‘The hand that cannot grasp itself’

First, it's very confusing that the word "theodicy" is being used in this thread to mean "anti-theodicy" or "anti-theism." For that reason I will avoid the word altogether. — Leontiskos

Acknowledged. I had associated the word with general discussion of the problem of evil not realising that it was usually intended as a apologetic in the religious context. So it is misleading, and I have changed the thread title to reflect that.

Part of your argument is something like this:

4. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent, then there would be no head colds
5. But there are head colds
6. Therefore, there is no existing God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent {modus tollens}
7. Therefore, head colds disprove the existence of God {reductio ad absurdum} — Leontiskos

That is not the argument at all. The argument is, if the existence of suffering is supposed to be an indictment against God, then where do you draw the line between what you would deem a reasonable and an unnacceptabe degree of suffering? That colds and influenza would be 'allowed' by a merciful God, but not cancer? That earthquakes would be reasonable, but mass casualties would not be?

The more general argument is that a world without suffering is inconceivable, (although I might add that this is actually what Heaven is supposed to mean.) So it's not as if suffering is inflicted on the world, either by design or intention, but that physical existence must be susceptible to suffering, pain and imperfections of many kinds. Hence the Thomist view of natural evils:

“God does not will evil to be done, but He permits it to be done; and thus He brings good out of evil.” — ST I, q.19, a.9

As facing and rising above evil is an essential aspect of existence.

Further, that the most conspicuous forms of intentional evil have been committed by man against man - even in the name of religion itself, which is particularly egregious, but again, not an indictment against God.

Again, the essay 'is not an attempt to justify suffering, nor to offer spiritual guidance. It aims only to point out the mistake of that common assumption in modern discourse — the idea that if God exists, He must operate like a benevolent manager of human well-being. It’s a superficial way of seeing it. Recovering some understanding of the metaphysical and theological contexts against which the problem of evil has traditionally been resolved, allows us to reframe the question in a larger context — one in which suffering still has to be reckoned with, but not on account of a malicious God.'

And I stand by that argument.

It (theodicy) does disappear if your version of god is less benevolent sky wizard and more ground of being. Mind you, the Bible deosn't help as it depicts a pretty nasty deity who has no issues with slavery and genocide and behaves like a mafia boss, demanding deference and worship to sooth his seemingly fragile ego, so there is that. — Tom Storm

Specifically, the Old Testament. And bearing in mind, the OT texts preserved in the Bible originated in the late Bronze age, amongst agrarian tribes, for whom the subtleties of the much later theologians would presumably mean nothing. Ergo the voice that is presented speaks in the terms appropriate to the society in which it was heard (although I don't know if genocide was part of the narrative. That doesn't enter the language until WWII, and not through any act of God.) But it raises the question of what is being debated.

Perhaps it's this confusion about the nature of the 'supreme identity' that is behind the belief that He operates as a kind of supreme agent — a being with immense power, knowledge, and will, who chooses outcomes in the world much like we do, only on a grander scale. It’s from this anthropomorphic projection that the impulse to assign blame arises: if God could have prevented this or that disaster, and didn’t, then He must be responsible, perhaps even malicious.

But this view mistakes what kind of causality is at issue. In the classical world — particularly in Aquinas and the Neoplatonic tradition — God is not a proximate cause operating within the causal order. He is not a being in the world, but the ground of all being, the cause of causes. His causality is not like ours — it is ontological, not mechanical or voluntaristic.

The “Hotel Manager” model of theodicy arises precisely from this misplaced attribution of agency: it treats God as if He were running the world like a human administrator, and then judges Him by those standards. But this picture, intuitive though it may be to us, is metaphysically confused. It domesticates divinity into a kind of super-personality — and then is shocked when the universe doesn’t live up to the standards we come to expect.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound. — Lunging, Flailing, Mispunchiing, Terry Eagleton (review of The God Delusion)

I gave too much credit to what DOGE could do as Musk didn't last even until the summer and the cuts have basically been meaningless as the Trump administration is spending a bit more than the Biden administration now. — ssu

Weren't all of these measures simply Trump lashing out at a Government that he hates, using 'waste and fraud' as a pretext? Similar to how he is having people deported on the pretext of them being 'violent criminals' even without any convictions having been recorded purely to appease the xenophobia of his base.

