Essays!

I’m going to be doing this a touch differently from now on — instead of providing a new summary specific to this roundup, I’m just going to write the summary that is included on the essay itself. This will save me time, while making you lose out on very little, if anything at all.

This week I wrote five essays, but since I don’t recount essays counted in previous roundups, I’ll only list the two here:

• Wednesday, May 16 >> TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part III – Skeptical Theism: “I’ve recently been looking at TheraminTrees’s videos about atheism and examining the arguments he puts forth for not believing in Gods. This essay furthers my specific look at the Problem of Evil, and continues looking at skeptical theism after finding the Problem of Evil lacking. I end by finding some unfortunate implications of Skeptical Theism, and conclude with the Almost Problem of Evil: while we cannot say that God is not omnibenevolent, we can say God is not knowably omnibenevolent, and thus knowably omnibenevolent gods cannot exist, because they are incompatible with the suffering we observe.”
• Thursday, May 17 >> Of Oughts and Is, Part III: “Oughtness is a persistent part of our moral language — that we ought to do this, and not that. In an earlier post I summarized the Is-Ought Problem and showed how Moore and Kant were unable to get out of it. Then I attacked Searle and Aristotelian Natural Law. Now I finish by turning the tables on Gewirth, Ayn Rand, and God to show that there is nowhere we can actually ground our normativity. This sets up a deep and robust problem for us to solve in the next series.”

Discussion!

Not many comments have happened since I my previous roundup just three days ago. I’m still working to find time to dive back into what’s been left for me during and before my absence. However, on “TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part II: Evil”, a discussion has been restarted on the Free Will Defense to the Problem of Evil, and on Cl’s “Science: It Works!”, we discuss the dangers and benefits of science and the balance between the two, plus how to have discussions about policy in a moral anti-realist framework.

Links!

Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite links to other cool places, for more ideas to share! As always,

(1) The links are also ordered so that the ones I like most are at the top, for those who don’t have time for all the links… but for those who do have time, I think all of them are worthwhile.

(2) The Link Roundup category has, I’d estimate, over 500 more links if you need the extra distraction. At a link an hour, that’s 20+ days of constant reading. If you budgeted 8 hours a day to constantly read these links, at a link per hour, that would take over two months. Fun facts!

(3) I don’t necessarily agree with everything said by these links; I just post what I find to be interesting and well-written. If you want to know whether I support a particular opinion you see, feel free to ask.

• The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul [PDF]: “In this chapter, I draw on Haidt’s and Baron’s respective insights in the service of a bit of philosophical psychoanalysis. I will argue that deontological judgments tend to be driven by emotional responses, and that deontological philosophy, rather than being grounded in moral reasoning, is to a large extent an exercise in moral rationalization. This is in contrast to consequentialism, which, I will argue, arises from rather different psychological processes, ones that are more “cognitive,” and more likely to involve genuine moral reasoning. These claims are strictly empirical, and I will defend them on the basis of the available evidence. Needless to say, my argument will be speculative and will not be conclusive. Beyond this, I will argue that if these empirical claims are true, they may have normative implications, casting doubt on deontology as a school of normative moral thought.”
• Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute?: “For many years before the Wright Brothers, people dreamed of flying with magic potions. There was nothing irrational about the raw desire to fly. There was nothing tainted about the wish to look down on a cloud from above. Only the “magic potions” part was irrational. [...] If a rocket launch is what it takes to give me a feeling of aesthetic transcendence, I do not see this as a substitute for religion. That is theomorphism—the viewpoint from gloating religionists who assume that everyone who isn’t religious has a hole in their mind that wants filling.”
• Between ‘New Atheism’ and ‘Accomodationism’: “I have often wondered whether I am in the camp of the ‘new atheists’, or if I am an ‘appeaser’. Or, what I think is probably more accurate, I am a mixture of the two. On the ‘new atheist’ side, I can write a post defending the conclusion that faith, when it concerns beliefs that affect the life, well-being, or aspirations of others, is a vice. [...] At the same time, I do not blame religion. Intellectual recklessness is at fault, and atheists are just as prone to intellectual recklessness as theists. [...] Being an opponent of intellectual recklessness, rather than being an opponent of religion, I am morally critical of intellectually reckless atheist and pass no judgment against the intellectually responsible theist.”
• From neural ‘is’ to moral ‘ought’ – what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? [PDF]: “Many moral philosophers regard scientific research as irrelevant to their work because science deals with what is the case, whereas ethics deals with what ought to be. Some ethicists question this is/ought distinction, arguing that science and normative ethics are continuous and that ethics might someday be regarded as a natural social science. I agree with traditional ethicists that there is a sharp and crucial distinction between the ‘is’ of science and the ‘ought’ of ethics, but maintain nonetheless that science, and neuroscience in particular, can have profound ethical implications by providing us with information that will prompt us to re-evaluate our moral values and our
  conceptions of morality”
• Conversations From a Pale Blue Dot – Toby Ord: “Today I interview philosopher Toby Ord. We discuss the problem of moral uncertainty: What do you do if you aren’t sure which moral theory is correct?”
• Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately: “To purchase warm fuzzies, find some hard-working but poverty-stricken woman who’s about to drop out of state college after her husband’s hours were cut back, and personally, but anonymously, give her a cashier’s check for $10,000. Repeat as desired. To purchase status among your friends, donate $100,000 to the current sexiest X-Prize, or whatever other charity seems to offer the most stylishness for the least price. Make a big deal out of it, show up for their press events, and brag about it for the next five years. Then—with absolute cold-blooded calculation—without scope insensitivity or ambiguity aversion—without concern for status or warm fuzzies—figuring out some common scheme for converting outcomes to utilons, and trying to express uncertainty in percentage probabilitiess—find the charity that offers the greatest expected utilons per dollar. Donate up to however much money you wanted to give to charity, until their marginal efficiency drops below that of the next charity on the list.”
• What Is An Effective Altruist?: “80,000 Hours is built around the idea of effective altruism. What does that mean? At its most basic, effective altruism is based on two simpler concepts: effectiveness and altruism. So far so good. Altruism means wanting to help other people. It means thinking that other people’s welfare matters. Effectiveness is a more fiddly idea. It’s about doing something well. Say I’m in the business of making match-sticks. It’s all well and good to take a whole tree and whittle away at it until all that remains is a match-stick. You’ve done what you set out to do, but you could have done much more with your time.”
• Gospel Disproof #38 – The guards at the tomb: “At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, there’s an interesting story that appears nowhere else in the Bible. According to Matthew, the chief priests were worried that the disciples might steal Jesus’ body to fake a resurrection, so they went to Pilate and got permission to post a guard on the tomb. When Jesus rose from the dead, the guards reported it to the priests, and the priests bribed them to claim that disciples stole the body while they were asleep. And thus, says Matthew, the Jews were reporting ‘to this day’ that the body was stolen by the disciples. Cool story, bro, but if you look at it a bit more closely, there’s something kinda fishy about it…”
• On “Where the Conflict Really Lies”: “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism is Alvin Plantinga’s popular-level challenge to the idea that science and religion are in conflict. At least, that’s the defensive portion of the book. He goes on to argue that the real conflict is between science and an irreligious worldview. I’m concerned that people eager for this conclusion will cite Plantinga as an intellectual authority without understanding which parts of his overall argument are strong vs. which parts are weak, overly specialized, or overly generalized. My plan is to cover select portions of his book, supporting or criticizing Plantinga as appropriate.”
• Does Free Will Matter?: “But once you have shown that individual responsibility not only can be, but in practice already is, based on compatibilist free will, the result is nearly zero net change in human behavior–unless the supernaturalists have yet other irrational beliefs that in actual fact weren’t based on their views of free will, regardless of what they claim.”
• Universal Fire: “We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. “Phosphorus” is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks. If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter. Reality is laced together a lot more tightly than humans might like to believe.”
• Innumeracy among political journalists: “John shoots down David Brooks’s claim that ‘If you look at the fundamentals, the president should be getting crushed right now.’ John points out (as does Ezra Klein) that if you look at the fundamentals, you’d expect a close election. OK, there are lots of ways of looking at politics, elections, and the economy, and I’m sure that some forecasts give Obama a bit lead. But that’s hardly a consensus reading of the fundamentals. [...] One aspect of innumeracy is seeing numbers as words, as rhetorical expressions rather than as quantities that can be added and subtracted, multiplied and divided. That’s what’s going on when Brooks talks about the fundamentals without looking”
• Why Does Religion Always Get a Free Ride? and From The Mailbag – A Reply to “Why Does Religion Always Get a Free Ride”: “We try to persuade people out of almost every kind of idea there is. Why should religion be the exception?”
• Sam Harris, free will, and blaming believers for the things they say: “Last week, I read Sam Harris’ new book Free Will. Until now I’ve liked everything I’ve read of Harris’, but I can’t recommend this book. The problem is that Harris argues against the notion of free will without ever putting much effort into figuring out what people mean by ‘free will.’ [...] I’ve said that I, like Blackford, am inclined to be cautious about using the phrase “free will.” But if what we mean by free will means the ability to chose, or our actions being up to us, or the ability to do otherwise (in a sense), I have no trouble saying I think free will exists. And research done by Eddy Nahmias seems to indicate most people understand “free will” in something like one of those senses. Or at least, they understand it in a sense compatible with determinism.”
• Ethicists No More Likely Than Non-Ethicists to Pay Their Registration Fees at APA Meetings: “Until recently, the American Philosophical Association had more or less an honor system for paying meeting registration fees. There was no serious enforcement mechanism for ensuring that people who attended the meeting — even people appearing on the program as chairs, speakers, or commentators — actually paid their registration fees. [...] Here, then, are my preliminary findings: Overall, 76% of program participants paid their registration fees: 75% in 2006, 76% in 2007, and 77% in 2008. (The increasing trend is not statistically significant.) 74% of participants presenting ethics-related material (henceforth “ethicists”: see the coding details) paid their registration fees, compared to 76% of non-ethicists, not a statistically significant difference.”
• The Widespread Permission to Do Harm in God’s Name: “We will no doubt hear the protest, ‘But what of all the good the church does? You mention the harm, but you ignore the good?’ By all means, continue to do good. However, go you think that doing good buys you moral credit giving you special permission to do harm? For example, do you think that a person who has saved two lives earns a moral credit, giving him permission to murder one person of his choosing at a later date? After all, he will still have a net moral balance of +1 life saved. That makes him a hero, right?”
• Your Intuitions Are Not Magic: “But like statistical techniques in general, our intuitions are not magic. Hitting a broken window with a hammer will not fix the window, no matter how reliable the hammer. It would certainly be easy and convenient if our intuitions always gave us the right results, just like it would be easy and convenient if our statistical techniques always gave us the right results. Yet carelessness can cost lives. Misapplying a statistical technique when evaluating the safety of a new drug might kill people or cause them to spend money on a useless treatment. Blindly following our intuitions can cause our careers, relationships or lives to crash and burn, because we did not think of the possibility that we might be wrong.”
• Dissolving The Hard Problem of Conciousness [PDF]: “In this paper we attempt to dissolve worries around the hard problem of conscious by showing that there is no good argument for the existence of such a problem. The arguments for the existence of a hard problem, as defined by Chalmers (2002), come from some classic thought experiments. We are asked to imagine a scenario radically different from our experience of the world and draw the conclusion that the intrinsic qualitative nature of a mental state is independent of the structure and function of that state. The conclusion depends on the truth of identifiable key intuitions. We suggest that these intuitions are not theory neutral. [...] These thought experiments thus cannot serve as evidence for a hard problem; that would be question begging.”
• Will Atheism Become Easier?: “In the next generation or so, will it be easier to become an atheist? I don’t mean socially or politically easier. I’m not wondering whether there will eventually be less anti-atheist bigotry, discrimination, stigma, whether state and church will be better separated, etc. (That’s not what I’m thinking about today, anyway.) I’m wondering if it will become emotionally easier, and philosophically.”
• What Do You Say to Grieving Non-Believers?: “If you know someone who’s grieving a death, and they don’t believe in a God or in any sort of afterlife… what do you say? A lot of religious and spiritual believers find themselves stymied, at a loss for words, when the atheists and other non-believers in their lives are grieving. The comforts and consolations they’re used to offering, and that they rely on themselves, don’t do much good with atheists and other non-believers. ‘It’s all part of a plan.’ ‘I’m sure they’re smiling down on you now.’ ‘You’ll see them in the afterlife.’ Etc. At best, these notions are useless for atheists: at worst, they’re actually upsetting.”

