I don't see any omni-perfect beings on or off the hook. — Bitter Crank

I doubt you're a proponent of the FWD in the first place.

t's give God a break. The problem is parents and their children. — Bitter Crank

It was a metaphor, where God is the parent, and we are the children. One the theists have been happy to use from time to time, including in their sacred texts.

To be fair, you ought to mention the good actions of the alleged god of monotheistic religions (whom I doubt you believe in) allows or (allegedly) aids and abets. You should mention liberation movements, emancipations, wonderful life-enhancing inventions like Nintendo and vibrators, peace making, Straight Guys Against Rape, great art of all kinds, Ben and Jerry's great flavors of ice cream, kind humble people (millions of them--count 'em!), smart, polite children and pets, and so on. — Bitter Crank

I don't see how any of that gets an omni-perfect being off the hook. In fact, most of that exists because of evil in the first place.

One more analogy.

Imagine the perfect police department, where perfect is defined as always upholding the law. Now also imagine that this department also knows everything about the area they patrol, and are able to do anything.

Now let's further say that all manner of crime exists in this precinct. Not just jaywalking and going 5 miles over the speed limit, but all manner of serious crimes such as murder, arson, theft, rape, etc.

What would be our conclusion? That the so called perfect police department is anything but. But we can imagine certain citizens within the precinct putting forward the FWD to defend the idea of a perfect police department. Despite wanting to uphold the law 100% of the time, the perfect police abstain from interfering many times to allow criminals to commit their crimes, because it's their free will to do so.

Would that definition be compatible with perfectly wishing to uphold the law? No, not in the least bit.

The ironic thing is that the very concept of freedom coincides the concept of slavery. To be free meant to be sovereign, precisely to not have a lord. — Wosret

That is very ironic. Lucifer is perfectly free.

The reason I'm hesitant to go into bat for Christianity is because I don't self-identify as Christian and I don't want to come off as evangalising on its behalf. — Wayfarer

The very big problem for Christianity and Judaism is that God is very much portrayed as interfering kind of deity in their sacred scriptures. Thus, a Jew can meaningfully agonize at the holocaust, and Christian parent can wonder why in the world God would let their child suffer from a terrible birth defect.

If God is not the sort of being who interferes - speaking from burning bushes, issuing out commandments, healing and striking people down, then you have a more reasonable way of reconciling God with the cosmos, although it still doesn't explain why the cosmos was created in the first place.

The majority of western monotheism involves an interfering God that people pray to to make stuff happen, and that kind of being is wholly incompatible with being omni-perfect and permitting evil.

Keep in mind that Yahweh flooded the Earth in Noah's time, because it was full of evil, but he didn't' see fit to prevent WW2.

I think you will find that impossible to validate with respect to any textual sources. — Wayfarer

So theists didn't invent the FWD as apologetics?

The problem is that you (not just you) don't understand what is the problem that religions seek to solve. — Wayfarer

I'm fine with religion trying to address existential issues, and I'm fine with people thinking there is some transcendental reality. But when this gets turned into statements about what God is, then you're going to have those skeptical of such statements push back.

So at whatever point certain believers decided that God was perfectly good and omni-capable, is the point at which skeptics question the existence of such a being, given that the universe is not a perfectly good place to live in.

And I'm familiar with many of Lewis's arguments, having read several of his books. He was a Christian apologist. I do like some of his stuff to this day, but I think his strongest arguments are from joy and longing, and not intellectual defenses of problematic theological positions laid down by the Orthodoxy.

According to them, freedom is found in abandoning the self, not in fulfilling it. — Wayfarer

But Christians tend to believe that God permits all abuse of free will, so that begs the question of why they don't endorse such a policy with regards to other human beings? It's fine if you think that abandoning the self is the path to true freedom, but trying to constrain other people's behavior would seem to mean you don't think that free will is worth allowing.