It seems the wind has been taken out of Musk's sails. He's said to have been having screaming matches with Scott Bessent in the West Wing and to have considerably annoyed many other cabinet members. Tesla is clearly wounded and may not ever recover (and it doesn't help that the Cybertruck is on the way to being an historic dud.) I think Musk was literally power-drunk when it all kicked of. Now for the hangover. Even so, the consequences of the DOGE chainsaw will be felt for years to come.

I'm trying to stay true to the classic framing of a theodicy in the West, which conceives of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent. — J

But regardless, one being amongst others - apparently with extraordinary powers and longevity but a being nonetheless. This is why Paul Tillich says that to conceive of God as a being is to deny Him. (And I'm not saying this from the viewpoint having it all worked out, either - more like a historical forensic pathologist, trying to reconstruct what happened on the basis of scattered remains. It ties into the loss of the heirarchical understanding of Being, and its replacement with univocity, 'all being(s) are of the same kind'. That, in turn, leads to the loss of a 'dimension of value' - values are subjective, or intersubjective, or social, there being no value in so-called objective reality (ref)).

God set up the whole thing — J

I'm sorry, I still don't think that is a fair assessment. It's a very Dawkins style depiction, God as a kind of cosmic film director, staging all of the action. I think it betrays a misunderstanding of the God that Dawkins doesn't believe in. A straw God, so to speak.

I could've done that! — J

Which is key to the whole thing.

Not sure that would necessarily amount to nihilism—perversity and cruelty are value-laden terms, and many people actually find them galvanizing, even a kind of raison d’être. — Tom Storm

Ah. They like them.

Far more damning is the design and creation of a world that uses death and pain as the engine of survival. That’s pretty twisted. A god might have engineered creation any way he wanted; creatures could have survived on water or light alone. — Tom Storm

The Buddhist creation myth has it that sentient beings were originally composed entirely of light. At the beginning of each kalpa (a cosmic age), beings are reborn as luminous entities, often described as shining or radiant beings. These beings, called Abhassara, are said to be reborn from the Ābhāsvara Brahma-realm and initially lack physical form, moving through the aether like pure energy. They are also said to not require sustenance and possess great longevity. Over long periods of time, they become attracted to a sweet substance on the physical plane, and as they consume it, their bodies become heavier and more physical, eventually losing their luminous qualities and differentiating into two genders.

But instead, he designed hunting, maiming, killing, and predation as the lingua franca of survival. None of this involves human sin or any other spurious theological cop-out. — Tom Storm

I found this essay, in a book of essays by a US Zen teacher, provides quite a compelling account of the source of religious consciousness:

The animal world is a world of pure being, a world of immediacy and immanence. The animal soul is like “water in water,” seamlessly connected to all that surrounds it, so that there is no sense of self or other, of time, of space, of being or not being. This utopian (to human sensibility, which has such alienating notions) Shangri-La or Eden actually isn’t that because it is characterized at all points by what we’d call violence. Animals, that is, eat and are eaten. For them killing and being killed is the norm; and there isn’t any meaning to such a thing, or anything that we would call fear; there’s no concept of killing or being killed. There’s only being, immediacy, “isness.” Animals don’t have any need for religion; they already are that, already transcend life and death, being and nonbeing, self and other, in their very living, which is utterly pure.