In “The Meaning of Morality” we applied the many problems with definitions in general to the problem of defining “moral good” — specifically, there were many different, mutually exclusive candidates for the definition, and equivocations made theories sound like they worked when they did not.

In “Of Oughts and Is, Part I” and “Of Oughts and Is, Part II”, I outlined this problem more explicitly: to any statement that we ought to do something, we can coherently ask “Why?”. Why is it the case that we ought to do what this specific moral theory says? Looking at many attempts to answer this question — moral non-naturalism, the categorical imperative, Searle’s appeal to institutions, and Aristotelianism — show that this extra step is still missing.

Now, for the final part in this series, I analyze a few more attempts to provide this oomph needed to make sense of “oughtness”, or normativity, looking to Gewirth, Ayn Rand, and even religion! And I find failure no matter where I turn. However, I end with a positive note not to give up, and promise coherent normativity is just around the corner as this series continues.

What About Rights and Hypocrisy?

So it seems like options for compelling normativity are dropping left and right. To pick up the call, we turn to Alan Gewirth’s “The Is-Ought Problem Resolved”. Here, Gewirth argues that all people value their freedom to pursue goals and their personal well-being and feel justified in claiming these two things as rights. Therefore, all people would be hypocrites not to recognize that other people may be justified in claiming freedom and well-being as their rights, and it would be further hypocritical to act against these rights in others while wanting them upheld for myself. Therefore, all people ought to refrain from infringing the freedom and well-being of others.

The end result of this is rather vague: What does it specifically mean to infringe the freedom and well-being of others? Ought I act to put a convicted thief in jail, even if it would result in restricted freedom and lower well-being for the thief than he would otherwise enjoy if allowed to continue robbery unimpeded? But this doesn’t matter, because it’s the core thought that counts: can we have normativity by appealing to the contradiction in upholding a right for yourself while denying it to others?

It turns out that Gewirth has two problems. First, he assumes that everyone not only values their freedom and well-being, but goes beyond that and states that these values must have some protective property known as a “right” that binds other people not to interfere with them. Clearly, such a property would have to be defended somehow, and we can’t just settle with very strong feelings that such a property must exist — otherwise we might as well all believe in God! While I would agree everyone who takes this step and aserts an individual right to freedom and well-being would indeed be a hypocrite for not respecting that right in others, I do not agree that everyone does, or ought to, assert such an individual right.

Second, Gewirth seems to assume there is something normatively wrong with contradicting oneself. But if one can get an advantage from tricking other people into thinking this right exists, but then exploiting this right in others to one’s own advantage, what’s the wrong in that? I don’t say that as an endorsement of such exploitation, but as a thought-provoking question that suggests Gewirth hasn’t really done what he sets out to do: explain why we ought to respect the rights of others. Why not contradict myself if I have something to gain from doing so? Why should I care?

For those keeping track, this fallacy is very similar to the one involving intrinsic value discussed in Part I: “just because we see happiness as immensely valuable to ourselves, personally, does not imply a motivation that we must see happiness as universally valuable, even if we aren’t personally experiencing it.”

We’ll have to turn away from overgeneralizations if we are going to come up with a grounding for morality.

What About Ayn Rand?

With Aristotelianism out for now, what about a much less famous but significantly more cultish author, Ayn Rand? She advocated a position called Objectivism. While Objectivism involves stances on metaphysics, epistemology, and politics, it’s the ethics we’re most personally interested in, and from which I think we can best learn by reading “The Virtue of Selfishness” by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden. Oddly enough for someone intending to construct a new theory of morality, Rand opens the book with much skepticism for the concept, arguing as I would: “No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined.” In summary, Ayn Rand asks the same “Why?” question that I do, and notes the continued failure of proposed answers.

The problem lies when Rand attempts to give a solution to this problem, defining value to a specific person as that which promotes the survival of that person. Rand argues that only living objects can be goal-directed, because they have something to lose (their life). Furthermore, only life can be the ultimate value, because without life, all other values for that living organism would not exist. Therefore, people should figure out what best promotes their own survival, and if you further buy Rand’s lengthy arguments on this topic, you will result in thinking that no person should give up herself for others in any sense of the word, and settle on a completely libertarian philosophy.

While I think that libertarianism does a poor job of promoting well-being, detailed discussion of that topic is better left for a different essay. Instead, it is enough to point out that life is a bad grounding for normativity, and thus it is left unproven that we ought to promote our own survival. Quite simply, Rand never answers her own question: Why? Why ought we value our own survival above that of other people? What if we would rather save our friends? What if we are in tons of pain and want euthanasia? What if we want to give our lives for a cause we believe in?

While our life does seem rather valuable most of the time, the value of our own lives is not universally obvious, and Rand leaves no explanation for this value beyond our own strong feelings that such a value must be the case. Like with Gewirth, strong feelings are not enough — after all, other people have very strong feelings that utilitarianism is the answer, and other people have very strong feelings that God is the answer. Thus we’ll have to look elsewhere for normativity.

What About God?

I would find it very desperate if you have to turn to God to solve a philosophical problem, but when it comes to morality, many people end up suggesting that morality is intrinsically tied to what God commands us to do, and we ought to do whatever it is God says to do. But like with all other theories considered so far, even this last effort has problems. In fact, it has more problems than most!

Three Simple Problems

But for starters, there are already three problems with this view, and each one individually is a killer, in my opinion:

1. We still can’t answer the “Why” question. Why follow God? What makes God’s commands the standard for normativity? …So what if God’s the creator of the universe; why ought we obey the creator of the universe? …So what if disobeying means we’re doomed to Hell; what if we want to go to Hell? And if we don’t want to go to Hell, it’s our motivation to avoid Hell that grounds normativity here, not God himself.
2. There are too many mutually exclusive gods. The second problem is a refrain not common to morality, but definitely common to arguments about God: even if you’ve proven that God exists, you still need to provide evidence about which religion to follow. Here, it’s very similar — different Gods proclaim very different things as their commands. In fact, the religious landscape is so confused that even within the same religion you might not know what God’s commands are about homosexuality, about sex-before-marriage, about masturbation, about abortion, about giving to the poor, etc. So how can this be a useful grounding for normativity if there is no way to know what the normativity will consist of?
3. Gods do not exist. The second problem included “even if you’ve proven that God exists”, which is a strong challenge indeed; see my table of contents for plenty of essays that demonstrate the nonexistence of gods. Clearly, if gods do no exist, there are no gods in which we can ground normativity, and thus this attempted solution is dead on arrival. You might as well ground morality in the tooth fairy.

But as they say in the philosophy business: that’s not all, because there’s another classic problem in God-based morality, and that’s the Euthyphro dilemma.

The Many Euthyphro Dilemmas

Another common criticism of God based morality that you’ll see again and again is the millennia old Euthyphro Dilemma: Are God’s commands worth following because they come from God, or does God command only that which is already worth following? It seems that if we take the first angle, we’re left with arbitrary commands, and God could have commanded anything, including rape and murder, and we would have to follow it. And if we take the second angle, we’re left with God himself being bound to an external theory of normativity, and the question is left unsolved after all. Hence, the dilemma!

Numerous ways have been proposed to get out of this dilemma, by far the most common of which is to say that God himself makes the commands worth following, but because God has a benevolent and loving nature, he would never command rape and murder. While a quick read of the Bible renders this immediately false (just look at Numbers 31:15!), the very fact that we would be concerned about such an outcome means that we think rape and murder are bad independent of what God thinks about them. If God’s commands were really the only thing that made something wrong, we would have nothing to fear if God suddenly made rape and murder the thing to do, because then there would be nothing wrong about them.

But as to God’s benevolent nature, we can just move the dilemma a step forward and ask whether his nature is benevolent merely because he has it, or if his nature is benevolent compared to some other, external standard about what benevolence should be? And we have the same trap again, with the same two outcomes that seem equally bad.

When God is No Help?

Others attempt to escape this by taking the second part and suggest that God just plays an important role — such as making that which is known to be good actually rationally binding on us, or just possessing infallible knowledge about what this external goodness actually is.

But notice here that something is missing: the actual source of normativity. Here, God is a middle man, passing along some other moral theory to us. (In Feser’s case, that other moral theory is Aristotelianism, and in Cl’s case, it’s unclear.) But how did this other theory become the theory, with it’s bindingness? Why did God choose this one, and not some other? And what makes us have to respect God’s choice? In the end, we’re back at step one.

And again, it’s worth repeating the shallowness of saying that God is just goodness itself, so of course we should follow him. What the hell does it mean to be goodness, just like that? I don’t even know how sense can be made of the concept, without already having a robust theory of normativity that we can demonstrate God fulfills perfectly, and if we have that, there is no way God can be that source of normativity. Otherwise we end up in a tautology, where we say God is just God itself, and get nowhere at figuring out what it is we ought to do in some non-arbitrary way.

Should We Just Give Up?

In “The Meaning of Morality”, we found that there are five key questions to ask about morality:

1. Do moral statements like “Abortion is wrong” actually communicate something that is truth-apt?
2. If yes, do moral statements communicate something that can sometimes be true?
3. If yes, are moral statements justified by appealing to descriptions of the world?
4. If yes, are these descriptions something other than people’s opinions?
5. If yes, which descriptions should we specifically focus on?

We also know that different concepts of the word “good” have different answers to that question. However, “good” is just a definition, and we could define it differently, with no way of determining the privileged definition.

That being said, it’s important to keep in mind that just because something is labelled “good” by some definitional scheme, does not imply that we ought to do that thing. One cannot equivocate between a definition of good as such and such moral code (like “that which is God’s will”) and a definition of good as “that which we ought to do”, and thus argue that because it matches our definition for “good” that it suddenly gains “oughtness”. Instead, there is an Is-Ought Problem that suggests there must be something extra to make that connection.

And we’ve found that a lot of theories that set out to solve this problem end up failing in less obvious to blatantly spectacular ways. So does this mean that we should give up and just ditch normativity altogether? Is there anything we actually ought to do?

I think we should not give up, because there are still things we actually ought to do, despite these failures.

I’ve found that I have to destroy nearly all of normativity to rebuild it in a way that actually works, but it’s for the best. Fear not, because now that I’ve done the destroying part, it’s time to do the rebuilding part. A few of the views I looked at in this essay actually got pretty close to capturing normativity despite the Is-Ought Problem, and it will take just a bit more prodding to get a robust theory that works.

There are things we ought to do. In the next essay of this morality series-of-series, I’ll show you how to figure out what they are.

Author’s Note: The previous essay was revised in light of reader’s commentary to include a more substantial discussion, and thus split into two essays for length. This is that extra essay, much of which is either new content or revised old content. This essay won’t make much sense chronologically, but it should fit into the old series just fine. The next part of this series has been renumbered from III to IV to account for this insertion.

This series is about looking at 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’m still analyzing his second video, which is about the gods he can reject with near absolute certainty, because they involve logically incompatible properties and thus are logically impossible.

Initially, I looked at I concluded that these arguments don’t work, because of Skeptical Theism, which is the position that we cannot know whether or not God has a good reason to allow suffering because he has a large amount of knowledge that we don’t, by virtue of being omniscient. But what are we to make of this appeal to Skeptical Theism, and what does it do for the greater scheme of things?

{Picture to go here, sometime tomorrow.}

Three Unfavorable Implications of Skeptical Theism

However, if we’re able to appeal to Skeptical Theism, we must face some pretty annoying implications. The problem-in-summary is that our lack of knowledge about God’s higher goods cuts both ways, and thus digs deep into theism as well. Here, I will identify three ways that theism is undermined by this lack of knowledge. Thus the current Problem of Evil is too narrow, but when we look at Skeptical Theism, we see that belief in an all-good God still doesn’t work.

#1: No Good God

The first way Skeptical Theism cuts both ways is that in undermining any inference to an evil God, we also undermine any inference to a good God. How do we demonstrate that God is actually good, especially if we can’t draw any conclusions about what reasons God may or may not have to allow suffering? With no way to justify the existence of a good god, the belief in a good god becomes unjustified.

Instead, God could just as easily be thoroughly evil. Perhaps we debunk the existence of an evil god by pointing to all the good things in the world, but this is just as bad as debunking the existence of a good god by pointing to all the evil things in the world — perhaps god is using these good things to obtain higher evils in a way we can’t see.

One might say that it just seems obvious that the world could be far more evil than it currently is. But likewise, it just is obvious that the world could be far more good than it currently is, and what is obvious to us has no bearing on what is true. We simply don’t have knowledge about what any omniscient entity would do, and that includes an evil one.

One might also say that being good is just in God’s nature — God is maximally great, and this includes moral perfection by definition. But if you’re doing that, you’re only advancing a circular argument — how can you prove that God is maximally great, or that moral perfection is included in maximal greatness?

#2: The Other Direction of Incredulity

The second way Skeptical Theism cuts both ways is that we get to make use of the same accusations of incredulity in the opposite direction. While the atheist argues “I don’t see any good reason for God to allow birth defects, therefore an all-good God can’t exist”, the theist is arguing “I don’t see any reason a world without birth defects would be better, therefore an all-good God can still exist”. If we don’t know anything about God’s intentions, how can we know that birth defects are actually worth permitting, without making the same bad claim?

How do we know birth defects and an all-good God are incompatible? Well, how do we know that they are compatible? It seems like we’re at a standstill, and thus whoever ends up getting stuck with the Burden of Proof ends up instantly being the loser.

#3: We Can No Longer Pick a Religion

Third, with Skeptical Theism, we become unable to select a specific religion, because selecting a religion requires us to know about how God would choose to reveal himself. But with Skeptical Theism, we will no longer know how God would choose to reveal himself, because we won’t be able to draw inferences about what reasons God may or may not have to reveal himself in particular ways. In fact, we wouldn’t even understand enough to know there was a single god, or that god had masculine pronouns! Thus Skeptical Theism leaves us not knowing anything more than a god exists of indeterminate moral character and other characteristics, being minimal deism at best.

Skeptical Theism, Teapots, and Unfair Arguments

After reading Cl’s commentary in “Why I Said Skeptical Theism Is For The Birds”, I’ve become persuaded by an argument that Cl himself argued for:

Simply put, ST is to metaphysics what Russell’s Teapot is to science. Consider the similarities between,

“For all we know, there might be a teapot orbiting Jupiter.”
…and,

“For all we know, God might have a reason for allowing seemingly gratuitous suffering X.”

Christians, is this really the argument you want to make? If anybody believes they can make a principled distinction between those two lines of reasoning, now is the time to speak up.

For those who don’t know, the teapot orbiting Jupiter is an allusion to Russel’s Teapot, which suggests that there are things we can’t even begin to disprove, yet have no reason to accept. I’m not sure to what degree Skeptical Theism fits in this category, since, at least for theists, there does seem to be some positive reason for them to accept that God has such a reason, even if they can’t know it.

But likewise, we could move this further by asking whether creationists can undermine the theory of evolution by natural selection by suggesting that it might be possible that there are rabbits in a yet-to-be-discovered Precambrian layer somewhere in Africa. All told, I’m currently leaning toward the idea that Skeptical Theism might be an unfair argument, but I’m not positive. Drop me a comment with your thoughts, and we could have a conversation that leads me to later revise this section. (Also, thanks Cl for the starting thought, and for causing a lot of updating in my beliefs about the Problem of Evil over time.)

The Almost Problem of Evil

So what’s left for the Problem of Evil? Not much. Skeptical Theism seems to be true, as we do not seem to be in any sort of a position to make a positive case that it is likely God has malevolent motivations. So the Bridging Premise should remain in tatters, and the Problem of Evil should never be heard of again.

On the other hand, it appears that Skeptical Theism was an entirely Pyrrhic victory. Not only do we systematically fail to infer malevolent intentions from the evil around us, but we similarly will systematically fail to ever infer omnibenvolent intentions. So therefore all claims that God is omnibenevolent are unproven and thus unjustified. We could have an evil god, or a middle god, or a bizarre trickster god, or anything in between. Until a positive case can be made specifically for God’s omnibenvolence without falling into the same Skeptical Theism trap, the belief in an omnibenevolent god is in big trouble.

Thus, I’d advance this argument:

P1: We cannot know whether God is omnibenevolent unless we know that he has sufficient reasons to allow suffering.
P2: If we do not have enough information to know what God’s reasons are, we do not know whether or not God has sufficient reasons to allow suffering.
P3: Either (a) we do not have enough information to know what God’s reasons are, (b) the existence of suffering is enough evidence to infer God has no reasons, or (c) a theodicy exists which can allow us to infer God does have sufficient reasons.
P4: No such theodicy exists that would allow us to infer that God has sufficient reasons to allow suffering.

P5: Regardless of whether (a) or (b) is true, we cannot know whether God is omnibenevolent.
C6: Therefore, we cannot know whether God is omnibenevolent.
C7: Therefore, all knowably omnibenevolent Gods do not exist.

As you can see, Skeptical Theism is just a small barrier, and once we eliminate all theodicies, no matter which way we go around it (denying it or affirming it), we end up only demonstrating the failure of some God concepts. So now, assuming you buy all of this (if not, please drop a comment saying why!), we have swept away the possibility of knowably omnibenevolent gods as incompatible with existing suffering.

So for clarification’s sake, I will describe my position as such: The Problem of Evil does not work. However, and this is an important however, this is no large concession whatsoever, because a rather similar problem exists — while we can’t say God is not omnibenevolent, we can say God is not knowably omnibenvolent. And I think that’s not much difference at all.

Therefore, I’d like to advocate for The Almost Problem of Evil.

{Picture to go here, sometime tomorrow.}

…In the next part of this series, we’ll look at the remainder of the second video, analyzing incompatibility arguments dealing with perfection and revelation.

Continued in: TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part IV: Imperfection

Essays!

Since the last roundup two months ago, I wrote six essays!

• On Wednesday, March 21, I wrote “TheraminTrees Atheism, Part II: Evil”, which outlines the Problem of Evil, an attempted argument for the incompatibility between an omnibenevolent God and all the suffering we observe in the world. I find that this argument actually fails, yet it’s failure provides the seeds for a later revival of the argument. (In response to reader commentary, I’ve decided to rebuild this essay — see further down for why.)
• On Wednesday, March 28, I wrote “Cl, Bubonic Plagues, and Bibles, Part I”, which continues my debate with Cl, of “The Warfare is Mental”. I respond to his counter-arguments about the Bubonic Plague, point out the failure of his theodicies, and provide further advice for giving the Problem of Evil.
• On Sunday, April 1, I wrote a tounge-in-cheek April Fools post entitled “Why I Became a Christian”, where I have fun giving my best argumentative case for a conversion to Christianity. Ultimately I think it fails, but maybe it could convince you?
• On Wednesday, April 4, I wrote “TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part IV: Imperfection”, which continues the trail of incomatibility arguments by asking the question: “How did a perfect God create what ended up being an imperfect world?” Here, I find a perfect creator incompatible with the observed, imperfect world; find fault with The Fall as a theodicy for suffering; and ask why God did not make a world in which humans freely preform only morally good acts.
• On Sunday, April 15, I wrote “Peer Reviewed Journal Article And/Or Bust”, where I wrote about how the blog would be going into hibernation while I focused on finishing up the academic semester and working on an attempt to get a piece of political science research published in a peer-reviewed journal. That quest is still ongoing, but the blog is now back up!
• Lastly, on Monday, May 14, I wrote “Back for a Third Blogxperiment”, where I bring the blog back as a significant part of my summer, setting myself with the goal of blogging once every weekday until school starts back up again. Let’s see if I can do it!

Comments!

While my time away took me away from responding to comments with as much frequency as I would have liked, Greatplay.net did receive 340 comments since the previous Weekly Link Roundup about two months ago. I’m going to do my best to summarize the conversations that took place here, while also keying you into conversations I’ve had elsewhere on those other blogs.