Really, I have no intention of continuing this dialogue. I don't wish to defend the Christian religion against those whose only interest in it is why it ought to be abandoned. — Wayfarer

Fine, but Christianity is broad, and not all Christians have had a belief in all-perfect God. There were some sects of early Christians who thought the world was created by an evil God, and Jesus came to give revelation of the higher God beyond creation. That makes a bit more sense than trying to square a perfect God with an imperfect creation.

he ancient man approached God as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man, the roles are quite reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge; if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God is in the dock. — C S Lewis

Or the Christian conception of God is on trial. It is believers who put the notion out there that a perfect being permits such things to happen. What a surprise when some of us find that difficult to swallow.

Science fantasy. — Wayfarer

We're talking about God, who didn't find it too hard to create an entire universe with the laws of physics as they are, and you're telling me that making animals with carbon nanotubes instead of calcium is too difficult? Gimme a break.

Free will is necessary in order that we may be able to determine the truth, through choice of what to believe, instead of just believing what is told to you by your parents or other authorities. It is by questioning the authorities that we rid ourselves of falsity within our beliefs. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why would God set things up so that we haven't question adults in order to learn the truth?

According to the main Christian denominations, humans are autonomous agents who are able to behave as they wish. — Wayfarer

According to Christian denominations, heaven is an eternal place where humans (and angels) are not autonomous agents, free to do as they wish. Or better yet, no human or angel, post Lucifer, wishes to freely will evil in heaven, apparently. For eternity. Which raises the question of why Lucifer and the angels, and mankind, were able (or wanted) to freely wish evil at all.

But setting aside the afterlife, even though it's rather important to Christian theology, Christians don't behave as if being wholly autonomous in society is desireable. Notice how often they wish to constrain behavior via various policies, or endorsements of certain moral positions.

Your post is entirely anthroporphic. First, even though, on the basis of what you post, you don't profess to have any actual belief in God, you think you understand what such a being, if such a being exists, must or must not do, on the basis of a comparison between that being, and what parents do. — Wayfarer

The idea that God is good is an anthropomorphic idea, based on what human beings value as good. Get rid of the good, and the FWD is no longer problematic. It's not even needed.

The problem is that believers have defined God as being perfectly good and capable of preventing evil, this the reason the FWD exists. So it's not me that's being anthropomorphic, it's inherent to the FWD.

I think you may be wilfully blurring the distinction between ability and permission. — Luke

We don't give people permission to murder other people in society under normal circumstances (setting aside war, self-defense, death penalty, etc).

But we lack the ability to always prevent people from carrying out a murder, although the police will, if a planned murder is known in advance.

God lacks no such ability. I don't see where I've blurred the distinction.

I think critters behave like it's a good universe. They have a natural exuberance. — Wayfarer

Until they're being chased by a lion, or fail to find water during a drought, or have parasites infesting their brain.

And the textbook answer is - and this is from one who doesn't even profess Christianity - that God creates beings who are free to do whatever they like. — Wayfarer

I don't think most human beings actually consider this sort of free will to be a good thing, but I'll create another thread about it.

But one of the inevitable entailements of physical existence is the possibility of accident and injury. How could it be different? — Wayfarer

We could be made of something more resilient than meat. Even as meat, we're not optimally designed to last and avoid injury. We just have enough resilience to reproduce and raise children, on average.

You can't really tell me that God couldn't think of a better design. Our bones could be made of carbon nanotubes. Or immune systems could be much more resistant. But for that matter, why do we inhabit a world where we need immune systems? Why should the environment be chalk full of things that would like to hijack our cells or feed on us? That's just horrific.

Why oh why does life exist at the expense of other life? Why can't the entire biosphere be massively symbiotic? Are you telling me that God is incapable of that?

And aging is unnecessary. Our germ line is ageless, going back all the way to the first life. Cells don't necessarily have to age. There are several organisms who don't show any aging.

And what is up with cancer? Are you telling me that God couldn't make our cell reproduction mechanism robust enough to avoid uncontrolled growth? Is God that bad of a designer? Are you telling me that cancer is unavoidable. That no possible design could have eliminated the possibility?

