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David Hume
Which statements do you accept?
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Berkeley
Which of the following most closely describes you?
Descartes
The philosophy or religion that most closely matches the message of "The Matrix" is
Plato
In most respects Philo's overlooks less obvious consequences of 'the symptom of the universe.' I will break down Philo's four reasons for why God does not exist or at least is not benevolent and discuss each point.
ReplyDelete1)Physical Pain: Philo argues that physical pain is un-necessary and can easily be replaced with a lessening of pleasure. We determine pleasure and pain as states in comparison to a normal state or status quo. When Philo says we will simply lessen pleasure I am skeptical as to how this will not result in pain. Since we base pain on a change from the norm a state of constant pleasure as result of not being burned will feel normal, and any lessening of this normal pleasure will be perceived as pain. I don't deny one can go from pleasure to a normal level of content without experiencing pain, rather I argue that if one is in a constant state of 'pleasure' (as measured against the reality of the status quo) any loss of this pleasure will be perceived as pain. Anytime pleasure is not derived from the normal state a drop in pleasure back to the status quo will not result in pain. I also find issue with Philo's reasoning on a practical level. Pain is through Philo's concession to tell people (and animals and what have you) that certain actions should not be committed (just as pleasure tells which should). Burning your arm with fire is a very immediate threat to your health and survivability. If one only experienced a loss in pleasure at such burning said individual may be prone to moseying out of the fire as they recognize a loss in pleasure but not the VIVID and EXCRUCIATING pain of having their flesh conflagrated. Pain provides a powerful survival incentive.
2) Philo claims a benevolent god would not run the world based on defined laws, favoring to change the rules in order to protect the most people. I have three responses. First, a benevolent god would try his best not to deceive us. The implication of this is that if god changes the rules of nature constantly to save the lives of people or help them in any way it becomes impossible to make predictions of nature and therefore difficult or impossible to act consequentially since the ends of any situation remain ambiguous. The second objection is a derivative of the first. As we loose predictability it becomes difficult and possibly impossible for individuals to act in a self-beneficial fashion; the result is not beyond people rationalizing jumping from a building since God saved that other guy. Of course if God always saves everyone this issue is avoided and our lives are run on auto pilot. We will never get hungry, never get cold, never need to do anything because god will provide for our survival. This may sound absurd but such an argument is irreverent since such a condition links into my third objection even stronger than a situation where god saves the occasional person from certain demise. If god is to go around saving people from death two implications result. The first is overpopulation in which since no one/less people die more and more children and created without a reasonable population check. Even if this isn't true we can reasonably assume that the gene pool is polluted by less intelligent individuals since god decided to save the guy who dove head first from a third story window, and the woman who lit herself on fire since it only resulted in a loss of pleasure. The second is dependent on some theory of pleasurable existence post-material life. Assuming individuals go to heaven following death to play golf or what have you it seems that god would not want to prevent death by manipulating physics since the more death that occurs the more people that can enjoy eternal pleasure (though it might be harder to get a tee time [I smell anterior motive]).
CONTINUED BELOW!!!
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE!!!
ReplyDelete3&4) The argument I made previously concerning death and God's preferences towards it should be cross applied to both Philo's third and fourth points. On top of this practical reasons exist to explain the imperfection of species and frailty of the universe. First, imperfection of humans and other creatures is not possible lest every creature reside on the throne of God, which I dare contend would be a rather crowded situation. Jokes aside, it is more difficult to provide reasoning explain why prejudice and hate exists within society. Yet this is not sufficient to claim there is no benefit to such phenomenon (I look forward to hearing further discussion on this point). Finally, from a practical standpoint, universal frailty is necessary for change to occur. Dinosaurs would still rule the world if not for the frailty of the universe. What appears to humans as negative can easily be beneficial in a scope beyond our comprehension. The engulfment of earth's land by water may seem the greatest disaster in modern history to humans but to whales it may be the best thing since plankton. This is just a matter of perception in which we very easily can misunderstand God's reasoning.
TL;DR: God likely has reasons for his actions, some beyond the scope of our comprehension. Therefore, based on the four arguments Philo gives we can not draw the conclusion that God is not benevolent.
The argument that Philo uses to prove that God does not exist or is not benevolent was in my opinion very sound. He stated that if God exists and is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent then there would be no evil in the world. He gets to this conclusion because God is all knowing, there fore knows where evil is derived from. With this knowledge He should be able to prevent this evil. Then if He was omnibenevolent He would prevent the evil. Seeing as though there is evil such as famine and wars in the world God is either not omnibenevolent or does not exist. The only question I have with this argument is that is the world was perfect and no evil existed then the idea of a "good" God would be unable to comprehend. Without the bad in the world there would be no good.
ReplyDeleteI disagree that there would be no good without bad. As Philo explains there can be states of good/pleasure of higher value than others. One can transition from a normal state to a state of heightened pleasure without feeling pain. If you look at my argument (which I feel like you haven't) you will notice I explain that a world without pain does not leave us unable to comprehend the difference between good and pain, but rather causes the bright line between pain and pleasure to be redefined and even possibly muddied. Additionally, as I also explained previously, I contend that what humans view as evil is not necessarily in correlation with God's view of evil. Thus I continue to affirm that Philo's argument against God is NOT sound.
