Wednesday, February 14, 2007

In the Big Chair

The argument from evil assumes a divine vantage point. “If I were God, what would I do differently?”

However, this is a deceptively simple, equivocal, and contradictory question.

After all, I can only attempt to answer this question by taking myself as the point of reference. My values. My needs. My duties. My desires.

So what does the question really amount to?

If we unpack it, the question may take this form: “If I were omnipotent, what would I do differently?”

In this version of the question, everything about me remains the same except that I have godlike power.

Of course, this is every boy’s superman fantasy.

Put another way, “If I had a genie in a bottle, what would I ask for?”

Naturally I can think of all sorts of things I might like to have. Maybe my own private island in the Caribbean.

Maybe a wife who looks like Greta Garbo, sings like Joan Sutherland, writes like Christina Rossetti, has a mind like Elizabeth Anscombe’s, &c.

Needless to say, God hasn’t given me any of these things. So God doesn’t necessarily want the same things for me that I might want for myself if I were in a position to wave a magic wand.

Does this mean I’m a religious hypocrite because I might arrange things a little differently if I could do whatever God can do?

But notice that, in this hypothetical, that I’m hardly anything like God. I’m simply a man with one divine attribute.

Suppose we add the attribute of omniscience. Not only am I omnipotent, I am now omniscient as well.

But an omniscient being would not do everything that a merely omnipotent being would do. An omniscient being would know the long-range consequences of every option.

It’s like those time-travel scenarios in which a scientist goes back into the past, makes one apparently discrete improvement, and wipes out the future.

Suppose we add other attributes like wisdom and justice?

The problem with this cumulative procedure is that I lose my personal point of reference. I no longer know what I would do, because the less human I am, and the more godlike I am, I cease to be me. I don’t know what it would be like to be someone else—especially someone with a very different set of attributes. I only know what it’s like to be me, and, by analogy, others of a kind. My fellow human beings.

The question seems to be intelligible when you change one attribute, but leave everything else intact. Yet I can’t relate to my godlike alter-ego. I can’t identify with what such a being would do if I were him, for I no longer know what it would mean for *me* to be *like* him. I wouldn’t be me anymore. My godlike alter-ego would be unrecognizable. Personal alterity instead of personal identity. Not enough continuity to even extrapolate from what I am to what I would be.

So the question is contradictory. It assumes in the premise what it denies in the conclusion. It trades on a radical equivocation of terms by appealing to my humanity while, at the very same time, swapping out my humanity for divinity. It asks me to assume a divine perspective while appealing to my human perspective.

My deified self wouldn’t want a South Sea island, or the wife of my dreams, or anything else uniquely human or male or mammalian or creaturely. There rapidly comes a point beyond which we cannot make any projections from our own experience to an utterly alien experience.

You might as well ask, what would I do if I were a kumquat? How would I feel if I were a starfish?

7 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Steve, the problem of evil is stated by me in these words:

    If God is perfectly good, all knowing, and all powerful, then the issue of why there is so much suffering in the world requires an explanation. The reason is that a perfectly good God would be opposed to it, an all-powerful God would be capable of eliminating it, and an all-knowing God would know what to do about it. So, the extent of intense suffering in the world means for the theist that: either God is not powerful enough to eliminate it, or God does not care enough to eliminate it, or God is just not smart enough to know what to do about it. The stubborn fact of evil in the world means that something is wrong with God’s ability, or his goodness, or his knowledge.

    Again, the explanation needed if from within what you believe. In fact, even if there were no atheists around to argue for it, you would still have to deal with it.

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  3. If I were a kumquat, I would grow. If I were a starfish, I would feel like eating some clams.

    Oh, snap!

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  5. Berny said:

    "We have answered you why the existence of evil is perfectly consistent with the biblical idea of God. You have yet to deal with the respones here. You simply just repost your original argument."

    I agree. He's done that on other issues as well. Sometimes he'll make comments about how Christians don't see things the way he does or how Christians haven't had the experiences he's had, but either side of the discussion could make comments along those lines, and making such comments doesn't refute the objections being raised against his arguments.

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  6. Not that it'll sink in...

    Loftus said:
    ---
    So, the extent of intense suffering in the world means for the theist that: either God is not powerful enough to eliminate it, or God does not care enough to eliminate it, or God is just not smart enough to know what to do about it.
    ---

    Of course, even in your false creation of the problem these aren't the only options available. I can immediately think of another alternative:

    [E]ither God is not powerful enough to eliminate [suffering], or God does not care enough to eliminate it, or God is just not smart enough to know what to do about it, or God has a plan in place already that John Loftus doesn't know about that will one day demonstrate that all suffering was worth the wait because God is smarter than Loftus.

    Since you're listing it as a bunch of "either/or" options, I don't even have to defend that position in order for your "problem" to crumble into dust...as it has a thousand times already.

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  7. or God has a plan in place already that John Loftus doesn't know about that will one day demonstrate that all suffering was worth the wait because God is smarter than Loftus.


    Yes, that is an additional option.....and one is forced to ask the question:

    how plausible is that that there is some goal/plan in God's mind that necessitated that, to name one of the many evils of the world, infants be born with congenital defects causing them to slowly die after weeks of terrible agony?

    The answer. Quite obvious to anyone not blindly committed to the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevent being:

    not very.

    Just as the christian missionary would say if they encountered a remote tribe which believed in an omnibenevolent God who commands human sacrifice. Those theists would make the same argument as the christians here do:

    God has a plan beyond our understanding and when that plan becomes clear we will know that these sacrifices were necessary and just and no contradiction of God's goodness and benevolence.

    Who are we to judge God?

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