Free Will and The Problem of Evil?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

A common solution to the problem of evil is an appeal to free will: “God is wholly good, wholly omnipotent, and wholly omniscient, but he cannot interfere in human affairs because that would interfere with human choice.” However, in offering this as a solution, the assumption is made that in order for humans to have free will they must be capable of doing bad things. And not only should they be capable, but they must also actively cause evil; otherwise God could have it so that humans were free to choose their actions, but as perfect creations they always chose to do good. This, of course, would be a better (one entailing more good) outcome than the imperfect situation that is observed. Therefore God, defined as a wholly good being, would choose that option if it did not invalidate his “free will clause.” So, for free will to be a solution to the problem of evil, anything that has free will must entail evil.

But then one might whether God has free will? Yes? Then he causes evil and is not omnibenevolent. No? Then he is constrained by something and therefore not omnipotent. If free will is a solution to the problem of evil, then God is not God and in fact the notion of God is nonsensical. So, we have reductio ad absurdum, and unless the Christian theist would like to give up logic (this may be surprisingly common) , they had best find a better defense than this trite tactic.

2

I love this idea of absolute good, its frustrates me with it’s simplicity and entertains me at the same time.

God does not need to be absolute good.
Instead, God only is classifiable as blameless, or better put; no man could fault him for no man is greater.

This was how the Hebrew texts described God, which I assume you are talking about the western concept of God based on the Abrahamic God.

So God isn’t goody-good gumdrops and shitting rainbows.
God isn’t the end of the Candy Land game.

God is simply greater than man so much so that no man could do better than God, and by this, God is found “blameless”; “perfect”.
These words are used interchangeably in Hebrew texts as the same words; meaning “without fault”, “blameless”, and “perfect” are the same word.

3

Trying to understand God will mainly be based on assumptions. His intent, desire for us, why He does the one thing not the other etc. The difference in understanding God from man’s point of view might very well be comparing the computational abilities of a Cray super computer to a one cell bacteria…maybe ten times that much.

What we consider being ethical and moral may have nothing to do with God’s sensibilities. Our language and finite reasoning abilities are possibly rudimentary to God’s. Theological scholars could study, translate and interpret for a millnea with no hope of scratching the surface of God’s Mind. Yet we try anyway, judging why God won’t present Himself to our satisfaction. Bringing Him down to our reasoning level.

If there is any blame to be placed, it’s on man’s concepts of God using his short sightedness and constraints in trying to undestand God. This why I feel faith is the framework in our connection to God. We are easy to blame something other than ourselves, but slow to listen, love and be patient. The complexity of our body and how it works is in itself just one miracle I see. Not to mention the innumerable other wonders that surround us. How smug and complacent we as human beings have become with our so called intellect and reasoning.

4

The problem of evil is only really applicable to those theist who maintain a belief in an all powerful, all knowing and all good god. You’ll find that most theists on this board don’t adhere to this belief, as Stumps has demonstrated.

This leads me to two conclusions.

Firstly that the even though basic teachings of theism, i.e. that God is good, that God can do anything, etc. etc., are fundamentally flawed, they are still taught and believed by dare I say it, a majority of theists. I suspect this is because the same majority mentally block this fact out, either deliberately or sub-conciously. Yes there are stupid people who simply don’t comphrend the argument, but I believe the majority see the problem but don’t want to confront it. This leads me to believe that these people don’t really take their religion seriously, in the way that Stumps & others on here do.

Secondly, and this is by no means a personal attack on anyone on this board, those who do confront the problem of evil do so in a way that is wishy washy or incoherent so as the position they posit loses much of the meaning from religion or God. One thing I will give to theists of the first conclusion, is a least they have a solid position, even though it may be wrong. Those who try to circumvent the problem of evil, are most successful when the deny either God’s omnipotence, omniscience or his wholly good nature. Yet that figure is central to what religion tries to teach us. Maybe it doesn’t render it completely impotent, but it leads me to question its worth.