• In “Joseph Kony and Malaria: Why Rationality Matters”, we talk about utilitarianism (especially from a moral anti-realist perspective), why funding anti-malaria methods is better than funding anti-Kony methods, and more and more difficult dilemmas of conflicting values.
• In “TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part II: Evil”, we talk about the inadequacies of the existing Problems of Evil, and my attempt to solve them by directly attacking Skeptical Theism. The first few comments cause me to revisit my position and update the essay. Eventually, commentary continues to the point where Cl writes an essay on his blog called “Why I Said Skeptical Theism is For the Birds”, further criticizing my position and causing me to revise it a second time, splitting this essay into two parts because of the increased length. Also discussed is whether or not it is foolish to search for truth if that truth is useless to the person in question, and the meta-question of how to evaluate that first question.
• In “Cl, Bubonic Plagues, and Bibles, Part I”, we talk about all the thorny issues about how we know we’ve really impacted the world positively, avoiding unintended negative side-effects — specifically, whether saving lives produces gratuitous amounts of overpopulation. This conversation continues onto Cl’s essay “Atheism and Moral Naivete”, which has more discussion about my theory of morality and overpopulation.
• In “TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part I: Incompatibility”, we talk about reversing my position on the Argument From Free Will (God’s omnipotence requires libertarian free will, which does not exist, therefore an omnipotent God cannot exist), thinking it is valid. I also address a potential Problem of Evil theodicy that argues that God had to allow evil because he chose to limit his own power to stop it.
• In “TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part IV: Imperfection”, Cl writes a partial rebuttal of my essay, and people discuss about how much an omnibenevolent God would intervene in everyday life to prevent suffering.
• In “Defining the Natural and Supernatural”, we talk briefly about Quantum Mechanics, highlighting the theories of Many-Worlds and Richard Carrier’s Interpretation. We also talk about Epicurean gods and Bayes Theory.
• In “The Contradictory Failures of Prayer, Part II”, Cl announces a rebuttal to my piece, contained in his essay “The Contradictory Failures of Peter Hurford”. People also discuss the meaning of faith, with specific focus on solipsism and Bayes Theorem. We then talk about different types of moral anti-realism.
• In “God is Unproven”, we talk more about the merits of the cosmological argument and discuss whether solipsism can be falsified.
• In “Of Oughts and Is, Part I”, we talk more about moral non-naturalism.
• In “Of Oughts and Is, Part II”, we talk about to what extent people will purposely live the kinds of life they wouldn’t want to live.
• In “What the Social Issues Debates Are Missing”, we talk about abortion — where the harm is in permitting it, where the harm is in restricting it, how to navigate this trade-off, and something about souls.
• Elsewhere, on Cl’s “A Reminder to the Willfully Ignorant”, we talked about to what extent Genesis is consistent with science, given how it allegedly successfully pre-empted the Big Bang Theory because it said the Heavens and the Earth had a definite beginning.

Feel free to join any of that discussion. I know I will be, shortly.

In other news, I also made some slight changes to previous ages: In addition to revamping TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part II into a two-part essay, I updated the about page to add my résumé and reflect my new status as a “rising junior”. I also added a small section on intrinsic value to “Of Oughts and Is, Part I”. I try to make updates to essays sparingly, but sometimes it really is better than writing a new essay.

Links!

Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite links to other cool places, for more ideas to share! As always,

(1) The links are also ordered so that the ones I like most are at the top, for those who don’t have time for all the links… but for those who do have time, I think all of them are worthwhile.

(2) The Link Roundup category has, I’d estimate, over 500 more links if you need the extra distraction. That’s enough links to keep you reading for a full month, if not more.

(3) I don’t necessarily agree with everything said by these links; I just post what I find to be interesting and well-written. If you want to know whether I support a particular opinion you see, feel free to ask.

• The Earth Is Round (p < .05): “After 4 decades of severe criticism, the ritual of null hypothesis significance testing—mechanical dichotomous decisions around a sacred .05 criterion—still persists. This article reviews the problems with this practice, including its near-universal misinterpretation of p as the probability that H0 is false, the misinterpretation that its complement is the probability of successful replication, and the mistaken assumption that if one rejects H0 one thereby affirms the theory that led to the test. Exploratory data analysis and the use of graphic methods, a steady improvement in and a movement toward standardization in measurement, an emphasis on estimating effect sizes using confidence intervals, and the informed use of available statistical methods is suggested. For generalization, psychologists must finally rely, as has been done in all the older sciences, on replication.”
• The ‘Biblical View’ That’s Younger Than the Happy Meal: “In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.
  Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception. [...B]ack in the day, Dudley notes, Geisler ‘argued for the permissibility of abortion in a 1971 book, stating: The embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.’ That was in Ethics: Alternatives and Issues, published by Zondervan. It’s still in print, kind of, as Christian Ethics: Contemporary Issues and Options. And now it says something different. Now it’s unambiguously anti-abortion.”
• The Basis for Morality: “You can acknowledge that there is no binding, logically necessary or factually obligatory reason to be moral, but you can choose to be moral. And there are plenty of good non-moral or prudential reasons for doing so, such as that social living benefits us, and it’s a darn sight easier to live socially when there are rules of conduct. So you be moral. [...] And once you’ve chosen to be moral, that binds you to playing by the rules of the moral system you’re in. Like when you agree to play a game of cricket, you can’t just go around breaking or conforming to particular rules, or making up new ones, willy nilly. If you did that, in some important sense you wouldn’t be playing cricket. And the other cricketers would certainly look upon you with great scorn and disapprobation.”
• Christianity in a Nutshell [YouTube]: “Former preacher Dan Barker summarizes the ‘good news’ message of the bible in less than two minutes. “
• 6 Tips for Productive Arguments: “We’ve all had arguments that seemed like a complete waste of time in retrospect. But at the same time, arguments (between scientists, policy analysts, and others) play a critical part in moving society forward. You can imagine how lousy things would be if no one ever engaged those who disagreed with them. This is a list of tips for having ‘productive’ arguments. For the purposes of this list, ‘productive’ means improving the accuracy of at least one person’s views on some important topic. By this definition, arguments where no one changes their mind are unproductive. So are arguments about unimportant topics like which Pink Floyd album is the best.”
• Sanity and Survival: “The following 3 essays were prepared from pages 737-780 of an ebook of Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985) by Douglas Hofstadter, an anthology of articles & essays primarily published in Scientific American between January 1981 and July 1983. [...] They are particularly interesting for introducing the idea of superrationality in game theory, an attempt to devise a decision theory/algorithm for agents which can reach global utility maxima on problems like the prisoner’s dilemma even in the absence of coercion”
• Regulation and the Nature of Externalities: “Capitalism is a good thing. A very good thing. But we’ve already lived through the robber baron era and we know what happens when it is unregulated. At the same time, we should use our understanding of how markets operate to design smart and effective regulation that increases competition rather than decreases it and that protects consumers and the public instead of corporate profits.”
• The Best Textbooks on Every Subject: “For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff’s Notes. How inefficient! I’ve since discovered that textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material. [...] But textbooks vary widely in quality. I was forced to read some awful textbooks in college. The ones on American history and sociology were memorably bad, in my case. Other textbooks are exciting, accurate, fair, well-paced, and immediately useful. What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful. Let’s do it.”
• Getting Yourself To Act How You Know You Should: “Just because you know what you should do, doesn’t mean that you’re going to do it. You may know that it would be smart to lose weight, but aren’t on a diet. You may be convinced that when you’re feeling tired during the day you should do jumping jacks to boost your energy, but instead you lie down on the couch. You may know that using a formal decision making procedure is a good idea when you’re trying to make important decisions, yet you’ve never bother to use one. So why don’t we always do what we know we should?”
• Making Beliefs Pay Rent in Anticipated Experiences: “Thus begins the ancient parable: ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air. Another says, No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain.’ Suppose that, after the tree falls, the two walk into the forest together. Will one expect to see the tree fallen to the right, and the other expect to see the tree fallen to the left? Suppose that before the tree falls, the two leave a sound recorder next to the tree. Would one, playing back the recorder, expect to hear something different from the other? [...] Though the two argue, one saying “No,” and the other saying “Yes,” they do not anticipate any different experiences. The two think they have different models of the world, but they have no difference with respect to what they expect will happen to them.”
• How Journalism Distorts Reality: “Journalism provides us with important information about what’s going on in the world. But when you consider the incentives that journalists have, combine that with their usual lack of scientific training, and add in the constraints of the medium in which they work, serious distortions of reality can result. Many journalists produce excellent work. But others leave you less informed after reading their articles than before you began. What causes journalistic distortion?”
• Lies We Tell Kids: “Adults lie constantly to kids. I’m not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. [...] One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is. All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they’re the questions you answer ‘Ask your parents.’ If a kid asked who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you ‘Is there a God?’ or ‘What’s a prostitute?’ you’ll probably say ‘Ask your parents.’”
• Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security: “In my previous two statements, I made two basic arguments about post-9/11 airport security. One, we are not doing the right things: the focus on airports at the expense of the broader threat is not making us safer. And two, the things we are doing are wrong: the specific security measures put in place since 9/11 do not work. Kip Hawley doesn’t argue with the specifics of my criticisms, but instead provides anecdotes and asks us to trust that airport security—and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in particular—knows what it’s doing. He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust the no-fly list: 21,000 people so dangerous they’re not allowed to fly, yet so innocent they can’t be arrested.”
• The Animal Research Paradox: “The paradox is that the case for animal rights largely rests on the finding of experiments on captive animals – the very research that animal activists oppose. For example, the philosopher Tom Regan, author of the influential book The Case for Animal Rights, argues that the possession of rights should be extended to all species that possess consciousness, emotions, beliefs, desires, perceptions, memories, intentions, and a sense of the future. But how do we know which animals have these attributes? The answer, of course, is animal research.”
• Timeless Control: “In Thou Art Physics, I pointed out that since you are within physics, anything you control is necessarily controlled by physics. Today we will talk about a different aspect of the confusion, the words ‘determined’ and ‘control’.”
• Gospel Disproof #31 – Burning Coals: “‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also.’ Great philosophy, isn’t it? Let’s dismantle airport security and send Al Qaeda free tickets. Do good to those that hate you, give them whatever they want, let them hurt you and take your stuff and get away with it.”
• Blue or Green on Regulation: “I understand that debates are not conducted in front of perfectly rational audiences. We all know what happens when you try to trade off a sacred value against a nonsacred value. It’s why, when someone says, ‘But if you don’t ban cars, people will die in car crashes!’ you don’t say ‘Yes, people will die horrible flaming deaths and they don’t deserve it. But it’s worth it so I don’t have to walk to work in the morning.’ Instead you say, ‘How dare you take away our freedom to drive? We’ll decide for ourselves; we’re just as good at making decisions as you are.’”
• A Polite Exchange Between Author and Editor: “It has been three months since I did you the honor of submitting my masterpiece paper to your journal. At 9,000 words in length, I calculate you would only have to read 100 words per day (fewer words than appear in Hop on Pop) in order to have read the entire manuscript by now. Can I expect a decision soon?”
• Why Some Wild Animals Are Becoming Nicer: “Nature is supposed to be red in tooth and claw, and domestication an artificial process for making animals gentle. But it appears that some corners of the animal kingdom are becoming kinder, gentler places. Certain creatures may be domesticating themselves.”
• Getting Duped – How the Media Messes with Your Mind: “Statements made in the media can surreptitiously plant distortions in the minds of millions. Learning to recognize two commonly used fallacies [straw man and weak man argumentation] can help you separate fact from fiction”

*Brushes off dust*

Well, I’m back, ending nearly a month of blog vacation announced in “Peer Reviewed Journal Article And/Or Bust”. Greatplay.net will be active and running again. Now that school is over and I’m on my way to summery things, I’m ready to turn back to blogging. In fact, I’d like to continue in my own past footsteps.

I’m going to attempt, again, to do one essay for every week day. I was able to do the same last summer, despite having a research job. This summer I have two jobs — one as a Washington DC Senate intern and a second doing research again, but I think I can still do the weekday blogging thing. After all, I was able to complete NaNoWriMo despite being in the full swing of school.

I’ve found it’s not so much about having work to do, but about making the time and just getting into the habit of it. I’d like to challenge myself by doing it again, and making blogging a significant part of my summer. After all, I enjoy it, and I have a lot of ideas to share.

