God Help Me.

[ulmont]

I have nominally intended to raise my children southern baptist, as I feel this does them a good service.

It will certainly give all your gay children complexes, yes.

[Neil]

Basically, I set it out like this: If one set of physical laws, namely our own (which require quantum mechanics, and--accepting MWI as given--thus all possible outcomes), can produce intelligent life, then an omnibenevolent God must consider itself morally obligated to set up those physical laws, even though evil outcomes will be the result.

Why does benevolence require a being to create intelligent life?

[crazy canuck]

Okay, rephrase: God is capable of creating all possible worlds.  Failure to create all possible worlds, when omnipotence renders that creation trivial, would be to permit souls, or consciousnesses, to languish in oblivion.  How could God fail to create all possible worlds if he is not also loving?

Alternatively, if you deny that it is immoral to fail to create humanity, our set of physical laws is the only one that allows life to exist, and our physical laws require the existence of admittedly crappier alternative worlds, then God is still required to do so in order to create the best possible world, with the rest--including, presumably our own--are logically necessary* side effects, although not by necessity bereft of God's love simply because of their inferior state.

*Regarding omnipotence, I don't believe that omnipotence is meaningfully circumscribed by an inability to do logically impossible things, such as fashioning laws of physics which mathematically cannot create life, and then using those laws to somehow magically create life.

Now you are getting around the problem by creating a God that is not all powerful but one that has constraints.  I agree that makes the most logical sense but it is not an explanation for why an all powerful God allows evil to exist.

[Ideologue]

Basically, I set it out like this: If one set of physical laws, namely our own (which require quantum mechanics, and--accepting MWI as given--thus all possible outcomes), can produce intelligent life, then an omnibenevolent God must consider itself morally obligated to set up those physical laws, even though evil outcomes will be the result.

Why does benevolence require a being to create intelligent life?

If (universal) life is, on balance, a pleasurable experience, then the trivial effort required to bring it into being morally requires God to do so.  So goes the argument, anyway.

It's also a big if.  Even ascribing a special, overriding value to sapient life--which is suspect at best--just the history of humankind has been of questionable utility.  Without ascribing special value to sapient life, it's very probable that the utility of life, in terms of pleasure, has been substantially negative.  However, life is young, compared to the expected longevity of the universe.  With the extinction of all of Earth's biosphere save sapient life capable of escaping it, an event which will arrive in little longer than a billion or two years due to the increasing temperature of the sun, and with the economic power that a civilization a billion years hence would be expected to possess, it can be reasonably assumed that life's utility will rise sharply into the positive soon afterward.  Because the physical laws of the universe permit if not mandate human-level intelligence and survivability, this general outcome is likely in many if not most possible worlds.

Now you are getting around the problem by creating a God that is not all powerful but one that has constraints.  I agree that makes the most logical sense but it is not an explanation for why an all powerful God allows evil to exist.

Well, think of it this way.  If God could directly intervene in the lives of every human on Earth, and give them each food, shelter, and a harem of philosophical zombie sex slaves appropriate to their sexual orientation, either under the physical laws it has set up an alternative Earth where that did not happen, or--and this strays from MWI and into logic and philosophy--it has ignored a possible world in which it did not intervene.  It would then be morally obligated to create that world as well.  If it intervened there, the possible world in which it didn't has failed to be created, and God has failed to live up to its moral obligation.

[Neil]

If (universal) life is, on balance, a pleasurable experience, then the trivial effort required to bring it into being morally requires God to do so.  So goes the argument, anyway.

But we know that life is not on the balance a pleasurable experience.

[The Brain]

Why would the "God allows evil OMFG" thing be problematic? Maybe God just doesn't conform to everyone's idea of good or loving (gasp!). "I don't like everything you do therefore I doubt that you exist" seems kind of lame. And not that it's terribly important to this issue but God as described in the Bible can certainly be a grade A asshole.

[Tamas]

Why would the "God allows evil OMFG" thing be problematic? Maybe God just doesn't conform to everyone's idea of good or loving (gasp!). "I don't like everything you do therefore I doubt that you exist" seems kind of lame. And not that it's terribly important to this issue but God as described in the Bible can certainly be a grade A asshole.

Actually, omnipotency is the core of the monotheist belief systems I think, not to mention God's standard on good and evil being the gold one, and if we are allowed to readily dismiss or bend those two, then we are basically free to twist and turn each aspect of a given religion as we see it fit and moral.

But then, how can one honestly believe that their customized God is anything more than the construct of their own personality?

[Slargos]

 

Ridå.

[Tamas]

Ridå.

Jag står övertygad

[Tonitrus]

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"

[Norgy]

Religion is "just symbolism"? No, Norgy. You are wrong, even if you will never understand it.

Don't call me stupid!!! 

[Slargos]

Religion is "just symbolism"? No, Norgy. You are wrong, even if you will never understand it.

Don't call me stupid!!! 

I didn't. 

[Martinus]

What I've always thought.  Your atheism is not rooted in your beliefs but whether or not you can suck cock.

Newsflash: atheism is never rooted in a belief.

[Martinus]

Playin Devil's advocate for the religious folk here, but how can you people look at the human body, the precise machine of survivability and adaptability that it is, and not believe that something made it in It's image. The body has countless systems of such precision and finesse that if one thin went wrong it would die, but yet it continues to strive for life. Seems to me that it we would have to pretty lucky for our bodies to have just evolved by themselves.

I don't, of course, believe in that argument, but it's a good point.

Dude. Rotting teeth. Beer belly. Shit. Painful bowel movements. Ingrown hair and toenails. If human body is created by someone, then Parodox has better quality control.

[Martinus]

I have nominally intended to raise my children southern baptist, as I feel this does them a good service.

It will certainly give all your gay children complexes, yes.

I hear Southern Baptist gays are awesome in the sack. Thats the same mechanism that works for ex-catholic schoolgirls CdM keeps chained in his basement.