5

I believe that’s mostly on the mark there hume.
However, I would offer an alternative perspective as another option.

Some simply see it, and it’s not a dismissal, but a need.
I don’t mean this in blindness, but instead, some people that are theists need something greater than themselves, and not simply this, but greater than their imagination can comprehend any man accomplishing.
This abstraction is the superior-icon, or super-icon (or, you could get sick of writing the dash and just write, supericon).

It is this that is a thing beyond them in which even defies the imagination to grasp the logic of the thing and how it correlates to the outcome.
Like being a 2 year old kid watching someone pull a half dollar coin from their ear, or being the same age and watching a cake pie arrive on the table.

For instance, my 2 year old refers to anything that requires preparation to eat (even if that preparation is opening the package and that’s it) as, “cooking”.
Now, in regards to what exactly happens that causes the end result to occur, she is absolutely clueless and can’t even conceive of the logic involved that allows for the food to be produced from the stove, but she still is absolutely convinced that if Mom goes into that kitchen to make, “cooking”, then food will come out of it at some point later to eat.

I’m not meaning this as insulting, but it’s the only relatable form of what’s going on.

Some people simply want to have something that is there that is that thing that is simply not even specially outlined, let alone cognitively reasoned or correlated, as to the methods to the end result.
They simply want to hold that unknown with the conviction of the end result.

It sounds strange, but for some…this is the magic of living life and to feel it spiritually…or, to stand in awe of it.

If we could somehow derive a perfect parameter of logic that absolutely, for all man on the earth and not just some, show the method behind “evil” for an absolute “good” “God”, then following it, people would find another cavity to populate instead.

And it’s almost as if we are watching gofers chased by landscapers.
The gofers go where there are wholes, which tells the landscapers where to change the soil to avoid holes, which in turn moves the gofers to a new set of holes, which tells the landscapers where to…etc…

Dog, tail; tail, dog?

6

Nice posts.

The trouble with the Problem of Evil is that there really is no easy solution. Let’s face it- it’s only a ‘problem’ because, like many of the great philosophical questions, generations of very nifty thinkers have so far been thoroughly unable to resolve it. In the end, we must pays our money and takes our choices.

That said, I find the theistic defence of God’s ‘inscrutability’ completely unsatisfactory. To place God so completely beyond our understanding seems like a cop out to me, and it begs all sorts of other awkward questions too- like, for example, how may we personally relate to this entity if He is so absolutely beyond us? Such a remote deity seems a far cry from the anthropical god figure described in the New Testament, and that’s a tough square for Christians to circle, I think.

7

This is why I suggest just taking the ancient approach of suggesting the divine is simply greater than man, not perfectly goody-too-shoo wrapped up in ever-loving-bubblebath-happiness off in gumdrop golden land.

8

That approach brings about the question, for some at least, of why such a divine is worthy of worship or even thanks? Part of the appeal of God is that He is holier than thou, greater than anything, knows everything and shits golden eggs. If God is simply a step up from man, who in all honest are no great shakes, where is the appeal?

9

Actually…if you read the Hebrew every infinite that we now apply to God wasn’t infinite but greater than they could define.
For instance, their use of the word for eternal that we use just simply meant further into the distance than one could see, but applied to time.

Or, that God resided in the sky above the mountains and could see all that the sky could allow one to see, which was far more than one could see by standing on a mountain.
They didn’t have airlines, or webcams, and no one was jumping out of planes.

They were grounded, so a mountain’s vantage was a massive site to take in.
(I’m talking about pre-settlement Hebrews)

This was pretty common in the terminology of God in the Hebrew words used.

Meaning, they didn’t have a way to express the concepts we apply to God today, but instead they had ways to express that God was greater than their comprehension.

Now, however, we apply far more to God in scope because we have mastered the concept of infinity as a scope and things like beyond the horizon and site from the sky are both things that lack in impact to our minds because we can imagine beyond an horizon and we can see the Earth from farther away than even it’s sky.