We can make machines faster, strong, and of more durable material than our bodies. Can God not even do that much?

In other words, unless life is like a perfectly stage-managed spectacle full of happy endings and healthy people, then there must be something the matter with whoever is in charge. — Wayfarer

So if God can't do any better than create a world with genocide, sexual trafficking, famine and predation, why create a world in the first place? And the hotel manager is a terrible metaphor, as if the inconvenience of a poorly run hotel is somehow equivalent to the holocaust, or people starving to death.

David Benatar's argument really comes into force with a being like God.

Globalism has existed in some form as long as humans have been able to travel over distances and come back, and thus engage in trade. Technology has just made it more doable in recent centuries.

There is no alternative to globalism. What do people expect, for countries to shut their borders down and prevent anyone from coming and going?

The existence of evil is insufficient to disprove the reality of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. However, by itself, this does not justify the belief that there is such a God. — aletheist

Maybe not disprove, since the theist can always appeal to God's mysterious ways and divine perspective being different from ours, but it sure seems like a rationalization to me, not a good justification for evil existing.

Basically, if people want to believe in an omni-god, then they'll find ways to make the argument work. But it comes across as sophistry to someone who doesn't begin with the premise that such a God must exist.

That is, if there is a philosophical underpinning to higher education, it's instrumental rather than value orientated. Cry as we might about that, it ain't going to change soon. — Baden

Well sure, but then my question is why bother with classes like philosophy if employment in an advanced technological society is the goal? Just have students take an intro computer programming course or Adobe/Microsoft class. Add a business management course. Statistics and data science are hot. Cut a a few requirements and set up internships in their place.

Why are we kidding ourselves with humanities course? Is it really going to help the next E-Corp employee think critically at their job?

Whether I'm fine with anti-realism depends of how that's defined. — Sapientia

Anti-realism and realism are well defined and don't need to be redefined, or we end up with endless semantic disputes that go nowhere. Color is real if it's mind-independent, and anti-real if it's not.

Compare with dreams. Some cultures have thought that when you dream, you go somewhere else. That it's an experience of something real. But we understand dreams to be mind-dependent.

Also compare with shape. We say shape is a property of objects, not of perception. Idealists might disagree, but at the very least, color is understood to be objective and not relative to the perceiver.

We can do so in accordance with an objective categorisation of colour. If it is so-and-so, then it is red. — Sapientia

If the strawberry tastes sweet, then objectively, it's sweet, right?

We can do so in accordance with an objective categorisation of colour. If it is so-and-so, then it is red. You just reject this categorisation, as it seems you must in order to conclude that objects do not have colour and that colour isn't real. — Sapientia

You can do so if anti-realism is fine with you. Also, science "paints" a rather colorless picture. Afterall, where is the color? Is it in the photon? Does that get transferred to the electrical signal travelling to your visual cortex?

The colour of the object is perspective dependent. From one perspective it is points of different colours, but from another perspective, it is mixed wavelengths. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perceptual relativity and the problem of perception, eh? How can we objectively say what color something is if it's relative to how we're viewing it, and the kind of visual system we possess?

Some animals see color better than we do, for example.

Fair enough. How does the fact that we've imported primary qualities into the definition of secondary qualities affect this distinction? — Benkei

Also, I think this distinction has implications for consciousness and Chalmer's hard problem, because if color is a secondary quality, but science makes use of primary qualities, then explaining the experience of color is going to be a conceptual dead end, as Nagel recognized, which again goes back to questions about the nature of objectivity.

Fair enough. How does the fact that we've imported primary qualities into the definition of secondary qualities affect this distinction? — Benkei

I'm not sure how to answer your question other than to point out that these types of discussion ultimately are about the nature of objectivity, with Nagel's view from nowhere, Locke's primary and secondary colors, direct vs indirect realism vs anti-realism, Kant's categories of thought, and so forth.

