Reply #51: Enjoy

[Stunster]

The theist who acknowledges a problem of evil, and presents the free will defense as a response, then must (if he believes in a god that loves and cares for us enough to minimize the amount of suffering we have to endure) be able to demonstrate that the current amount of suffering IS at a minimum.

No we don't have to demonstrate that. We believe in theism. We understand that there are good reasons why God would wish to create the laws of physics, and free will, and we attribute natural evil to the laws of physics and moral evil to the bad use of free will. Along comes the non-theist who claims that theism is not true because there's too much evil and suffering in the world. But how does the non-theist know that there's too much? It's all due to physics and bad use of free will, but there are good reasons for creating physics and free-willed creatures.

True, there is more evil than there needs to be, but this is due to bad use of free will. And here I'd simply be repeating myself that "a free creaturely action that is constrained by God to be morally good" is like a "square circle"---it's an incoherent concept.

Next I'd be repeating myself about the quantity of moral evil being a function of population. One could reduce the quantity by having just two free-willed humans. But what if one tortures and eventually murders the other and thereafter sets cats on fire for fun? Is that a better world than this one? I don't think so.

And my challenge to that demonstration is suggesting possible worlds (or scenarios) where a little divine intervention without affecting anyone's free will is possible.

For any given set of free-willed creatures, God cannot determine that they will freely choose less evil than they actually do. Why? Because "determining what someone else will freely choose" is a self-contradictory notion.

God may and does offer grace, by which humans are attracted to the good. But grace is resistible, because 'compelled salvation' isn't salvation, any more than 'compelled love' for one's spouse is love for one's spouse. But spouses can attract each others' love by being gracious.

A person's body is capable of killing others that they can overpower, but not those they cannot (unless they employ tools like a gun, but that's not relevant). We are not on equal footing with other human beings to make moral choices, so how can you say god cannot "make" certain moral choices off-limits? He already has!

There are many ways to skin a cat. A strong man can rape an elderly woman, but not if she has already murdered him by poisoning his coffee.

But even so, why can't we ALL start out in a paradise and live there until our moral choices expel us from it? A&E got that opportunity, but no one else. Why are the consequences of the bad choices of the fathers visited upon their innocent sons?

If evil choices didn't have evil consequences, what would be evil about them? That's the nature of evil---innocent people get hurt.
We are responsible for our own moral character. Our character is initially formed by our actions, and our actions then reflect the character we have adopted. But the formation of character requires that we see that certain kinds of action will have certain kinds of effects, and predictably so. Intentions have to be realizable in a consistent way for rational agency to be possible. And rational agency has to be possible in order for us to be responsible for forming our own moral character. Hence, intentions have to be realizable in a consistent way if we are to be responsible for forming our own moral character.

So you have an easy way to tell if someone is a good Christian (or good Catholic) - they're always happy and rewarded by god. Uh, right?

Uh, of course not. They might be martyred by bad people using their free will in a bad way.

So poor and suffering people are that way because they have turned away from god? Stunster, are you a Catholic or a Calvinist?

Catholic.

Your god's options in limiting the suffering of the Holocaust were endless.

Oh no, not tinkering again! I've already told you what's wrong-headed with that idea. It's either this set of physical laws, or another set. If you can't specify another, superior set, then you have no grounds for making this assertion.

Why are you limiting what your god can do?

I'm not limiting God. You're simply confused about omnipotence.