(In his book, A Theory of Religion, George) Bataille sees human consciousness beginning with the making of the first tool, the first “thing” that isn’t a pure being, intrinsic in its value and inseparable from all of being. A tool is a separable, useful, intentionally made thing; it can be possessed, and it serves a purpose. It can be altered to suit that purpose. It is instrumental, defined by its use. The tool is the first instance of the “not-I,” and with its advent there is now the beginning of a world of objects, a “thing” world. Little by little out of this comes a way of thinking and acting within thingness (language), and then once this plane of thingness is established, more and more gets placed upon it—other objects , plants, animals, other people, one’s self, a world. Now there is self and other—and then, paradoxically, self becomes other to itself, alienated not only from the rest of the projected world of things, but from itself, which it must perceive as a thing, a possession. This constellation of an alienated self is a double-edged sword: seeing the self as a thing, the self can for the first time know itself and so find a closeness to itself; prior to this, there isn’t any self so there is nothing to be known or not known. But the creation of my me, though it gives me for the first time myself as a friend, also rips me out of the world and puts me out on a limb on my own.

Interestingly, and quite logically, this development of human consciousness coincides with a deepening of the human relationship to the animal world, which opens up to the human mind now as a depth, a mystery. Humans are that depth, because humans are animals, know this and feel it to be so, and yet also not so; humans long for union with the animal world of immediacy, yet know they are separate from it. Also they are terrified of it, for to reenter that world would be a loss of the self; it would literally be the end of me as I know me.

In the midst of this essential human loneliness and perplexity, which is almost unbearable, religion appears. It intuits and imagines the ancient world of oneness, of which there is still a powerful primordial memory, and calls it 'the sacred'. This is the invisible world, world of spirit, world of the gods, or of God. It is inexorably opposed to, defined as the opposite of, the world of things, the profane world of the body, of instrumentality, a world of separation, the fallen world. Religion’s purpose then is to bring us back to the lost world of intimacy, and all its rites, rituals, and activities are created to this end. We want this, and need it, as sure as we need food and shelter; and yet it is also terrifying. All religions have known and been based squarely on this sense of terrible necessity. ... — The Violence of Oneness, Norman Fischer (On the Motivation for the 9/11 Terror Attacks

And yes, the non-human world is full of suffering too, but God isn't supposed to be the loving parent of ants, on the Abrahamic account of things. — J

But it's already been said that

Nature isn’t merely amoral; it’s grotesquely cruel and perverse by design — Tom Storm

Which to me suggests the question, does the perversity and cruelty of existence negate its worth altogether. Which again suggest nihilism.

And it also should be acknowledged that the most grotesque and needless forms of suffering to have been suffered by humans in recent history, has also been inflicted by them, in the form of world wars and military and political repression and conflict. Indeed, great suffering has been inflicted in the name of religions, but again whether that constitutes an indictment of a Creator is a different matter.

As to the suffering that is due to natural causes - the 2004 tsunami comes to mind as an example - how is that attributable to divine act? I'm sure there are those who would intepret it as such, and indeed they are sometimes referred to as 'acts of God', but whether they actually signify malign intent is the question at hand. I'm inclined to think not - the Thomist understanding, that they are an inevitable aspect of a contingent and imperfect world, still seems reasonable to me.

What would it take to falsify this statement? — J

The emergence of trends showing less mental illness, decreases in depression and anxiety, and a commitment to veracity in the political sphere.

Don't hold your breath!

Again - how could existence be free from suffering? Predation is fundamental to organic life, disease inevitable, even before intelligent life develops, which still relies on predation and is subject to disease and accidents. So you're basically just repeating the same line: an expectation that if a Creator was truly benevolent, then suffering would not exist. And I think it's a false expectation.

As for the meaning crisis, it's an undeniable fact of modern existence. John Vervaeke expresses it in the foreword to his lecture series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, like this:

We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. There are increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, suicide rates are going up in North America, parts of Europe, other parts of the world. And that mental health crisis is itself due to and engaged with crises in the environment and the political system. And those in turn are immeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis I call the meaning crisis. So the meaning crisis expresses itself and many people are giving voice to this in many different ways, is this increasing sense of bullshit. Bullshit is on the increase. It's more and more pervasive throughout our lives and there's this sense of drowning in this old ocean of bullshit. And we have to understand why is this the case and what can we do about it? So today there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, from a viable and foreseeable future. — John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Which part of that isn't true?

