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(June 6, 2010 at 6:17 pm)Caecilian Wrote: First of all, I haven't read Leibniz, so I'll have to defer to you on what he meant. It appears to be a circular argument (yet again):
a) God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent
b) Therefore, we must live in the best of all possible worlds
c) Therefore, the problem of evil is solved
d) Therefore, god is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent
Not very convincing, I'm afraid.
Leibniz, not really into the hardcore circular reasoning thing, did not use it to prove the god attributes or god's existence (so you can leave out d), but only to reason that with these god attributes the problem of evil is solved.
(June 6, 2010 at 6:17 pm)Caecilian Wrote: I'll try to re-phrase the argument:
1. We assume that we really do live in the best of all nomologically possible worlds.
2. However, it is very easy to imagine a better world ('heaven' might serve as some sort of model here).
3. Therefore, we do not live in the best of all logically possible worlds.
4. 'God' is only limited by what is logically possible (he is omnipotent).
5. Therefore, god could have instantiated a different world from the set of logically possible worlds. Some of the different worlds that he could've instantiated would be better than ours.
6. But he didn't. He instantiated our world, which is not the best logically possible world even if it is the best nomologically possible world.
7. Therefore, god is a cunt.
I agree with almost all of this one. The weak spot, I think, is premisse 2 since it cannot be shown that god at the initial conditions had any choice. However if you accept an additional premisse (i.e. god could have created every state of our universe as an initial state) it is easy to see that since humans have shown that it is possible to erase or diminish specific evil from the planet (cured diseases) a better world is possible. Which is rather evident when you think of it. If we can make a better world, why can't god?
Of course 7 is a non sequitur, but it does add to the joy of argument.
Yeah, statement 2 struck me as a possible weak point when I wrote the argument. But your additional premise seems to patch it up nicely.
Statement 7 is in there purely to be gratuitously offensive. Childish, I know, but religion really does genuinely piss me off sometimes.
Anyway, what we need now is for a philosophically literate theist to show up and try to to argue against it.
I'm not holding my breath.
He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
Mikhail Bakunin
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything
Friedrich Nietzsche