There was a previous discussion on the old forum (I think) about whether direct realism entailed color realism, and if the scientific evidence was against color realism, then direct realism could not be the case. Needless to say, the direct realists strongly disagreed, leading to charges of anti-realism, and ultimately, a disagreement over terms.

So yes, we do recognize a distinction between wavelengths of light and the color we experience seeing. What that means for perception is disputed. I think it means colors aren't real. It's like the sun rising and setting, which is naive realist language, and still useful to say, but everyone knows it's false in the modern world.

1.Why must the perception of an object's colour and the [actual] object's colour be the same? Or, why can't I say the grey in that picture appears red to me? By insisting I cannot say this, are you saying I'm lying? — Benkei

I would say that objects don't have any color. Color is a property of visual perception, just like smell is a property of olfaction, not the chemical makeup of the odors themselves.

2. Why shouldn't I incorporate what we scientifically know about "red" into the definition of "red"? — Benkei

Scientifically speaking, the world is without color or smell, except for creatures who see color and smell odors. Color is a secondary property, not a primary one, qua Locke.

3. Why shouldn't I apply a descriptive definition to "red" to my experience? — Benkei

That's fine, as long as it's understood in philosophical discussion that the colors we see are based on how human visual perception works and not the properties of objects or photons themselves.

4. Is this just a matter of definition/semantics? If I define red as what I experience as red unless it turns out that a spectrometer tells me it isn't because it does not have an emphasis of wavelengths between x and y, then by definition the strawberries aren't red. — Benkei

In ordinary language, which assumes naive realism, strawberries are red. But given a scientific understanding of atoms, photons and how our visual system works, strawberries are not red.

5. What is red? (e.g. what's your definition). — Benkei

The color we experience seeing for a certain wavelength of light, depending on the exact visual circumstances.

hey just want to pass their fucking class. Haha. You following? You're not going to convert these people to your particular brand of bullshit by telling them they aren't pursuing enlightenment properly or they haven't been "bit" yet. If someone asks a question about a philosophy course in college, you just need to answer the question... you don't need to beat them over the head with your philosophical zealotry. — Carbon

I'm not questioning the reality of people just wanting to pass a class. I'm also not saying that Mary Ellen or anyone else should be interested in the subject matter. That's up to them. I'm questioning the educational merit of having people take classes they view as just a means to an end.

Why have a nursing student take a philosophy class? Why is that an option for them? It's no different when people have asked why they had to take geometry, and what use it would be to them in the real world. If you can't give such students a real answer, and geometry isn't going to be part of their career, then you're wasting their time.

But it seems to me that a lot of courses could be presented in a way that shows their value. How might a philosophy course aid a nursing student? Well, surely ethics plays an important role in the medical profession. And ethical inquiry is a major part of philosophy. There are other areas of life that affect us all such as politics where ideas have philosophical roots. And ideas matter for policy.

But more than anything, asking questions about our existential condition, what's moral, how we know what we say we know, etc is fundamentally human. Everyone asks these kinds of questions in one form or another. It's like how creating and enjoying art and music are fundamental to being human. Art and music are everywhere, found in all cultures. So we could just force a boring music or art class on engineering students, say, or we could tie the subject matter into how it impacts engineering (good design for example) and life in general.

I don't see how viewing philosophy as something fundamental to being human (we all wonder at times) is somehow a particular brand of bullshit. It's just an observation that waxing philosophical is like breaking into song. Everyone can appreciate a little bit of philosophy like they can music. Why am I here? How best to live my life? What is the good, etc?

Presenting as just a course to get by is like making people take geometry just because.

That's assuming general relativity provides us with an accurate model of things at this scale. But we can consider that the concept of "event horizon" is evidence that general relativity doesn't provide us with an accurate model. — Metaphysician Undercover

Whether GR is accurate or not doesn't change the astronomical data. There is something there. Our understanding of it might be inaccurate, but that doesn't change the data.