//that said, I can't really fathom Christian teaching about 'God's love', other than to think it must be a pretty tough love.//

It has been intrinsic historically, but would you agree it isn’t so much anymore? — Mww

Well, sure, nowadays physics has metaphysics which has not much to do with divinity, although that is rather an old-fashioned word. And yes, that is an excepctionally good book.

I don't understand why you're entitled to your "God-child" who plays hide-and-seek and goes on adventures, but others can't have their divine hotel manager. — goremand

I recommend a read of The Supreme Identity, Alan Watts. He spells it out in considerably more detail than I am able to reproduce in a forum thread.

One of the formative books in my quest was Alan Watts' The Supreme Identity (although I don't know how well it has aged). But something I took from this book, is that the cause of suffering is a consequence of our mis-identification with who or what we really are. Because of this mis-identification - this is what 'ignorance' means - we fall into states of suffering, which can extend over lifetimes (or 'aeons of kalpas' in Indian mythology). Realising the 'supreme identity' is the seeing through of that illusory sense of identity, and the awakening to our true nature, which is somehow beyond death and decay. Of course, this is a motif that is found in many cultures (think Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey). You can find analogies for it in philosophies East and West. And I think seeing it in those terms (rather than just through the prism of inherited religious lore) gives it credibility, at least for me. So again, in analytic terms, the aim of the paths of liberation or enlightenment, is to come to know directly a higher intelligence - not theoretically, not dogmatically, but through insight, always hard won. And that awakening, or 'return to the source', is what is being alluded to through the various religious lores that have been handed down. That on that return, the being realises it's original identity as one with that source and beyond suffering (although each cultural tradition may have very different understandings of what that means.)

The point is really just that it is impossible to improve upon a perfect and complete being, and therefore God can't possibly derive any benefit from creating the world. He can do if he wants to, it doesn't affect him either way, but it's still completely arbitrary. — goremand

In some senses, it's an adventure. According to the Alan Watts book I mentioned, and without wanting to sound flippant about a serious topic, God plays hide-and-seek with himself.

While the term 'theodicy' usually refers to attempts to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil, my use of the phrase Hotel Manager Theodicy was deliberately ironic: it criticizes a particular framing in which God is seen as a kind of cosmic service provider which I think misrepresents the metaphysical depth of classical theism and the spiritual traditions it emerges from.

Would the irrational number, π, also constitute some understanding of The Forms? — Shawn

According to legend, the Pythagoreans—followers of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras—believed that all things could be explained through whole numbers and their ratios. This harmonious view of the cosmos was shattered when it was discovered that some quantities, like the square root of 2, could not be expressed as a ratio of whole numbers. These “irrational numbers” deeply troubled the Pythagoreans, as they threatened the foundation of their mathematical and philosophical beliefs. The story goes that the man who revealed this unsettling truth—often said to be Hippasus—was drowned at sea, possibly by his fellow Pythagoreans, as punishment for exposing a truth they considered too dangerous or sacrilegious to be known.

There were similar controversies over the discovery of zero, which was likewise opposed on dogmatic grounds, holding back progress in arithmetic for centuries, until at last it was imported from Indian mathematicians, via Islamic scholars, who had no such qualms.

I think a case can be made that the forms are nearer to what we would call principles. Have a read of the chapter on Plato in this .pdf book, it will set you straight

I suppose they were complaining to the front desk clerk expecting it to get relayed to the manager. — Hanover

To good effect, considering what happened next.

to short-circuit the Free Will Defense at this point, we can simply limit the suffering in question to the so-called natural evils -- disease, earthquake, accident, etc. What loving parent would do this to their children? "After all, life is supposed to be good, right?" No, this is the wrong point. God is supposed to be good. — J

That’s a fair challenge, and I agree it raises one of the most serious theological tensions in the Abrahamic traditions: the insistence that God is loving and good, and yet the world is filled with devastating suffering — especially natural suffering that doesn’t seem to arise from human choices.

