Free will and the problem of evil

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Some thoughts here under the first comment on the proposition of free will as a counter to the problem of evil.

Ugh … my reply AscendingGoogle123 appears to have been clobbered. Here it is for reference.

You haven’t bothered to demonstrate that free will actually exists, not even remotely. We may simply be at the mercy of our brain chemistries. Is there any reason to believe otherwise? Free will certainly did not exist for a certain biblical Pharaoh when god “hardened his heart” so as to show off a few magic tricks culminating in some nifty infanticide. In addition, and assuming you are talking about the Christian god, the fact that he threatens with eternal torture anyone that does not believe in Jesus does not bode well for your free will theory either. But … even if free will is indeed a thing - so what?

I’m just an imperfect human, a mere moral bug compared to your god, and even I will interfere with my child’s free will if I see him being rude, not to mention cruel, to another. That’s just common decency. But not god. Oh no. It’s important to him to sit idly by and have an elderly couple tortured for fear of hampering the human scum’s ‘free will’.

The whole notion sounds idiotic, cruel, and downright sick to me. And it says a lot about the effect of religious dogma on otherwise good people that they will try and defend such a god at all.

As an aside, if you are proposing that god does not interfere in the affairs of mankind because he wishes to preserve free will, it makes thanking god, or praying to god for specific outcomes pretty pointless, doesn’t it?

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Whenever this fruitless discussion about “free will” as an adequate refutation, or at least as a resolution, of the Problem of Evil (be it necessary or contingent evil) arises, it seems to me that the protagonists on both sides of the divide usually lose sight of a key issue, namely the assumed character of the creator-god who supposedly made this world we inhabit.

It doesn’t take much creative imagination or deep thought to see that an omnipresent, omniscient, omni-benevolent creator must necessarily create a universe in which true free will exists in the complete absence of any evil. A universe that is otherwise, as ours is, necessarily refutes at least one of those omni properties, if not the whole notion of a creator-god altogether—and by now, everyone on this forum knows where I’m putting my money.

The elaborate verbal disguises pasted over the dilemma by theologians such as William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, et al. invariably “remove” the problem either by excusing it on some ultimately flimsy grounds, or by opportune redefinition of terms, and sometimes both.

In short, twenty-three centuries on, and Epicurus still stands virtually unblemished.

'Luthon64

Some years ago I was “interviewed” by a xtian whose study group or whatever gave them the task of talking an atheist (and supposedly learning about their stupid beliefs so the pastor could shoot them down without the inconvenience of facing the person he’s refuting… I digress…). I agreed to this and, predictably, at one point was asked how I could have a moral “absolute” if I didn’t believe in god. I returned fire and asked the person why they needed a morality, at all. Their answer is a strange contradiction that had previously also puzzled me:
“Because I want to be a good person”
“You want to be Christian so you can to be a good person right?”
“Yes, of course”.
“So, you actually know what’s good before choosing to be christian. How do you decide Christianity is “good” and anything else is “Bad” before you choose christianity? And if god does bad things, you say we’ve “moved past” those times. How do you know they were bad? [and so on]”

What followed was bewilderment, stammering, and hand waving, as you’d expect… Still, how do you define good and evil? Xtians seem to know what “good” is even without reference to god. Moreover the problem of evil presupposes that evil … exists. I’m sorry Mintaka but I don’t think it does. That might lead to unpleasant avenues but I am more inclined towards trying to see the world for the trees than to try and see it according to my preferences.

What we see in nature is what we see in ourselves… ducks that rape, animals that devour their competitor’s offspring, snakes that eat eggs, elephants that trample tourists without as much as a thought to protect their young, opportunistic scavengers that “steal” the meals of others, birds that fool other species into rearing their young. People never stop to wonder why a spider is doing evil as it sucks the liquefied innards out of it’s prey. When predators rip their quarry asunder, still alive. When apes go to war.

I THINK we humans simply have these impulses because we’re a social species that gain our evolutionary advantage from working together and there are certain actions, when visited upon our fellow travelers, that don’t just disadvantage our group, but come back to disadvantage ourselves in turn. “Live by the sword, die by the sword”, as it were. The real life manifestation of karma: If you make yourself untrustworthy or are a threat, you can quite possibly trigger the “trampling” from the group as it protects it’s own.

It is in the group’s interest to have police and laws… we need to discover the threats in our midst and eradicate them for our own survival and prosperity. Anyway… I suspect you get it. If you choose to label such actions as “evil” I’m sure you can. I just don’t think such a thing as evil “inherently” exists. I think we could find this out quite harshly if ever encountering an actual alien race. Or maybe they’ll have similar motivations for self preservation… try not to upset the whole galaxy…

BoogieMonster, I just assumed that evil exists as simply meaning something morally bad.

I’ll grant that whether some act is evil or not is by no means universally agreed upon. For instance, I don’t think that telling the holy ghost to get stuffed is an evil thing to do, but I’m sure my mom would disagree.

I’m also assuming that only humans can do evil. Run-ins with devastating hurricanes and annoyed elephant cows are just unfortunate. This is just for convenience, mostly because I have no clue if the lion killing off it’s rival’s cubs is evil, even though it seems horrible.

And perhaps there are grades of evil on some moral scale. This is at least approximately and theoretically in line with our judicial system. I’m fully convinced that eating meat is cruel and unnecessary, but I cannot as yet see it as a big enough evil to overcome my occasional craving for a succulent burger.

But even in spite of all this fuzziness, people - religious or not - usually and sufficiently recognize an extraordinarily evil act when they see it, and it at least lubricates the conversation around it.

ETA: I take it you have since been promoted to Village Atheist, considering your invite to participate in the faithful’s homework assignment. :wink:

Modern thoughts on “evil.” Since the narrower conception of evil that philosophers consider (as opposed to theologians’ broader conception thereof) confines itself mostly to moral condemnation by moral agents that are capable of making autonomous decisions about their own and other such moral agent’s actions, this suggests that “evil” cannot be said have any objective existence, as theologians like to claim. Different moral agents have different frameworks, even if only subtly so, within which they assess actions’ moral standing.

That does not mean that there aren’t some actions that humans will (almost) universally condemn as “evil,” and that is where the theologian, I think, commits a cardinal ( :wink:) error in equating such near-universal condemnation with a genuine objective existence of evil.

'Luthon64

The free will argument is silly IMO to begin with - regardless of the problem of evil. Our actions are governed by our brains’ well-being, which in turn is dictated and altered by brain chemistry, genes, strokes, accidents, tumors, dementia, temporal lobe epilepsy or other factors over which we have no control. This shows the absurdity of the “free will” argument, and also begs the question: If there is an immortal soul, why would it be subordinate to flawed biology?

Welcome to the forum, plcomp. It’s been very quiet around here for quite some time now.

Regarding your comments, you won’t find too many people on this forum who would disagree with your arguments. The central point of this thread, I think, is to demonstrate that even if humans are near-perfect, unimpaired rational agents with a strong moral sense (insofar as that is ideally possible), the Free Will argument is still not an adequate reply to the Problem of Evil.

'Luthon64