Yes, Wotjek, I am familiar with all the moves that the theologians have made, over the centuries, to solve the problem of evil. They either deny the existence of evil (who are you going to believe? The theologians or your own lying eyes?). I am familiar with the famous "free will defenses" A few difficulties include the fact that such defenses presuppose the existence of libertarian free will, a notion that IMO was demolished, long ago, as being incoherent by David Hume. If we, like Hume, rule out the possibility of libertarian free will, then we are left with either compatibilism or hard determinism. On either of those views, there should be no reason why an omnipotent, omniscient creator should not have been able to create us so that we would be free but not incline to committing evil acts. And in any case, free will defenses fail to take into account the existence of natural evils, which occur with little or no human agency, such as the death and destruction causes by natural disasters or plagues. None of these attempted rebuttals, to my mind works, unless you're already predisposed to accept the theologians' conclusions.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Tim Wise loses it Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2013 08:27:55 -0400
Jim: " I would maintain that the widely accepted notion of God as being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, is incoherent in face of the existence of evil in the world that was putatively created by God."
[WS:] AFAIK, christian theology resolved that problem in various ways - either by claiming human free will or by limited human understanding. An interesting twist is denying the existence of evil as an "ontological entity" and defining it is as "absence of good" i.e. a failure of achieving a full ontological potential created by god (Thomas Aquinas).
The problem, at least as I see it, is of an epistemological rather than ontological nature. The popular conceptions of god use what I call a "telescopic distortion" - i.e. an illusion of perception that things that are separate appear to be clustered together (an optical illusion of this kind can be achieved by using telephoto lenses). A proper approach to such perceptions is to disambiguate them, i.e. analytically separate a common notion of god by looking at individual attributes separately (in a way similar to what Spinoza did). That is, instead of asking the questions whether there is an entity that has jointly several attributes (i.e. a1 and a2 and a3 .... and an), a proper way of asking is whether there is an entity that has the attribute a1; whether ther is and entity that has an attribute a2 and so on.
For example - is there is an entity that is infinite? - the answer is yes - the universe (which leads to to pantheistic beliefs) Is there an entity that is omniscient? - the answer is depending what you mean by omniscience. If this means having knowledge of things that humans do not - the answer is - it is theoretically possible (cf. the sci-novel "His Master's Voice" that examines this question), although we have no positive proof of such a creature at this time. Is there is an entity that humans are not able to observe? - the answer is, it is possible (cf. the sci-fi novel "Solaris") but what we cannot observe now we may be able to observe in the future. Is there is an entity that human are unable observe by definition, i.e. will never be able to observe - the answer is probably yes, cf. Kant's noumenal world.
I sum, if we ask about each individual attribute of an entity called god - the answers may vary depending on what that attribute is being considered, and there have been different philosophical answers to such questions. If, on the other hand, we take a telescopic view of all these attributes and perceive them as located in a single entity, we are dealing with an optical illusion - an issue that is epistemological rather than ontological. Or to use a much simpler example - we ma ask whether there is a creature that looks like a horse and a creature that has a horn on its nose. The answers to both questions are affirmative. But if we ask if there a creature that looks like a horse AND has a horn on its nose (i.e. a unicorn) the answer is - no (at least on this planet) because such a creature is a product of human imagination that "telescoped" together two attributes found in separate creatures.
I would like to add that social and political discourse is full of such "telescopic" conceptual clusters - "capitalism" and "socialism" are two examples that readily come to mind, other include intelligence or cultural identity.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money." ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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