the appropriate post.
“Maybe this is just a blogger’s dream…”
Do bloggers dream of blogging sheep?
9 Mar 2012, 1:11 am
That’s very talented, but probably not too practical as a means of punctuation!
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I think it can be done, but I’m fine with the good start to the conversation we had here. I just didn’t want to get back into explaining MWI when I already intend to do that elsewhere.
10 Mar 2012, 10:35 pm
In concluding that the block universe implies determinism, I think you misconstrue determinism (as is also suggested by the failure of most block-universe proponents to embrace determinism). The block universe is a theory of time; determinism is a theory of causality. To a first approximation, the block-universe theory says whatever will happen is inevitable; determinism says the laws of nature pick out a unique outcome. The indeterminism of the universe, in other words, has nothing to do with the question of whether time “flows.” In the block universe, the universe is completely fixed, but it isn’t fixed by the laws of nature; rather, it’s fixed by what in fact occurs.
On another issue you discuss–if God’s lacks libertarian free will, the concept of an omnipotent God becomes otiose. You end up, I suppose, with a Spinozan concept in which God just is the universe. What’s the difference between saying that God did it in accordance with the laws of nature and saying that it just happened in accordance with the laws of nature? Operationally, there’s none; the difference is purely rhetorical.
12 Mar 2012, 3:02 am
I agree with you entirely here; you’re right to point out that I have erroneously equivocated between a few different types of determinism.
To draw out the distinction, there’s “predictable determinism”, “temporal determinism”, and “causal determinism”. I think the universe is predictably indeterministic (there is no way, even in principle, to predict the future with absolute accuracy), temporally deterministic (there is only one future, and it is fixed because in a sense it has already happened), and I’m not sure but I lean that the universe is also causally deterministic (there are fixed laws that determine exactly how the universe unfolds).
It’s important to note that temporal determinism is already enough to make statements about the inevitability and fixity of the future and create worries about free will that are common to any discussion of determinism.
This makes establishing temporal determinism sufficient for the point I was making in this essay: people don’t metaphysically mediate between two different futures, because they don’t change the future in any direct way. Thus libertarian free will is incoherent.
Omniscience would also require temporal determinism too. Thus the fact that temporal determinism actually exists, and we can have free will on it, actually helps the theist’s case here. So in agreeing with compatibilism and temporal determinism, I’m actually conceding ground to the theist’s case, and agreeing that the omniscience – free will contradiction is no contradiction at all!
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Even operationally, there actually is a difference, because you wouldn’t have a Spinozan god, but rather an Epicurean god, who has the same kind of free will us humans do: we make the choice given our environment, desires, dispositions, etc. Just like us, the only way the Epicurean god would make a different choice would be to encounter a different environment, have different desires, have different dispositions, etc.
But still, this Epicurean god could still be capable of omnipotent power, capable of intentionally creating a miracle because that’s what it desired to do, given it’s environment and dispositions. Thus we have something entirely different from just a universe, but rather we have something that can be properly modeled as an intentional agent.
That being said, I’ve wondered if anyone has advanced this argument for atheism (argument from free will):
P1: If God exists, libertarian free will exists.
P2: Libertarian free will does not exist.
C3: Therefore God does not exist.
Sadly, I don’t think P1 is true.
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Also, a bonus potential argument (argument from unpredictability):
P4: If God exists, God can predict the future with 100% accuracy.
P5: The future cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy.
C6: Therefore God does not exist.
I wonder how that works out. I don’t feel too confident about it, even though I think I believe all the premises… Weird.
12 Mar 2012, 9:15 pm
Unless I’m missing something, the last is a non sequitur. The existence of miracles have no necessary relationship to agency. If the interaction between environment and dispositions conduce to a miracle, the miracle can be explained without invoking a God. I think the logic is straightforward. If God is omnipotent and performs in accordance with regularities, those regularities govern the universe. (The Epicureans could get away with deterministic gods because they weren’t omnipotent according to them, to my knowledge at least.)
Perhaps some confusion results from tacitly taking theism as coextensive with supernaturalism (a term I don’t really like, nor naturalism–I prefer the materialism/idealism distinction, where the issue is the primacy of the mental and the nonmental). Personal theism seems to me a particularly silly form of objective idealism. But a “supernatural” world need not contain a personal God, and would be much more compelling without one–although I’d still stick with materialism/naturalism. Events could be “miracles” by our standing, because the laws governing, that is the “supernatural” laws, are teleological rather than causal.
That’s my argument. The only place I’ve seen it argued is by me in a forum years ago.
Much of the problem with moving from agnosticism to a hard atheism lies in the definition of God. I think God means an omnipotent being who has libertarian free will. The position requires a leap into the mind of the believer, which seems to me to involved partly instinctoid beliefs, which are intuitively compelling despite being incoherent (or in some cases, simply false). One of these instinctoid beliefs is libertarian free will. Thus, I reject compatibilism because it, in essence, denies or refuses to recognize what people are really talking about when they claim to know they have free will. (See http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/free%20will for my argument against compatibilism, particularly 10.1)
One argument I didn’t make their is that the belief in a personal God depends on libertarian free will, for the reasons remarked above.