See you with new essays starting tomorrow, as I continue where I left off and start some things anew!

While I’ve never been of the persuasion that I must maintain a defined essay schedule, despite deliberate attempts to stick to one and while I’ve never been of the persuasion that I should provide excuses for not writing more, a few people have been wondering where my time has been going. So I want to share what’s up, especially because the answer is kind of exciting: I’m attempting to shoot for getting some of my newest political science research in a peer-reviewed political science journal.

While regular school work has been impressively high in this last big month of classes and is definitely not helping, and while I’ve been working a lot with Denison University Venture Philanthropy Club (another thing I’ve long wanted to write about someday but can’t quite yet), finishing up my research paper and getting it ready for publication has been the biggest focus of my time.

But as for this blog, the gist of this is that I’m going to be taking the rest of April off from blogging. I’m going to post Weekly Link Roundup #28, and then step away from the essay writing part. Instead, I intend to focus fully on finishing up my school work, finishing this research publication opportunity, and respond to the several dozen comments on this blog left for me to get to. It’s sad that I have to step away right as this blog is really ratcheting up, but I think it’s the only way I can get all my work done.

I do look forward to a very essay-filled May, though. I have a lot of plans for May…

This series is about looking at 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’m still analyzing his second video, which is about the gods he can reject with near absolute certainty, because they involve logically incompatible properties and thus are logically impossible.

So far we’ve ruled out omnipotent gods (for being incompatible with the state of free will); knowably omnibenevolent gods (for being incompatible with Hell, suffering, evil); gods you can pray to; and omniscient gods who get surprised or upset. That’s a lot of divine real estate, but there’s still more to be said! In this last part of the second video, TheraminTrees takes aim against gods said to be perfect.

Much Confusion Over Perfection

The first problem TheraminTrees finds with perfection is that few people can get more specific than that — people disagree very much on what perfection entails. Many people argue that perfection would compel a god to intervene in human events, enforce an omnibenevolent will, and oversee humanity’s ascension to Heaven. Other people argue that perfection would compel a god to be completely hands-off and detached from human affairs.

This kind of confusion is standard, and definitely clouds the issue of figuring out the properties that gods have. As I mention in “Where is God?”, there are multiple confusions both between and within religions. For example, just within Christianity:

[A]s B. Steven Matthies points out, there are sixteen different Christian opinions on how one is saved ranging from faith alone to requirements for baptisms, communions, and/or good works to straight predestination. Adam Lee finds four major disagreements on salvation, not to mention that the idea of salvation by faith alone is rather condemnable by itself.

This is no trivial matter — this is confusion over a core teaching of a major religion. Why does God leave us so confused?

And in “There Are No Religious Facts”, I summarized many more disagreements within Christianity:

It’s definitely possible to establish more — the disagreements among Christians alone are numerous and contentious enough that many books have been written about them, enough to fill a bookshelf.

But I wouldn’t want to belabor the well-established point: the religions of the world are thoroughly confused. Perhaps we’re justified in being atheist until the theologians settle the disputes amongst themselves.

The Cosmic Shell Game

So religions are massively confused, and it’s probably because God’s method of revelation could be better. But now we might whether there is a incompatibility argument buried in here? Jumping around the second video a bit and adding in some other works, I would argue that there is. As Adam Lee puts it in his essay “The Cosmic Shell Game”:

Religion is a cosmic shell game. If theism – any brand of theism – is true, then the universe is just a shell game at a rigged carnival, with God the barker whirling the pea of the One True Religion around under one of thousands of identical shells. Out of all those multitudes of faiths, the reward for picking the right one is an eternity of bliss and happiness. Failure to pick the correct one instead merits an eternity of torture. And your participation in the game is not voluntary. This, to put it lightly, is monstrously unfair.

A knowably benevolent God is incompatible with such an unfair game, as is a God who wants more than anything to reveal himself to us — because if he did, there would be literally nothing preventing him from doing so. The only limitation on such a powerful entity would be a higher desire.

The Argument from Confusion

To defend this thesis, I would argue the following argument similar to the one made in “TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part II: Evil”:

P1: Either a less confusing revelation would be morally preferable or we cannot know about God’s motivations.
P2: If we can’t know about God’s motivations, God cannot be known to be omnibenevolent.
P3: If a less confusing revelation would be morally preferable and it was logically possible for God’s revelation to be less confusing, God cannot be omnibenevolent.
P4: It is logically possible for God’s revelation to be less confusing.
C5: Therefore from P1 through P4, God cannot be known to be omnibenevolent.

…So that was a bit of a sidetrack, but it was pretty fruitful nonetheless. What we have here is another incompatibility argument that finds a contradiction not between characteristics of God, but rather between God and the world as we see it. As the world is limited to our personal knowledge, we can’t actually claim that God is actually not omnibenevolent, but rather that we just cannot know of his omnibenevolence. Anyways, now onward to look at perfection more specifically…

From Whence Comes Imperfection?

TheraminTrees then moves to discuss the parts of perfection we do agree on firmly — namely, that a perfect being never makes mistakes. Thus, if God is the omnipotent creator of the universe, the universe God makes must be devoid of mistakes, and therefore perfect.

Yet, the world is not perfect. Some kinds of imperfection we might point to are the types of suffering we examined in the previous part of this series — nonhuman animal suffering and birth defects. Yet, these forms of suffering are indeed debatable, so let’s turn to a type of imperfect that isn’t easily debatable: the idea that humans are imperfect. This is a key tenant of Christianity — humans sin — and also generically plausible given that we hurt ourselves and others both intentionally and unintentionally.

We could all be better. But this raises an interesting question: where did this imperfection come from? Are we imperfect beings created by a perfect god? If so, why? How and why could a perfect god create imperfect beings? Let’s consider an argument analyzed by Graham Oppy in his book Arguing about Gods, which I have rephrased as follows:

P6: An omnibenevolent entity would always bring about a world where humans freely preform only morally good acts provided that (1) it is logically possible to bring about such a world and (2) the entity is capable of bringing about that world.
P7: It is logically possible to create a world where humans freely preform only morally good acts.
P8: An omnipotent entity can realize any logically possible world.
C9: Therefore from P6 through P8, an omnipotent and omnibenevolent entity would realize a world in which humans freely preform only morally good acts.
P10: Our world is not a world in which humans freely preform only morally good acts.
C11: Therefore from C9 and P10, no entity can exist that is simultaneously omnipotent and omnibenevolent.

This argument is logically valid and the premises are very plausible: P8 and P10 are utterly uncontroversial, so all the debate must occur within P6 and P7. But P7 seems true because of the nature of compatibilist free will and the untenability of libertarian free will, as well as God himself having free will yet being genuinely incapable of evil, and that Heaven is traditionally conceived as a place where people have free will yet don’t commit evil acts.

P6 seems obvious on first glance, but given everything we’ve talked about skeptical theism, we have to defend that we can actually know this. I think it can be most easily defended by another appeal to the fact that Heaven has people freely preforming only morally good acts, yet is preferable to life on Earth. But more generally, it seems further defensible by taking it to be definitionally true — the morally good acts would be whatever maximizes even the goods unknowable to us, and then this argument shifts to P10 which can be defended by an appeal to the fact that humans are declared to be sinful and imperfect by God himself.

Thus what looks like a characteristic-world incompatibility argument (omnibenevolent, omnipotent gods are incompatible with a world in which humans do not freely preform only morally good acts) is actually better understood as a characteristic-characteristic incompatibility argument (omnibenevolence and omnipotence are incompatible with a god that declares his creation to have become imperfect). Now let’s look at this in a bit more detail…

The Fall

In my debate with Cl about the existence of needless suffering, Cl wrote in his rebuttal that all suffering (birth defects and the suffering of nonhuman animals included!) are a result of The Fall, the theological event in Genesis in which Adam freely chose to reject God and eat the poisoned fruit. Thus the Fall is the origin of all imperfection. God created a perfect world, but we ruined it. And God has to let us endure the ramifications of our own choices…

But there are like a million problems with this. Let’s start with the most obvious: this isn’t a good place to rest a theodicy, nor a tenable origin of imperfection, because given what we know, there is no way that The Fall actually happened, and a metaphorical Fall can be no justification for actual suffering. I don’t think I need to mention how Genesis is historically untenable, genetically untenable, and contradicts a lot of scientific evidence.

Now we could pack up our bags and be done here, theodicy busted. But there’s a greater point to be made, and as far as free will and imperfection are concerned, we should be far more interested in the theological and philosophical concerns — which are also numerous.

The key lemma of the Fall is that it was (1) a free choice made by Adam that (2) God had no choice but to respect and allow to unfold. But both (1) and (2) are false, given the nature of the event that actually took place. First, the choice was entirely uninformed — Adam would not have known the ramifications of his own actions without a greater understanding of how the world worked nor would he have been able to judge his actions as wrong without eating the tree in the first place. Secondly, just as we stop children from walking off cliffs, God could have intervened at any step of the way, but in fact he did the opposite by making it really easy for the Fall to take place. In fact, as mentioned in Part I, he knew it would take place due to his omniscience and still changed nothing.

In his essay “Sins of the Father”, Adam Lee summarizes all the problems with (1) and (2) as follows:

What we have so far is this: God deliberately created a dangerous, forbidden tree and put it into Eden with no protection, then created an intelligent, evil, talking serpent to tempt Adam and Eve, and gave them an ineffective instruction they could not have known not to disobey along with a threat of punishment they could not have understood. This bizarre behavior can only be explained as the result of malice or extreme stupidity.

But granted for the moment that all this happened as written – that God could have intervened at any step of the way to stop what was about to unfold, and yet he did not. The serpent tempted Eve, and God kept silent and did not intervene. She reached out to eat from the tree, and God didn’t stop her, although he could have. She ate, and gave the fruit to Adam, whom God also did not stop from eating. Only then – once their sin was complete – did God finally show up. And instead of simply forgiving them and undoing what had happened, which he also could have done, he kicked them both out of Paradise and cursed them, condemning them to mortal lives of toil, suffering and death.

The Trouble of the First Sin

But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg, because all we’ve done is look at the action and notice that it was uninformed and unprevented. But where did the action to reject God itself come from? If Adam was created perfect, why would he do such an imperfect thing?

As Adam Lee puts it in his essay “That Fateful Apple”:

In examining this doctrine, the first question that arises is this. What caused the first sin to come into being? In other words, why did Adam and Eve choose to eat the fruit? [...] It is true that, if he gives us the option of doing good, God must logically also give us the option of doing evil. But that does not mean we must choose to do evil. Why couldn’t God have created free-willed beings who would freely choose only the good?

[...T]he fact remains that Adam and Eve did not create their own natures. Any hint of rebellion, any trace of pride, any tinge of defiance that was to be found in their natures was there because it was put there by God. (Saying they were originally created without sinful inclinations but later took them on is absurd: why would a perfectly good person choose to add negative qualities to his character?) [...] Responsibility for any imperfection to be found within any created thing must ultimately lie with the creator. It would hardly be fair for God to blame us for being exactly as he created us to be, even though the Bible tells us he repeatedly does just that.