But the idea was that such a thing as God is greater than our capacity.

So part of the appeal now may be that God is infinite in all respects, but this hasn’t always been the case.
As to a problem with such.

shrug

I don’t have a problem.
I suppose if some have problems with it, then they would hold God more infinitely and all powerful in all regards and load God up with more responsibility than just being greater than man beyond man’s tangible “vision”.

10

How did you jump from free will entailing the possibility of evil, to free will entailing the actualization of evil?

It seems to me that the Free Will Defense says that there’s something very good about free creatures, but one of the consequences of freedom is the possibility of evil- and as it turns out, that possibility was realized. That’s the problem here:

It’s not that free beings have to actually do evil in order to prove or demonstrate their freedom (indeed, God is such a being that is free, and doesn’t do evil), it’s that if God created beings that could “Choose freely, so long as they didn’t chose evil” that does mischief to what we mean to say by ‘free’. Of course a free being could choose evil.
You seem to also say that if God is a free being who doesn’t do evil, that He could have made us that way. There’s two problems with that. First, being a free being that doesn’t choose evil doesn’t violate a common-sense understanding of free will, but creating free beings with a guarantee that they only choose good as an ingredient of their creation certainly does seem to. So no, the existence of God as a free being who chooses only good does NOT entail that he could (reliably) create others that do so. If you strip ‘perfection’ and ‘good’ out of it, it becomes easier to see- Could a free being always choose to go left? Of course. Could we create free beings that always choose to go left? Not reliably.
Also, you have to address Euthyphro here. You seem to be running under the assumption that the Good is a set of laws that God is beholden to, and he just follows those laws better than anyone else. From what I can tell, that’s a pretty weak solution to the dilemma. If, instead, goodness somehow springs from God (His Nature, Will, or some combination), then God as a free being always acting according to His own will makes perfect sense (especially given omnipotence), whereas his creations being free beings that always (i.e., are designed such that they must) act according to God’s will makes no sense at all.

11

When Matthew Fox wrote of original good as antidote to the toxic consequences of teaching original sin or corruption, the pope at the time told him to shut up. According to the religious thought police, we are not supposed to imagine that, for us dumb humans, wars in heaven set the precedent for wars on earth, horny angels excuse our debauchery and being born corrupt dignifies our corruption!

12

Leaving aside the debatable ‘the majority’, those who see the problem but don’t want to confront it interest me greatly. There must be undesirable results from this subconscious denial. Stress and anger are just two. Could this be a fundamental reason for the seemingly inevitable fact that some/many of the strongest proponents of any religion are themselves guilty of wrongdoing/evil?

13

I think the conservative position (Pope, Orthodoxy, etc) is of a general rejection of ‘imagining things’ (i.e., making shit up), and then going about as though it’s the true message of Christianity. Nothing against Matthew Fox in particular.

14

That just brings me back to an accusation of a wishy-washy, incoherent position. If nothing can really be said about God, or if we cannot comphrend him, can we realistically talk about God with any authority?

15

Change your perspective a bit possibly if you want to.

It’s not so much about hearing the symphony, but seeing the reaction of the people to the symphony.
We can’t tell what the symphony is (divinity, God, universe harmony, etc…), but we can see the reaction of the people to it.

It is this that we label in Religious dialect as best as we can, and it is this that we read.
Read it as if watching a Symphonic movement on Mute with only a camera on the audience.

When we talk of God, we are talking about the reaction…not God.
We refer to it as God, because that is the name we know the reaction by.

Same as we would refer to the Symphony on Mute with only the audience on Camera.

16

Has anyone here studied, or tried to interact with Plantinga’s “Free Will Defense” formulation?

17

All revealed religions have come into being in order to gain control of people and thus gain power. They have nothing to do with God.

I just posted this in a similar thread: