(June 7, 2016 at 9:03 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: I've never understood the objection that God's omnipotence is limited by the logically possible.  Does it come from the bible?  If so, where?  God supposedly can perform miracles.  That puts him above natural laws.  Why is he constrained from violating logical laws?  It just seems like something made up to avoid a theological conundrum.

I don't get it either. It's just an assumption for ease of "study".

We make such assumptions in science all the time, but then we test our models to see if we have over-simplified. In this case, there's no testing going on so there's no way to tell whether the assumption is reasonable or not. It's all just part of exploring an imaginary abstract world, with no guarantee it has any relationship with reality.

(June 7, 2016 at 4:33 pm)SteveII Wrote: You are positing a unviverse that has no ability to cause human suffering.

A universe that doesn't cause suffering isn't the same as one that can't.  I can cut off my finger, but I don't.  God can flood the world again, but he doesn't.  

If an all-powerful god was totally against suffering, then there would be no suffering.

Quote:It is not apparent that having a universe with a set of natural laws can avoid natural events that can cause suffering.

So your god can't do magic?  It's not that he lacks the will to prevent suffering, but rather that he lacks the ability?

Quote: Something as simple as gravity kills an awful lot of people. Wind and water kills people. Where do you draw the line between what "ought not be" and what is permissible for God to allow to happen? 

"Ought" and "permissible" don't come into it.  An omnibenevolent god would choose not to have any suffering.  An omnipotent god could effect that without compromising any other of his other goals.  

Quote:Also, there is a bluring of the line between free will and suffering at the hands of nature. People decide where to be and live, people decide how to construct homes and vehicles, and people decide what to do in every particular situation facing them. It is not like there is no safe place. There are many places on the planet that provide protection from serious natural disasters. 

I don't believe anywhere is safe from disaster.  Anchorage doesn't have much problem with locusts, but it does have the earthquakes.  

In any case, if we had a magic-throwing god protecting us, we could safely live anywhere.  

Quote:I do not think that omnibenevolence requires intervention to save human life. That would put safety at the top as the greatest good. I think there are at least two things higher than that: 1) There is the greater good of free will and 2) there is the greatest good of each person's knowledge of God. It is not obvious that a universe that achieves these could also be a universe where there is no suffering from natural causes.

There are two ways to style that argument. 

If we say that evil is suffering (and only suffering) and that god is more interested in free will and knowledge than in fighting evil, then god is not omnibenevolent. 

You can just say that if you want, "My god is not omnibenevolent.  The PoE is correct that tri-omni gods can't coexist with evil, but that doesn't rule out my god because my god isn't omnibenevolent." 

Or we can say that evil isn't just about suffering.  Suffering is evil, but so is not having free will, and so is not knowing god.  The thing is, a tri-omni god would have all three.  He would be smart and powerful enough to have all three if he wanted to, and he would want to.

(June 7, 2016 at 10:33 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:

(June 7, 2016 at 10:20 pm)SteveII Wrote: If the study of God is not governed by logic and reason, then nothing can be known about Him. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that knowledge of God does not conform to logic and reason. Every revelation has been in language we can understand including actually stating the purpose of the revelation is our understanding and knowledge of God.

You're conflating obeying the laws of logic with being constrained by them.  Even so, there's no reason to think our knowledge of God is reliable.  Is that a presupposition?

If can be reasoned that logic is not created, it is an intrinsic property of God. It is how the mind of God is ordered. I would therefore be impossible for God to do the illogical. It is the same principle that God does not make up morality, it is part of his nature and cannot be separated (that's why the Euthyphro dilemma does not apply in the moral argument for God).

(June 7, 2016 at 9:59 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: It is foundational?  What's that even mean?  That it cannot be mistaken?  Like I said, it sounds like it's just made up.

That's why I don't care about whether God could do logically impossible things. Theists made him up, they can make his superpowers be whatever they want.

Basically, yeah. Until it's demonstrated to be something real, who can say what's right or wrong?

(June 7, 2016 at 1:03 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: IMHO, all a Christian believer can really say is that skeptics have not adequately shown that a better world than ours was possible. Skeptics have only their incredulity. 

I daresay we have more than mere incredulity. The logical incompatibility of the claims "a tri-omni God exists" and "gratuitous suffering exist" is not terribly controversial. (Many theist philosophers such as Wykstra themselves agree with this).

To illustrate, consider a two-year old who falls in a ditch and breaks his arm. He lies there in pain, screaming "Mama! Mama!" His mother does nothing to help him. It's possible that she doesn't know he's hurt; or that she knows, but doesn't have the power to help him; or that she knows, and has the power to help him, but looks on with indifference and leaves him to cry until he dies a slow, painful death.

In the last case, by the doctrine of morality that has been historically orthodox for Christians (and pretty much any moral realist), we would say that the mother is not perfectly good. She allows suffering that she could have prevented. In other words, evil. There is no question that many of God's children endure exactly this kind of suffering. 