Conclusion

So clearly it cannot follow that Adam and Eve were perfect yet did something imperfect. Thus God could not have made a perfect creation and we end up with another incompatibility argument: not only is the story of Genesis incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient god who desires above all else his creation not disobey him, and not only is the story of Genesis incompatible with a perfect god incapable of making mistakes, but the concept of a perfect god is incompatible with the very fact that the current creation contains mistakes, even setting Genesis aside.

So we enter another incompatibility argument: a perfect god cannot exist, given the fact that the world is imperfect. Not only does the Fall fail to ground any explanation for why God is justified for allowing suffering in the world, but the Fall is another example of how God messed up, and another reason to doubt his existence. In the next part of this series, we’ll see just how far these incompatibility arguments can go, and then what to do with the rest of the god concepts that can’t be ruled out by logical contradiction.

By way of further conclusion, I’d like to quote the end of “That Fateful Apple” to put this all in perspective and explain why this can be so important:

This puzzle, like so many others, remains unsolved, a glaring flaw in the logical framework of Christian theism. Why did initially perfect human beings commit the first sin? Why did God not create us as free-willed beings who would freely choose only the good? Why are we held responsible for the actions of others and punished for acting just as we were created to act? Why did he create us knowing he would have to punish us thus? Unless all these questions can be satisfactorily reconciled, and I have yet to see an apologetics source that even tries to do this, much less accomplishes it, Christianity must be considered to fail the test of basic logical coherence.

One final point remains to be made. [...] It is a simple observational fact that no one is perfect. But Christianity takes that fact and twists it to claim that therefore none of us can ever do anything good. From this degrading proposition, it reaches the conclusion that we are all inherently worthless, we are all hopelessly depraved, and we all deserve an eternity of inconceivable pain and anguish for no more reason than that we exist.

Not only is this false, it is psychologically harmful, and the detrimental effects of believing it should be obvious. Witness the many Christians who live in perpetual fear of sinning, who are constantly begging God to forgive them for real or imagined transgressions, who find only confusion, misery and depression where they were promised a sense of inner peace and contentment. [...] How could anyone bear to live under such a gloomy, life-sapping cloud?

Christianity tries to win converts by piling guilt onto them for non-existent crimes. In effect, it tries to make us believe we are sick so it can sell us a cure. But as the saying goes, an entire pound of cure is not as good as a single ounce of prevention, and the prevention in this case is to realize that we are not sick, that we are not worthless sinners, and that while there may be badness in us, there is much good as well. [...]

We are still accountable, to ourselves and to others, for our behavior, but this is a standard that is in our power to meet. And if with the adoption of this standard comes the further realization that there is no good evidence for any supernatural beings to whom we owe anything at all, so much the better. Atheism is joy, it is freedom, and it is the empowering realization that we are in control, that we can direct our own lives, and that we have the potential to accomplish amazing things – all we have to do is decide to use it.

The First Cause

To get you to accept Christianity, I first have to get you to accept deism, or the belief that a god of some sort exists. To do this, I first offer an argument that only an omnipotent being can account for the existence of the universe.

The way this argument is typically offered is by pointing to the strong scientific consensus that the universe began to exist with a Big Bang from which everything flowed. While this does seem plausible, with God creating the heavens and the Earth in a single, unfolding creative event that started in a point and time (Genesis 1:1), this argument has been more recently undermined by appeals to multiverse theories and multiverses.

Even if these appeals do seem a tad desperate and unsubstantiated, it doesn’t matter because the first cause argument is far stronger than that — because these still try to explain the existence of the universe by pointing out that it has always existed, yet they still don’t explain why it exists. Even an infinite series needs some reason why it is infinite instead of finite, why it is this way instead of some other way, or why it exists at all. Why do we have a multiverse instead of nothing?

God, being a supernatural being of infinite power, has the metaphysical property of being incapable of not existing, of being logically necessary. The universe is not like that and it does not have this metaphysical property because it is not supernatural. Thus the existence of God is self-explained (no need for “What created God?” since a logically necessary being needs no creation) and explains a universe that could have failed to exist otherwise. Thus, God is the best explanation for why the universe exists, and therefore we should take God to exist. No appeal to the Big Bang required.

The Basis for Logic

However, even if we were to somehow come up for a way for the universe to come into existence all by itself from absolutely nothing (none of this quantum effects creating a universe, because we would still have to explain the quantum effects themselves…), we would still need to explain why the universe is so orderly and logical.

In this universe, we observe abstract properties like mathematical and other logical truths. It’s not just that one apple and another apple equals two apples, but “1 + 1 = 2″. It’s not like the universe stays together rather orderly most of the time, but that it follows regular and unbreakable laws. It’s also not like the universe is going to fall apart tomorrow, but that the universe will stay on these laws forever and always.

Only God can make sense of these things.

First, where do we find mathematical propositions like “1 + 1 = 2″? These things are not observed anywhere in nature — while you can find plenty of solo objects, you can never find an actual number one. The numbers themselves exist only within minds, which are powered by a supernatural God. Math comes from God’s mind and exists supernaturally, and is not physical. Thus, mathematics requires God.

Second, why would the universe follow regular and unbreakable laws? Only an omnipotent God would have the power to enforce such laws, and only a perfectly consistent being would make laws so regular. Why expect a universe to be so orderly? Why not expect it to come together and then fall apart instantly, or a few weeks later? There are definitely far more disorderly universes than orderly universes, yet we find ourselves in this unlikely orderly universe. Thus, the probability points to God.

Third, we should look to the Problem of Induction. Hume long ago pointed out that we can’t use any of the facts about the laws we know now to infer that they will be the same tomorrow. Even if the universe has held together for the past billions of years, why assume these laws will hold tomorrow? The answer to this problem is God and God alone. Given that God is orderly, we can depend on Him to have created a universe that will stay orderly. And given that God is omnipotent, we can depend on Him to not fall apart like any other possible explanation. Thus, inductive logic requires God.

Fine-Tuning

So far, God is the only explanation for why a universe exists and the only explanation for a variety of logical truths. However, God also is the best explanation for why the universe we are in allows for our life, instead of a different universe that has logic, yet no life. Specifically, life seems very rare — as hard as we’ve searched, we have found no other intelligent species. This makes sense, since we are God’s children, and God is unlikely to have also made (1) different children elsewhere and (2) not have told us about them.

But this isn’t just about how rare it is for there to be life on one planet among trillions, for odds are it would happen somewhere even if by chance. This is about the odds of being in a universe with planets at all! In fact, the constants of the universe seem so finely-tuned for life, that we’re very lucky to be in the universe we are in rather than in a different universe!

For just one example among many, if the strong nuclear force (that which binds nucleans together in a nucleas) were only 2% stronger, there would be no stable hydrogen, and thus no long-lived stars, and thus nothing anywhere in the universe to sustain life. If it were 5% weaker, hydrogen would be the only element around, and again there were would be no stable stars!

This means that we are in a very fine range of possible universes, even if we allow a godless explanation of why universes exist. Now it makes sense that a God would create not only a universe but a universe in which life exists. Without God, this is a crapshoot that is extensively unlikely. Thus it is far more likely God exists, given that we observe a universe with life. Again, the probability points to God.

Evolution, Altruism, and Purpose

So we have the very existence of a universe pointing to God, and our very specific, logical, mathematical, orderly, life-bearing universe pointing even more to God. With that, I consider God proven beyond any reasonable doubt. However, we can go further, establishing the existence of God even more certainly while figuring out more about what God is like.

For this, we turn to how humanity came to be — how God chose to create humanity — evolution. Believers seem scared by evolution because it seems so long and clunky for a perfect God. But it’s not like a perfect God could be inconvienenced by waiting, and it’s consistent with God creating everything from a single, unfolding point of a Big Bang.

What is of concern worth addressing is the scare that evolution explain humanity without God. But this is very far from the truth too, as I will now explain. First, evolution grounds us specifically with a belief in God, as we would expect. As has been pointed out by numerous atheists, humanity has evolved specifically to think in God terms and to make inferences to God, just as a result of how we think. Ironically, this is no accident — this is a sensus divinus that God has given us to be able to discover Him.

The second most shocking fact about evolution is that we’ve evolved to be empathetic, altruistic creatures. Godless evolution is all about the survival of the fittest, and thus would produce competing human organisms who only cooperate when it is in their self-interest and would never sacrifice theirself for any other organism — it harms their very survival!

Thus the existence of genuine self-sacrifice is strong indication that God intervened and created humans that could get along with each other. Thus altruism is further proof of God, and also strongly indicates that God is good. Only a good God would desire that humans exist so much, and take steps to ensure that we were good to each other too.

Altruism in Fulfillment

But not only has God ensured that we are capable of altruism, but has ensured that we are happiest when altruistic. The Greeks and later philosophers have long noted that a virtuous life is the most fulfilling and complete one. But this is surprising with godless evolution, since our survival requires no need for virtue, let alone the large depth of fulfillment we can get from it.

Since godless evolution is incapable of going so far above and beyond the call of duty like that, we must conclude evolution was guided by an all-good God that wanted us to be happy and make others happy at the same time. Why else could organisms be so happy harming their survival interests?

This is also my answer to the atheist’s challenge of why an all-good God could allow people to suffer, the so-called Problem of Evil. Namely, we need something to be altruistic about — we can’t help and show love to others if people aren’t occasionally in need of help. If everything were perfect, ironically, we would have nothing to do and no way to live a fulfilling life. Likewise, we would lose our personal autonomy by not being held responsibly for the true ramifications of our actions if God stepped in to intervene all the time.

Objective Good

Lastly, it’s not only that we’re motivated to be altruistic, and happiest when altruistic, but also that we view being altrustic as objectively good and that which all people should do. Yet this requires grounding goodness in something more than our personal preferences, or we couldn’t expect other people to be genuinely mistaken in acting as if they had evolved godlessly. But where would we ground goodness, if not in our personal preferences?

The answer is in a Platonic form of good, or an embodiment of perfect goodness from which other things can be compared, and this form of good is a perfectly good God. God himself embodies what is good, and we find out what is good by looking to God, even if we do so only subconsciously through our evolved preferences.

To recap, the existence of the universe and the existence of the specific logical, mathematical, orderly, stable universe in which we live are both strong evidences for God. This is further confirmed by an evolved sensus divinus and an evolved commitment to altruism, which goes hand-in-hand by talking about morality in an objective way that requires basis in God. Also, given that God has made us exist, and designed us to cooperate and be altruistic as much as we are, yet allowed us to make real choices and be responsible for our actions, strongly points to a God that is all-good. But now why Christianity, specifically?

The Holy Bible

Now that I’ve hopefully argued you to deism, it’s time to argue you to Christianity. The answer here lies first within the Holy Bible. First, it’s important to point out that the Bible confirms our evolutionary commitment to altruism by reinforcing our knowledge of morality and teaching us to be more compassionate and altruistic than we currently are.

In fact, Jesus commands us all to give up all we have to the poor, one of the boldest moral commitments made in all of history, thousands of years before Peter Singer argues the same. This should show the wisdom of God’s moral knowledge and further point to his benevolence, as well as confirm the Bible as a morally superior book.

