Sunday, August 30, 2015

Podcast #1 - Andy Rogers, Pascal's Wager Updated, Design Arguments, Historical Jesus

I am proud to share the very first episode of my podcast! You will learn about cool animals, the historicity of Jesus from Dr. Bart Ehrman's book, "Did Jesus Exist?", take a peek into the life of a philosophy nerd on Philosophy Nerd Roadtrip, and enjoy a 30 minute interview with philosophy graduate student, Andy Rogers. The second podcast is already filmed and on its way through the pipe!


Thursday, August 20, 2015

Problem of Evil: Simplified, Rethought, and... Re-complicated.

Note: When I started writing this post, I had a very different conclusion than the one I figured out in the process of writing this post. I'll leave my process up for everyone to see as my mind is changed while I ponder the issue of the problem of evil by writing:

In this post, I hope to simplify the problem of evil and offer a simple, albeit depressing, solution. In layman's terms, the problem of evil is: "If God is all-powerful and all-loving, why does bad stuff happen?" I will be talking about the problem of evil in the context of Christianity and the Christian God for this post.

I have written on this subject before here--
http://honestsearchfortruth.blogspot.com/2011/06/god-does-not-love-everyone-here-is-why.html

The problem of evil takes its most potent form thusly:

1. God is omnipotent (all-powerful).
2. God is omnibenevolent (all-loving).
3. God is omniscient (all-knowing).
4. God has free will (God could have chosen not to create our universe).
5. In natural theology (the physical world), we see most people ending up in hell (eternal punishment).

I realize each of those points is debatable, so for now, we can treat each one as a moving part--for example, we might take the stance that God doesn't have free will, or that God has free will but wouldn't act in any way other than the way God does based on God's perfection. Another example would be hell--perhaps it isn't eternal, and souls either cease to exist or are moved to purgatory (kinda heaven) or heaven (heaven) at a later time, or perhaps most people actually go to heaven instead of hell.

To start with, lets treat 1-5 like cement and see where those assumptions take us.

If 1-5 are all true
Actually, this is impossible. If God were omnibenevolent and had free will, God would not have chosen to create the universe. It would be more loving to simply not create, given that the majority of people experience eternal punishment in hell.

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 Wait... Hold on...
Actually, maybe it IS possible for 1-5 to all be true at the same time. I was planning to write something totally different, but perhaps I have figured something out:

My Solution to the Problem of Evil
The magnitude of heaven's good-ness for people could be at least 10 times greater than the magnitude of hell's bad-ness.

Under this model, God can be omnipotent, mostly benevolent, omniscient, and have free will.

Actually, now we need to examine the influence of free will in humans, especially regarding their part in choosing to accept salvation. We would need to wade through Calvinism, Molanism, and Arminianism to do this, as well as some complex philosophy of mind. What is the best of all possible worlds?

It is impossible to figure out what the best of all possible worlds would be--but can I at least think of one that would be better than the current world? I suppose that is (at least probably) beyond human comprehension?

OK, so for now I'm going to assume Molinism, which means that people DO have free will. So, God created the universe, gave humans free will, majority of people don't choose salvation, but heaven is so much better for the ones that are saved compared with the pain of hell that the net good-ness is still positive--and if the magnitude of heaven's good-ness is infinitely higher than the magnitude of hell's bad-ness, then the whole thing is a wash and hell is negligible?

Hmmm...

It would still bother me that anyone was experiencing something bad for eternity, no matter how much better the good was that the minority of people were experiencing forever. But is that just the wrong way to think about this?

There are two ways to think about this.
1. Binary--each person counts as one person, and the good or bad they experience is equivalent across the board.
2. Quantitative--the magnitude of the happiness/suffering also matters.

Logically, it seems like the quantitative model makes more sense--it would be better to punch someone in the face so that someone else could get a million dollars than to not punch someone and not have someone else get a million dollars.

Then again, is there a point at which the degree of suffering outweighs any amount of happiness for someone else?

I'm really not conditioned to think about these kinds of things when eternal values are assigned--infinite time, or infinite pleasure, or infinite pain. That is hard to think about.


OK, if I remove my emotional attachment, then it is mathematically infinitely good to give a few people something that is infinitely better, in exchange for giving most people something that is bad, but infinitely less-so than the good is for the others.

If this is the case, then God can be omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and have free will (if humans also have free will)--and there are purely logic-based constraints upon universes in which there were no humans that chose (or didn't even have the opportunity to make a positive decision to accept salvation [people who never hear the gospel]) the option of not being saved.

But then again, is it more loving to give free will, if one of the options is eternal punishment? I suppose, again, if heaven is infinitely more good than hell is bad, mathematically, the people in hell are negligible?

I just can't get myself to agree that most people are negligible.

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I must ponder further. Please comment if you have ideas!