Now it’s my turn to disagree with your first premise. I know there are arguments that the future is unpredictable in principle because of the recursiveness of prediction and I’ve seen your agreement with this line of argument. It isn’t something I’ve thought about much, but it seems to me that the argument might expose another chink in compatibilism. I think the failure of the argument shows that even the limited free will compatibilism offers is illusion: we don’t necessarily have volitional control over our voluntary acts. (Which, it just occurs to me, also seems to be demonstrated empirically by the existence of contra-volitional hypnotic suggestion.)
To consolidate the argument, 1) if compatibilism were true, prediction of the future would be impossible. 2) No principle of logic or physics precludes perfect prediction on principle 3) Physicalism is true. 4) Therefore, nothing precludes perfect prediction on principle 5) Therefore, compatibilism is false.
Compatibilism implies the impossibility of prediction, because it concedes voluntary action, which allows us to defeat any prediction we know of.
14 Mar 2012, 9:38 am
Just one additional comment on the divine suicide section… there’s another angle where it can be attacked.
On Christian theology (some versions of it anyway), human beings can’t actually kill themselves. They can only kill their bodies. The immortal soul will continue living, either in heaven or in hell (or in purgatory for a while). In fact, human souls may be just as impossible-to-kill as God.
Amending our definition of suicide to take this into account, we get something like:
Suicide: The act of killing one’s own material body, intentionally.
At that point, it seems pretty clear that God can also partake in suicide. He could give himself a new human body, kill it, and continue on with his immaterial existence.
14 Mar 2012, 12:13 pm
Wouldn’t that make Jesus’s sacrifice less powerful? Thinking out loud here…
15 Mar 2012, 4:29 pm
I feel like that’s saying because I’m ultimately reducible to the motion and interactions of atoms, than this blog comment can be explained without invoking a Peter Hurford. I suppose that’s technically true, but it’s really missing the point.
The entire Bible could have counterfactually unfolded exactly as stated, and God could be around to listen to and respond to our prayers, do miracles, and impose his will, even if all his wills and actions were caused by his nature unfolding according to regular laws.
Now a couple cases could be made here:
(1) we have no room for the supernatural, because it would involve transcending the regular laws, and that might necessitate a libertarian free will that does not exist.
(2) we have no notion of the causation that would be required by an Epicurean God — how does it do miracles?
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I’m pretty sure that’s identical to the supernatural-natural distinction, see , , and . I’d be interested in some help working out a more robust notion of naturalism.
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Definitely. My particular brand of atheism is “For every concept commonly and sensibly labeled under ‘theism’, the concept is either incoherent, false, or unproven such that an ideal Bayesian agent would be compelled to disbelieve”.
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I don’t really want to talk about compatibilism in this comment thread, because I want to, as far as I can, keep things organized by topic. So I’m going to address some comments here on my essay “Free Will That Makes Sense”.
And I’ll probably comment on your essays over at your blog, as well as write additional essays on this issue next month.
15 Mar 2012, 4:39 pm
I suppose that would be a way to resolve the issue on any theism that doesn’t involve annihilationism. Like I mentioned, I don’t really buy the suicide argument anyway.
Instead, I find the sin argument really interesting. I wonder what it really means for a being to be omnipotent and yet constrained by its own nature.
I also wonder if this might be the angle for the libertarian free will argument: can someone be said to be omnipotent if they lack libertarian free will?
16 Mar 2012, 6:18 pm
I think of two replies. I think the second is stronger, but the first may be more to your point.
1) The reason why we posit Peter Hurford actually shows why it would be otiose to posit God. Peter Hurford is a limited system, whose operation outsiders can anticipate (if imperfectly) by abstraction. God, on the other hand, would be the instrumentality through which the entirety of the laws of nature would be expressed. No economy of description is obtained by positing the person. Positing Peter Hurford isn’t mere rhetoric; positing God in a deterministic universe is only rhetoric.
2) Were God determined by nature, God would not be omnipotent. The basic point of God discourse is to explain what is intentionally (in counterposition explaining it causally). The whole explanatory point of personal theism is that the material world, including the laws governing it, were created by God. What’s the point of having God, if the blueprint somehow arose apart from God? Unlike Epicurean gods, God discourse intends to answer the most fundamental questions consistent with God being the origin of all.
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Half-frivolous: A solution to the theist’s problem of evil occurred to me. You mentioned the riddle about whether God can create something so heavy He can’t lift it–or one of the logical equivalents. Can God limit his own power. This exposes an ambiguity in the concept of omnipotent, but oddly, I’ve never heard a theist address which concept of omnipotence really is the one that applies. If it’s really a toss up, I think that’s (a nth) strike against theism (if I’m right that omnipotence is the key point of God discourse). But it seems to me the “correct” answer is that God can limit his own power. This is a consistent answer, because God was omnipotent when he limited his power; nothing vital rests on God’s continuing to be omnipotent.