But even if we don’t see the Bible as morally superior, we know we can trust it because God wrote prophecies within the two testaments that have stunningly come true. 100prophecies.org offers a lot of these, and here are a few of my favorites:

• Micah 5:2 says the savior will be born in Bethlehem, and Jesus was born in Bethlehem hundreds of years later.
• Zecheriah 11:10-14 and Exodus 21:32 both mention betrayal of Isreal for thirty coins of silver, which actually happens with Jesus and Judas.
• Psalm 22 predicts death by piercing and having the body put on public display, which is how Jesus was killed.
• Ezekiel 37:11-14 predicts that the Jews will be scattered all around the world and then reunited later in Israel, which did happen after World War II.

Thus God gave us confirmable miracles with just a little Bible reading and history. Thus the Bible cannot be reasonably doubted as God’s Holy Book.

We also can confirm this by looking at the history surrounding Jesus’s resurrection, and noting that only an authentic resurrection can account for the fact that Jesus was cruxified and then discovered with an empty tomb, yet no one was able to dispel the growth of Christianity by pointing out that the body was stolen, that many skeptics (Paul and James) had a change of heart after witnessing the resurrection, and that many disciples (including once skeptics) claimed to have witnessed Jesus directly.

The Holy Spirit, Prayer, and Personal Experience

Lastly, God does not require us to be full time historians, philosophers, cosmologists, and theologians in order to recognize God. Even though God’s existence does appear obvious in retrospect after rethinking the evidence from the right perspective that I now have, and even though I do think the case can be made clearly and compellingly, the existence of God can actually be known through the inner testimony of the Holy Sprit.

Christianity is analogous to having everyone tell you that a movie is terrible, yet you personally going to the movie and enjoying it — your personal experience will automatically trump everything anyone else has to say, no matter how compelling their arguments are. It’s just the simple truth that you enjoyed the movie, even if you can’t prove it, or explain why the movie is good. Likewise, we can know God through our own personal experience, even if everyone tells us we can’t.

This is what happened to me with prayer. After finally deciding that God has a decent chance of existing, I broke down and prayed to Him to give me the strength to see Him in the philosophy I was studying. And it turned out that I did, and now I am saved and happier than ever. More importantly, I am living the truth, as you can too, just like billions of other people.

So there you have it. The existence of God is confirmed by the existence of our universe, especially given how logical, orderly, and stable it is. Furthermore, we can know that a good God exists from examining how we find fulfillment in altruism and that such a kind of alturism would survive evolution’s survival of the fittest. Additionally, we can specifically know that Christianity is true because of the Bible’s moral knowledge, the Biblical prophecies, and the resurrection of Jesus. And all that nonwithstanding, we still can get personal knowledge of God through prayer and direct testimony.

…

Author’s Note: As today is April Fools, this essay is obviously satire. While it seems obvious now, I just wanted to make sure those who stumble on this essay later are not confused. Sorry to disappoint, but I’m still very much an atheist. These arguments are all flawed, but were written in response to someone asking me to make my best case for Christianity. This is the best I got.

Back a little over a month ago, Cl of The Warfare of Mental and I were in deep in a debate over whether needless suffering exists (in any sense relevant to the Problem of Evil), and Cl had just released his rebuttal to my opening statement, which ended before I got a chance to reply to it.

However, I’ve begun to piece together a response to his rebuttal in the course of my regular blogging. My essay “TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part II: Evil” was intended to renew my Problem of Evil in light of Cl’s objection that I was making an argument of incredulity, explaining that if my inference from observed suffering to God’s malevolence is not valid, a lot of other inferences are invalid as well, and theism crumbles apart anyway. Left to respond to are Cl’s comments about theodicies, especially The Fall, and Cl’s comments about the bubonic plague.

In this essay, I’m going to respond to Cl’s comments on the bubonic plague. Quite a fun topic to discuss, no?

The Challenge and Counter-Challenge

In my opening statement, I outlined three examples of needless suffering that I thought were so obviously indefensible that there could be no justification for any of them other than appealing to us not being able to know about what they could be for / the Skeptical Theism Defense / “God works in mysterious ways”. These were birth defects, the suffering of nonhuman animals, and the Bubonic Plague.

Elsewhere in my now recanted essay “The Great Problem of Evil, Part II”, I throw down a different challenge: “…knowledge of the germ theory of disease contained in the Bible rather than left to be discovered by fallible scientists would have saved billions of lives. Why [God] didn’t do so, given that it would prove [God's] glory and goodness beyond a shadow of a doubt, is unknown.”

Cl counters that the Bubonic Plague can be justified, because (1) it allowed for HIV resistance; (2) it was a key turning point in European economic development; (3) the bubonic plague punishes people for the sins of filth, which the Bible specifically taught people how to avoid. Additionally, these instructions were so advanced and ahead of the Bible’s time that the only possible explanation is that the Bible is divinely inspired from a real God, and thus Christianity is true!

Cl wraps this up saying:

My list is just the tip of the iceberg, and already we have something akin to modern hygiene and germ theory, delivered 3,000 years before Pasteur was so much as a twinkle in his father’s eye—by people atheists often denigrate as ignorant goat-herders. [...] I agree with Peter that a “god” who makes people suffer pointlessly is worthy of condemnation, cruel, malevolent, and fundamentally opposed to love and compassion, but as my arguments have undeniably demonstrated, God did exactly what Peter asked for, and much more.

Cl thus answered one-third of my challenge and turned the tables on me with a counter-challenge, attempting to prove that Christianity is not just true, but undeniably so. I promised Cl on March 6 that I would respond to this argument within a month. Here is that response.

The Three Mistakes of Theodicy

So Cl said that the Bubonic Plague is justifiable because (1) it allowed for HIV resistance; (2) it was a key turning point in European economic development; (3) the bubonic plague punishes people for the sins of filth, which the Bible specifically taught people how to avoid.

HIV Resistance

First, let’s look at (1). Indeed, the Bubonic Plague does seem to have some sort of indication of increased HIV resistance, through some adaptation. This means we do indeed have some sort of benefit that came about from the Bubonic Plague! Problem solved, right? Well, no. It doesn’t seem clear at all that this increased resistance saved more lives than the millions lost in the Bubonic Plague

And even if it was clear that there was a benefit from HIV resistance that outweighed the lives lost in the Bubonic Plague, it doesn’t seem at all clear that God couldn’t have just prevented HIV outright, or given people the favorable adaptation from the beginning without it needing to be introduced by the Bubonic Plague, or having at least made the Plague-given adaptation stronger, etc. etc. etc.

Turning Point in Economic Development

Second, (2). Cl cites two historians who argue that the Bubonic Plague represented a turning point in European economic development. While I wasn’t able to get a hold of their works, their claims seem plausible enough. Cl argues “[i]sn’t a deficit of laborers logically required in order to spur demand?” and it does seem pretty clear that since the Plague killed people and not possessions, income per capita would raise dramatically.

Cl acts why I act stumped, as if I’m putting on a show to fool you. But there’s a lot of uncertainty here too: was the increase in the European economy really worth the damage of the Bubonic Plague? After all, while the economy was better, with the death of lots of skilled laborers, it’s not clear the economy was more productive. Higher demand for labor doesn’t mean more production when there simply are a lot less laborers.

And what would have happened to the European economy without the Plague? It’s hard to tell, but other economies unaffected by the Plague seemed to progress just fine, so it’s again just not clear at all that the Plague had a beneficial effect. And even if it did have a beneficial effect, could an omnipotent God achieve this effect without the Plague? Almost surely: drastically reduce the birth rate, pop people out of existence, provide greater machinery for greater economic production, etc. It’s odd that God would want to increase the economy with the Plague, but only just a little bit, if even at all.

Punishing for Filth

Now for (3). I’m going to comment on the actual medical warnings in the Bible, but instead analyze the Plague as a method of punishment. For the stated goals of increasing commitment to cleanliness, it seems effective. But it also seems hopelessly unfair and cruel — why target only a specific region of the world for this test? And why make it affect babies who are too young to be able to understand and implement cleanliness laws? Why make the plague so dehabilitating?

Again, we can look for other ways God could have achieved the same stated goal of increasing commitment to Biblical cleansing ritual… ignoring the fact that we don’t follow these rituals nowadays and God doesn’t seem at all upset, kind of like how he doesn’t seem at all upset at our space stations despite getting angry at the Tower of Babel. Could God not have provided everyone education in sanitary practices directly, without expecting a bunch of barely literate people to trust priests to properly interpret and implement the Biblical processes?

Keep Your Examples Abstract

So there you see the classic two mistakes with this theodicy: giving a possible good and not checking to see if that good outweighs all the harm and not checking to see if there’s any other logically possible way to get this good without as much bad. For each of the three explanations Cl gave, these two mistakes are present.

So after hearing two mistakes, you might be wondering, what is the third mistake I alluded to? Turns out that’s mine: in arguing the Problem of Evil, never give an concrete example that occured in History. It’s too easy to respond to events like “Holocaust” or “Katrina” or “Spanish Influenza” or “Bubonic Plague” with an account of how history was changed for better with these events, even if the two mistakes are present.

Instead, atheist interlocutors will experience much more success if they just stick to the two examples for which theodicies are far easier to refute: nonhuman animal suffering and birth defects. While you could go with either one, they play strength to each others weaknesses — people try to deny that nonhuman animals matter or feel pain, which despite contradicting a lot of scientific literature, is an annoying conversation to have, and something no one will try with babies. Likewise, people argue that babies are compensated in Heaven, but is something no one (at least that I’ve seen) will try with nonhuman animals.

Thus you’ll notice that in my new articulations of the Problem of Evil, I now only mention nonhuman animal suffering and birth defects. While I haven’t conceded anything to cl, I’ve just decided that it’s easier to just stick with these two examples. And all Cl has attempted to justify them with is an appeal to a literal Fall, which has many historical (more), biological (more), and theological (more, more, and more) flaws. But more on that in my next essay.

What God Should Have Done and Why

Now while Cl is guilty of both mistakes — giving a possible good and not checking to see if that good outweighs all the harm and not checking to see if there’s any other logically possible way to get this good without as much bad — he doesn’t think much about them. Instead, he anticipates these appeals to God just zapping things away as a “Why didn’t God do it the way I want” argument, and accuses it of being ad hoc and “ignor[ing] the fact God already gave us a world without disease and we ruined it”.

However, if we see better solutions that would have accomplished God’s stated goal better than the solution actually alleged, we can then make an inference that (A) God is not good or (B) that we don’t know enough to understand whether God is good. As I argue in “TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part II: Evil”, no matter (A) or (B), the belief in a good God is unjustified. Our only recourses are to go back and argue a theodicy that does not make the two mistakes, abandon belief in a good God, or puncture a hole in my reasoning somewhere.

So this isn’t just an example of “if I were God”. I don’t have nearly the omnipotence, omniscience, or good looks. Instead, it’s a simple response to a claim that we know what God would do in a situation — well clearly he caused the Bubonic Plague because [fill in the blank]. That blank has to be something that would actually explain the suffering from the Bubonic Plague in some way, or we simply have to give up playing defense for God because we’re not smart enough. Perhaps we should let the omniscient guy explain himself?

I contend that takes care of the first part, and the Bubonic Plague example stands against Cl’s first objection, but should be abandoned anyway out of rhetorical convenience. As for Cl’s second part, that God gave us a world without disease and its our fault that disease exists now, I will address it in the next essay I write. Then I’ll come back here and finally face head on Cl’s argument that the Bible has remarkable guidelines for cleanliness that are so far ahead of its time that we’re forced to conclude that the Bible was divinely inspired.