Since this is a philosophy forum, let's approach it a bit differently. What is the purpose of teaching philosophy in higher education? Is it just another subject to give students a choice of electives? But why? What do schools and society in general hope to accomplish? What will it do for the students who take these classes? Is it just to meet elective requirements and get a passing grade?

If so, then what's the freaking point? Might as well take a bridge class.

Something is there that's being described by the math, given the massive gravitational effects on nearby objects. And it's condensed to a small area for that much gravity. It also doesn't give off light beyond a certain point. There is real data about the objects we model as black holes.

Here's what I'm getting at with a lot of this: I think you and a few others on this forum have a disastrous tendency to conflate this sort of glamorous image of "the philosopher" with modern academic philosophy. The latter simply does not fit with the former (and probably hasn't for several centuries). Creating "lovers of wisdom" is not the job of academia, universities don't get accredited for that. It's idealistic! It's maybe fun and creative to think about all the exciting and amazing things philosophy can do, but that's not why people go to college. As educators hired by our respective universities our job CANNOT solely be creating really "wise" students who "get it" and are "enlightened". — Carbon

No doubt you're right, but a the same time, it's kind of sad statement on education. And not just philosophy, but any subject matter, bet it art, literature, computer science, etc. So you're basically saying that students aren't there to learn, they're there to get a grade in route to graduating, which will look better on a resume than not finishing college. And those who choose an academic career do so because they like the atmosphere.

So why do we bother with the pretense of education at all? Instead, soon as little Johnny and Suzy can do the three RRRs, send their asses off to job training and trade schools, and be done with the silliness of taking a foreign language (unless that's part of the job training), learning about the Civil War, or reading some great piece of literature.

Let's stop fooling ourselves if nobody outside of an online discussion forum cares about learning. Because endeavors like thinking and asking questions aren't important and fundamental to being human. I can't help but wonder what the ancient and medieval schools would think of modern attitude toward education.

eah, Kant always seemed to me to be engaged in a purely apologetic exercise that went nowhere. I was never taken in by him. — The Great Whatever

Next, you'll be taking aim at Witty ;)

I don't know if 'foot' would be a possible body-part to genuinely feel you are identified with, but I don't see a reason to exclude it either if, in fact, body-part identification is something you learn from the culture you're born into. — Moliere

Reason we learn to identify consciousness with our heads is because all the evidence correlates with the brain and not the foot. But if panpsychism is true, then neurons (and only neurons in certain regions) in the skull shouldn't be special when it comes to consciousness.

How does my experience of being a human, in a world, emerge from individual particles (that have experience as part of their nature). Is my conscious experience physically located throughout the particles within my brain, only some of them, or is it an emergent entity and exists somewhere else entirely? — dukkha

And also, why isn't my foot conscious? Or is it, and my brain just isn't aware? But then why I am I located with my brain and not my foot?

I never found Humean skepticism about causation to be compelling. It's just obviously so that there is an order in the world that goes beyond mere conjunction. Humean causation, at least on the face of it, reduces the entire universe to radical contingency, which is prima facie absurd.

Also, the idea that the sun could stop shining tomorrow (or water ceasing to be boiled by heat) being analogous to Thanksgiving for the turkey just seems very wrong, as if anything could literally happen at any moment, we've just been lucky so far the cosmos appears orderly.

And all of that just to maintain purity of skeptical empiricism, instead of just admitting the very well could be more to the world than meets the senses. It's too high of a price to pay.

So is your moral realism based on pleasure being the highest good, which wold be true for all beings capable of pain and pleasure?

Because I can sort of see how one would argue for moral realism on those grounds. But I'm an external world realist, so if morality isn't found out there, then it isn't real in my book.

Is there a difference between determining something and objectively determining something? Clearly I can determine it, and so can you, since we already did. — The Great Whatever

We happen to be in agreement that torturing kids is wrong. But I'm sure we can find moral issues that we will strongly disagree with. What then?