And there lies the solution to the problem of evil. God did limit his own powers and thus is now powerless to banish all evil. Why did God limit his own power, which he did not just by endowing man with free will but my creating indestructible angels endowed with free will (one of whom rebelled)? Could God have realized that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”?
29 Mar 2012, 9:03 pm
God and Free Will Incompatibility Arguments
I’ll accept this one, and I’ve revised the essay in light of it.
Sort of. Consider again an Epicurean God, though — perhaps not omnipotent, but arbitrarily powerful by manipulating cause and effect chains. We agree that exists.
So where do we take that from here? What else have we rendered logically impossible? Have we rendered impossible gods capable of creating the universe? The entire supernatural? How would you argue that?
29 Mar 2012, 9:07 pm
Problem of Evil
Well, then you’d owe an explanation for why God would limit his own power. If God could’ve prevented evil, but then made himself incapable of doing so, then the Problem of Evil would still apply to him…
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…and your explanation for this is that God thought his absolute power would corrupt him. But corruption is a sign of either lack of omnibenevolence or lack of omnipotence. No god would be corrupted unless he corrupted himself willingly. And if an omnipotent god doesn’t want to be corrupted, that god is immune to corruption. No need to restrict himself just in case…
29 Mar 2012, 10:28 pm
My corruption idea is indeed a nonstarter. But why would God limit his own power? It’s an extension of the free will idea. Just as God might be thought to have reason to create humans with “free will,” so it is even nobler to create angels possessed of the same.
When Lucifer went to war against God, was his doom pre-ordained? That would just be silly. Lucifer and the angels had all been endowed with free will, and if a sufficient super-majority of angels supported the Luciferian revolution, presumably God would have been toppled, and maybe consigned to some other hell.
29 Mar 2012, 10:33 pm
The only thing I think is rendered logically impossible is an omnipotent God. Not a lot of territory in the sample space of possible deities, but definitely prime real estate.
30 Mar 2012, 5:02 pm
Indeed, I now agree. I have updated the essay to reflect this.
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If we premise arguments for what happened in the Bible as “that would be too silly, therefore it had to unfold some other way”, we’d have to revise a lot more than just this story…
I at least agree with you that this is silly; see the part of this essay on “Omniscience vs. God’s Surprise”.
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God, if omnipotent, could only be toppled if he willingly wanted to do so, and fully cooperated with it. God, if omnibenevolent, would only allow himself to be toppled if doing so would not lessen his powers to reduce evil. We still have the same problem.
Also, why would other people want to topple an omnibenevolent, perfect God? The only way they could do that is if they were infinitely irrational or infinitely malevolent. See “The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time” for more of this vein. Also see the upcoming discussion about why a perfect entity would create imperfect entities in TheraminTrees’s Part III.
30 Mar 2012, 6:05 pm
But remember, per hypothesis God is no longer omnipotent after he created angels.
So, the question is whether a benevolent God would sacrifice his omnipotence, if it meant risking evil, and the angels story at least provides the offsetting good.
Of course, free will is an empty claim. But if the theist is allowed to use it for one purpose, he can use it for another. If it was a good thing that humans got free will, even at the great risk of evils, then it is even a better thing the angels got “free will.”
Why would rational angels try to topple a benevolent God? Isn’t part of the benefit of free will supposed to be that we have the option to sin. In the case of the angels, it was the sin of pride–again, anything I say about the Bible’s narrative should never be accepted without independent verification.)
In any event, that’s the strongest “theodicy” I can think of. Isn’t it used much; am I overlooking something.
13 Apr 2012, 2:09 am
It seems logically consistent that an all-powerful being could create freely willed angels and still maintain immunity to being toppled.
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I think the question of where this sin came from becomes very relevant; see Part III of this essay series.
13 Apr 2012, 3:26 pm
Well, that’s my point. He forfeited his immunity to being toppled because freely willed angels is a higher good than a universe guaranteed to be without sin.
Was it worth the risk? How does God calculate the utility? “Free will,” it would seem, precludes assigning likelihoods to acts that are entirely its outcome.
What’s so great about free will (ethically speaking)? If compatibility were true, nothing? If hard determinism is true, there’s nothing there to speak of. But any theist true to the core intuition behind monotheism is a “libertarian” because the essence of the God concept is the reification of the illusion of free will and use to explain not only human conduct but the universe. God is personified free will.
So the idea that free will is something worth sacrificing the possibility of sin for isn’t an ad hoc maneuver; free will’s glory is always immanent in monotheism (one omnipotent God at the origin of everything).
But one problem occurs to me. By creating free-willed angels, God limits his own free will. God was once the only perfect embodiment of free will; with angels or oven humans having an independent free will, the scope of God’s is limited. How many autonomous angels are worth one truly omnipotent God?