ReplyDeleteP.S. At the risk of sounding as though I am making ad hominem attack, therefore is one word.
I agree with what Mesterhazy has to say on the topic (though he and Omar are making us all look bad with their huge posts). It is easy to criticize the current state of affairs and claim this as proof of God's malevolence or non-existence. As Mesterhazy pointed out, we have to look to the alternatives: without pain, the laws of nature, or any of the other solutions proposed by Philo, the world would be thrown into disarray. Rather, I think we can see that our current existence is, to paraphrase Churchill, "the worst existence except for all the others". Simply put, there isn't any logical alternative to the world we live in (I wont go into details as Mesterhazy covered all of the specifics).
ReplyDeleteI'd also like to bring up a new point. First of all, Philo is operating under the assumption that God hasn't intervened on behalf of humans and therefore is evil. What about miracles? What about any of the other numerous phenomena attributed to God each year. Couldn't this be proof of his intervention on our behalf? The point I'm trying to make is that Philo is assuming that God hasn't intervened on behalf of humans, but he hasn't really proven that. For all we know, the world would be even worse without the imperceptible intervention of God,and that this is the best possible world without incurring the side-effects Mesterhazy talked about. So, there should be at least some hesitance in saying God hasn't helped us because we really don't know.
I just want to apologize to Brooke; my reply may have been rude. Brooke, I apologize (even though you admitted you didn't read what I said :p).
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I would argue that the conclusion Philo should have drawn is that either: 1) God does NOT exist, 2) God is NOT omnibenevolent, 3) God is NOT omnipotent, 4) God is NOT omniscient, or any combination of 2,3, and 4.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I would argue that good cannot exist without evil. To give an analogy, we define light and dark to be opposites, so I will examine light and dark instead. So lets say I create (with my Godly powers) an alternate universe. This universe is completely identical to our own, with only 1 exception, there is absolutely NO light, it flat out does not exist. Now, dark is defined as "with little or no light," so my universe is completely dark. But, however, in this universe, light does not exist at all, it might as well be replaced with _ _ _ _ _ since it has no meaning in my universe. But if that's what light is in my universe, look what happens to dark, dark - "with little or no _ _ _ _ _". You will agree that this isn't logical, but that is because when you take away light, dark ceases to have any meaning. So if we take that light cannot exist without dark, why would good and evil be any different. There can be "higher values" of light or dark, but that doesn't change what I have argued. It is for this reason that I would argue, if God DOES exist, the reason for evil is that it is necessary.
I agree with Philosoraptor, that Philo should have concluded the lack of omnipotence, omnibenevolence,or omniscience, or just that God does not exist at all. If he were to try to prove that God can exist with the absence of omnibenvolence, he could argue what Philosoraptor brought up, that good cannot exist without evil. I believe this to be true because in order for good to exist without evil in the world, everyone and everything would have to be perfect at all times. If this were not true, there would be people and things that appear and behave worse than the most "perfect good," thus leaving them to be defined as evil in comparison. So, if everyone and everything was perfect, everyone and everything could be said to have these perfect qualities of God (absolute power, knowledge, and kindness), consequently denying the idea of an overall deity.
ReplyDeleteThe problem of evil is a direct affront to a benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent god. If believers cannot find a way to avoid the problem of evil they will be required to believe that an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient god does not exist. Believers commonly justify evil by arguing that evil exists because of free will, which is a higher good and is worth existing at the expense of pain and suffering.
ReplyDeleteThere are multiple problems with using free will as a justification for the existence of evil. The first problem is the existence of evil that is not a direct response to human action. Natural disasters often kill huge numbers of people while operating completely independently of man. Why are these evils allowed to exist?
The next issue with the free will defense (FWD) is the idea that god could have created humans who always freely chose good over evil. This is not a violation of free will. God creates men who are moral who make good decisions and men who are immoral and make bad decisions. What is to say he couldn’t create only one type of person; the type of person who would infallibly choose the decision that avoids evil and creates good. In a slightly different vein, it is possible to argue that god could have set up a universe in which evil could not possibly exists.
Russell has also argued that everything is ultimately god’s fault and cannot, in any way, be blamed on human sin. Before god created the universe he understood perfectly all the evil that he would create. “If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man."
The free will defense can also be countered by showing that we do not have free will. If we do not have free will, yet evil exists, then a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent god cannot exist. There are a variety of ways of demonstrating that we do not have free will. I just read one that accepts the premises of the bible and uses them to show that we do not have any choice. This argument is centered on the issue of original sin. It is repeated throughout the bible that we do not have a choice in the matter of original sin. We are all born with it and do not have the ability to remove it completely. Therefore we do not have the ability to choose freely. (Sorry for the long quote but I think it is appropriate)
"A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code. Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free."