To salvage the doctrine of a tri-omni God, theists by and large take the skeptical position and argue that we don't know that God isn't morally justified in permitting such instances of suffering.

It isn't mere "incredulity" to reject this answer. The burden of proof is not on me to show that paradigmatic instances of evil are not in fact evil. It's the theist who is obligated to defend his astonishing incredulity at a moral judgement that, for any other person, would be a damning indictment of that person's moral character.

@wiploc

When I use the term omnibenevolent, I mean it is a property describing the essence of God as perfect goodness or moral perfection. You are defining it more along the lines of infinite benevolence. Rather than a descriptive property, you are taking a step further and are claiming it creates an obligation to avoid all suffering. But by using this definition, you cannot stop at just natural suffering--you would have to apply it to all suffering (even man-made), otherwise preventing this suffering vs that suffering is arbitrary and therefore is not a real property. 

In response to both the free will and the knowledge of God defense, you say that if God thinks these things are more valuable than preventing suffering he is not omnibenevolent. I can see you point with your definition. I don't think argument is strong with the definition I have. Moral perfection in a universe of physical laws and free will does not entail preventing suffering if 1) there are greater goods to acheive or 2) someone makes a choice that results in suffering.

If God is really a personal God, and by that I mean one which people should care about, then there should be some symmetry between the knowledge of God gained and the evil one must endure. However, this is not the case: a young infant can suffer greatly, with no real understanding of anything, and then cease to exist. Its contract with a personal God has been broken.

God, therefore, is at best a force of nature-- something hidden in the variables and functions BEHIND life. But we already have something like this-- the universe. Defining an impersonal struggle among humans to either suffer or not to suffer makes very little sense of the implied contract: "Suffer that you may learn," is not universal when some of the evils involve things or beings which do not have the capacity to learn about God. The only case in which it is logically true that suffering = gaining knowledge of God is that God is a God of suffering.. But if that's the case, God must be avoided at all costs, because, you know, suffering sucks.

(June 8, 2016 at 12:18 am)wiploc Wrote:

(June 7, 2016 at 2:47 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: 1. A tri-Omni entity who can't do better than this world is a contradiction in terms.
2. Lots of excuses, none of them plausible.

Traditionally, the excuses mostly consist of temporarily forgetting that god is supposed to be omnipotent, or that that he is supposed to be omniscient, or that he's supposed to be omnibenevolent.  I say temporarily because the people who give up god's benevolence for the sake of argument will then turn around and worship him for his goodness. 

So I like to say that the art of defending against the problem of evil consists largely of not realizing what you have given up.  To be consistent, you have to give up omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence; but, to continue worshiping a tri-omni god, you have to not realize that you gave it up.  

But these people, people who actually give up omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence (as opposed to just making a feint in that direction and then reverting to their prior beliefs) don't have any reason to argue against the PoE.  They already know that a tri-omni god can't coexist with evil, which is why their gods aren't tri-omni.

While stated often, I don't think that the case has been made, where logically; to be omnibenevolent, other good attributes must be forsaken.  The argument is normally presented as a simple and naïve false dichotomy.  One where comfort and happiness are presented as supreme, and the one making the argument seems to forget about everything else. 

I agree with Steve, that it is more of an emotional problem, than a logical one. 

Let me ask you, if I told you that there was a fix for the things you attribute to the problem of evil; would you do everything within your power, to save as many as you could from suffering?

(June 8, 2016 at 6:48 am)SteveII Wrote:

(June 7, 2016 at 10:33 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: You're conflating obeying the laws of logic with being constrained by them.  Even so, there's no reason to think our knowledge of God is reliable.  Is that a presupposition?

If can be reasoned that logic is not created, it is an intrinsic property of God. It is how the mind of God is ordered. I would therefore be impossible for God to do the illogical. It is the same principle that God does not make up morality, it is part of his nature and cannot be separated (that's why the Euthyphro dilemma does not apply in the moral argument for God).

The Euthyphro dilemma absolutely still applies. I've seen theists try this word game before. Saying that "good" is intrinsic to the nature of God versus existing as a separate and independent property, is just a language gymnastic that in no way excuses him of the contradiction.

Attaching "good" to the definition of God's essence is convenient for the theist because it absolves him, and absolves God of the responsibility of defining what "good" actually means. We are still left with the question of how such a moral determination of his character was reached in the first place. How do we know that god's nature is "good"? By what standards are we comparing god's essence in order to make such a judgement about his inherent morality? Or, is God just circularly declaring that he is good because because he's God, and he is God because he is good?

So, as you can see, "God is inherently good" is just another vague, poorly defined, and essentially meaningless assertion in the end. It doesn't get you out of Euthyphro's dilemma in the sense that you think; it only takes you safely away from it. Without venturing to define what "good" actually means, you aren't even coming near the discussion.