Author’s Note: This essay was first revised on March 27 in response to comments given in the comments section. The essay was then again revised on May 13, in response to Cl’s essay “Why I Said Skeptical Theism is For the Birds”. Because of the added length, I cut this essay into two halves.

Recently, I’ve taken a strong liking to 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. Thus I’ve decided to write a blog series of my own detailing his arguments in text, analyzing them, and pointing out where they can be made even stronger. The end result is a comprehensive and cumulative case for atheism.

Currently, I’m still analyzing the second video in his series, which is about the types of gods he can definitively reject because they are logically impossible. He does this by incompatibility arguments, which demonstrate that certain god concepts have logically contradictory properties — just like we can’t have a “square circle”, we can’t have an omnibenevolent god that allows the existence of Hell, an omnipotent god that is incapable of sin, a god that involves libertarian free will, an omniscient god who gets surprised or upset.

Another incompatibility argument that TheraminTrees advances is mentioned rather briefly in the video, but deserves a large amount of analysis: The Problem of Evil.

Those familiar with this site have seen me pound my head against this issue in a lengthy three part essay “The Great Problem of Evil”. Then, cl of The Warfare of Mental wrote a rebuttal, which I summarized in “Revisiting the Problem of Evil, Part I”, which was discontinued in favor of a debate that started strong and then fell apart for a variety of reasons unrelated to the Problem of Evil itself. In between all of that, I wrote a two-part conclusion series “Is God Good, Part I”.

Now, if I already wrote three metric crap tons of stuff on the Problem of Evil, why belabor the point further? The answer is simple: I messed up earlier, and I want to correct my mistakes. I need to set the record straight, because I misunderstood a lot of the key concepts earlier, and I now regularly see atheists misunderstand a lot of what is going on. So I’m going to start from the very beginning and defend my newer thesis: The Problem of Evil does undermine theism, but (probably) not for the reasons you think.

What is the Problem of Evil?

First, it probably helps to understand what the Problem of Evil is. Most broadly, the Problem of Evil is any incompatibility argument that demonstrates that God is incompatible with the existence of evil, usually taken to be a conflict between a property of omnibenevolence, all-lovingness, and/or moral perfection and something incompatible with that, like suffering.

However, this expands the Problem of Evil to include many potential incompatibilities, like the previously mentioned conflict between Hell and Omnibenevolence, and the not-yet-mentioned-here-but-well-dealt-with-elsewhere conflict between biblical malevolence and Omnibenevolence, Satan and Omnibenevolence, and perhaps even Divine Hiddenness and Omnibenevolence and Prayer and Omnibenevolence!

Typically, all of that is seen as overly broad. Thus, the Problem of Evil is often made specifically about an incompatibility between the suffering caused by nature and our fellow humans in today’s world, thus not counting Hell, Biblical events, Satan, an overly hidden God, and prayer.

The Typical Problem of Evil

The typical Problem of Evil usually works like this:

P1: “God” refers to an entity that is omniscient (knows everything that is logically possible to know), omnipotent (capable of doing anything that is logically possible), and omnibenevolent (will always act to prevent the existence of suffering).

P2: Suffering exists (consider the suffering of nonhuman animals and babies with birth defects).

C3: Therefore, God cannot exist.

However, since then multiple problems have been raised against this argument. First, the existence of theodicies have indicated that while we may suffer, our suffering is justified because we achieve a higher good, or because God couldn’t remove that suffering without causing greater or equal amounts of suffering to occur. Thus P2 is unjustified.

Many people have pointed out what these higher goods / unavoidable evils might be, and these are called theodicies.

Secondly, others have argued that we simply aren’t knowledgable enough to look at the world and infer why God acts the way he does — for all we know, God could be acting for a higher good that we just aren’t capable of understanding. This is called Skeptical Theism.

Lastly, Other people criticize P1 by saying that God is not actually omnibenevolent, and/or suggesting that omnibenevolence does not actually consist of “always acting to prevent the existence of suffering”.

The Reformulated Problem of Evil

In response to these arguments, we can modify our Problem of Evil. This argument is inspired by William Rowe’s 1979 paper “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”. I’ve given each premise a cool name so that they’ll be easier to talk about, as I’ll be mentioning each premise quite frequently:

• Theological Premise: “God” refers to an entity that is omniscient (knows everything that is logically possible to know), omnipotent (capable of doing anything that is logically possible), and omnibenevolent (definition provided in the next premise).
• Omnibenevolence Premise: An “omnibenevolent” entity will always act to prevent the occurrence of any instance of suffering, unless (1) it is not within the entity’s power to do so, (2) such an action would cause the loss of a higher good, or (3) such an action would cause the realization of a greater or equal suffering.
• Seemingly Evil Premise: It seems as if at least one instance of suffering exists such that (1) it is within God’s power to remove, (2) such action would not cause the loss of a higher good, and (3) such an action would not cause the realization of a greater or equal suffering. (Consider the suffering of nonhuman animals and babies with birth defects.)
• Actual Evil Premise: It is indeed the case that at least one instance of suffering exists such that (1) it is within God’s power to remove, (2) such action would not cause the loss of a higher good, and (3) such an action would not cause the realization of a greater or equal suffering.
• Bridging Premise: If Seemingly Evil Premise is true, Actual Evil Premise is true.
• Conclusion: Therefore, from Theological Premise, Omnibenevolence Premise, Bridging Premise, and Actual Evil Premise, God does not exist.

This argument contains three key changes:

First, the Seemingly Evil Premise takes into account all theodices, and suggests that even if we take into account the existence of suggested higher goods (theodices), we still can find instances of suffering which look unjustified.

Second, we take into account Skeptical Theism by noting that there is a difference between suffering that just look like they’re unjustified and suffering that is actually unjustified when we take into account all the information that God knows that we do not. The Bridging Premise then argues that despite the Skeptical Theist argument, we are still in a position to know that some suffering truly exists. I really like making this bridge explicit and obviously stated, because most Problem of Evil arguments I’ve seen really try to hide this step. I feel it is important to be upfront about your argument’s potential weaknesses.

Third, to take into account people’s different ideas of definitions, the definition of benevolence has been separated into a second premise that needs independent defense.

Now, let’s look at some counterarguments in far more depth…

The Theological and Omnibenevolence Premises vs. Definitions

Not all concepts of god actually are considered to be omnibenevolent — certainly, gods like Loki and Hades never were, and the Wiccan gods also aren’t! Thus it’s very easy to deny Theological Premise with a different theology. While such theologies are in the minority, they still do exist today, and must be considered. However, all this means is that this incompatibility argument doesn’t rule out all gods, it merely rules out gods that have the incompatible properties.

Secondly, one might deny the Omnibenevolence Premise by suggesting that being omnibenevolent does not consist in stopping suffering, but rather in doing something else. Perhaps these people suggest that whatever God does is omnipotent because he is the very standard of morality himself! While I find this approach to morality unsatisfying in my long series starting with “The Meaning of Morality”, it seems enough to just grant them the failure of the Omnibenevolence Premise but deny they’ve done anything significant. Instead, they’ve merely gotten confused over definitions.

What I mean by this is just because you call something “omnibenevolent” doesn’t mean anything if the word refers to something else. While it would confuse people endlessly, there’s no rule of logic that says I can’t define “omnibenevolent” as synonymous with potato, or “that which always acts to bring about suffering in cruel ways”. All I’ve done is construct gods that simply lack the incompatible property.

Thus, I concede that for some god concepts, the Theological and/or Omnibenevolence Premises fail. Thus the Problem of Evil does not disprove the existence of all gods, or prove atheism. The Problem of Evil just cuts some potential god concepts away, and we’ll have to get the remainders in a later essay. However, we can continue for the majority of god concepts for which these premises are true. Carrying on…

The Seemingly Evil Premise vs. Theodicies

An even stronger shot is to deny Seemingly Evil Premise by suggesting that there does not seem to be any evil that (1) it is within God’s power to remove, (2) such action would not cause the loss of a higher good, and (3) such an action would not cause the realization of a greater or equal suffering. In response, some people argue that there are specific higher goods that can be identified which justify all suffering we observe.

Thus in order to demonstrate the Seemingly Evil Premise, we need to identify one instance of suffering for which no theodicy can succeed. Given that the amount of theodices are so numerous, I do not want to discuss them all here. Instead, I offer the following:

First, the two examples I picked (nonhuman animal suffering and the suffering of babies by birth defects) were handpicked specifically because they dodge nearly all popular theodices. Both examples involve no actions that arose by free will, contain no sin to be punished, are not necessitated by any fundamental physical laws, involve no opportunities for life lessons or character building, involve no opportunity to be drawn closer to God, involve suffering to complicated to meaningfully eliminate, and do not involve anyone going to heaven.

Second, I point out problems with each theodicy I mentioned in my opening statement of the Cl – Peter debate.

Third, I offer the comment section of this essay to ask me to deal with any theodicy you can think of that is relevant to my two examples and that you don’t think I have properly addressed elsewhere.

While that settles theodices for now, it’s also really important to note that some suffering can be justified even if it is entirely avoidable by humans, for God might have had to allow for the possibility of suffering, such as allowing us to freely choose choices that harm us, or allow the existence of criminals to give us something meaningful to try and stop. While I don’t think these theodices succeed at the end of the day, it indicates that it is not true that if God exists, removing any instance of suffering must make the everyone net worse off. Thus, I hereby recant all the essays I wrote in which I argued this position.

The Bridging Premise vs. Skeptical Theism

Now for the strongest attack against this argument, suggesting that Bridging Premise is false, and just because it looks like some suffering is needless to us doesn’t mean it actually is, because we’re not omniscient ourselves and thus don’t have the same grasps of higher goods as God does. This argument is made most famously in Steven Wykstra’s 1984 article “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering”.

Basically, it goes like this: Consider looking in a garage, and looking around. After about five minutes of looking, you realize that (1) you don’t see any bears and (2) you don’t see any microbes. Thus you conclude that there is (1) no bears in the garage and (2) no microbes in the garage. Clearly (1) is valid while (2) is not, and the inference to unjustified suffering is far more like (2) than like (1).

The reasoning here lies in the difference between (1) and (2), because we have no reason to think that microbes are the kind of things that we can see, whereas bears are definitely the kind of thing we can see. Thus even though we can observe instances of suffering that seem extensively horrendous and are not justified by any theodicy that we can think of, does not mean that such suffering is truly unjustified, because we have no reason to think that the justification is the kind of thing we can see. God is just that much beyond us.

This makes sense, and it seems that Skeptical Theism is very damaging to the Bridging Premise — we simply do not have the knowledge to know whether these things are truly unjustified, or even say that the justification is unlikely. Thus we are arguing “I don’t see any reason God would allow this suffering”, and expecting that to matter, when really we aren’t in any position to draw a conclusion from our personal lack of insight, just like the person who doesn’t see germs.

Thus the Problem of Evil, as traditionally conceived, fails. However, if we take Skeptical Theism a bit further, perhaps we can break it… In the next essay, we’ll aim to do just that.

Continued in: TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part III: Skeptical Theism