But I would make two clarifying points in response. First, the original claim — that nowhere in the sacred texts is there a promise that life will be free of suffering — is an observation about the narrative structure of those texts. Christianity is not founded on the promise of earthly comfort, but on the fact of the crucifiction — a figure of suffering who shares in, rather than eliminates, the world’s pain. (Again, some gnostic heresies (so-called) dispute that, by saying that in reality Christ did not suffer at all.)

Second, I’d question the modern framing of divine love as analogous to human parental love. That may itself be part of the conceptual difficulty. We naturally imagine a “loving God” as a kind of celestial caregiver who would prevent harm, much as we would do for our own children. But traditional theology has often insisted that God’s love is not sentimental or merely protective — but is also wrathful (especially in the OT.)

Philosophiclly, I'm drawn to the Thomist view (and it's in the philosophical sense that I'm drawn, not so much the devotional side.) It doesn't attempt to explain suffering away, but accepts calamity an inevitable aspect of a finite, material world. For Aquinas, suffering and death are not evils in themselves, but aspects of a world in which things come to be, change, and pass away. That doesn’t make suffering good in the moral sense, but that the presence of suffering in nature is not evidence of divine malice. As folks like to say nowadays, it is what it is. It’s a view that offers philosophical clarity without diminishing the gravity of suffering itself.

If this life is all there is, I would find the idea of a loving God absurd, and would reject all the theodicies I've ever seen. — J

That, I think, is the consensus view in a secular culture. The nearest thing to eternal life that can be envisaged is interstellar travel, hence the popularity of the genre.

a self-sufficient being doesn't need to design a game of "struggle of lower beings to recognize X, Y, Z", and "learning their lessons through cycles of suffering". This just seems all too human.. — schopenhauer1

@goremand When it comes to omniscience, I'm unwilling to claim that I even understand what that means. I don't think it means that all of the content of what humans believe they know is known by an omniscient mind, in that it's feasible that what we think we know might be illusory and so not a real object of knowledge. Perhaps what we call real includes distorted cognitioins that only exist for us because of our limited perspective. The real object of knowledge is not the falsehoods we believe, but the truth that they veil.

You don’t. My family were from an anglican backround but were not religious.

Sounds like some ancient Hebrews kvetching (bitching in the way only Hebrews do) to their hotel manager about their accomodations — Hanover

They were ‘crying out’ to the Lord, but actually talking to Moses, weren’t they?

*

The David Bentley Hart passage that @Count Timothy von Icarus quotes, explicitly criticizes the 'greater purpose' view. As to why evil is possible at all, I think the orthodox answer is that it is because we are free agents, able to choose to do good or evil, otherwise our freedom would be pointless - we'd just be animals, or automatons. Don't overlook the symbology of the choice of the apple 'from the tree of knowledge of good and evil'. To me, that signifies the origin of self-consciousness, with the burdens and possibilities that it brings. As to 'why creation in the first place', a philosophical perspective is that through the process of 'descending' into organic existence, the Deity is able to discover horizons of being that could otherwise never be explored. (This is something that Alan Watts writes about, also.)

And, hey, these are very deep questions. I'm not trying to push a polemical barrow here, just exploring them.

Now that the system is being tested, are people sure it will work to protect democracy? — Christoffer

Many are :pray: for exactly that.

That's a tricky perspective to proffer, if you ask me, since the very condition of life is suffering - it depends upon it for its continuance. — Tom Storm

As I mention in the OP, that life is suffering is the foundational truth of Buddhism. But that is not the end of life, indeed it is the first of the 'four noble truths', the remainder comprising the cause, the end, and the way to reach the end of suffering. The first link in the chain of 'dependent origination' - the psycho-physical complex that is the driving force behind lived existence - is ignorance, avidya, which is the lack of insight or knowledge into what enmeshes one in suffering.

God is supposed to be the author of everything, something that he sincerely opposed would never exist in the first place. — goremand

You might rephrase that, because, as written, it does not parse.

-----

I'll add another philosophical note here - again, not intended as religious apologetic, but as a way of expressing an existential truth in analytical terms. One of the formative books in my quest was Alan Watts' The Supreme Identity (although I don't know how well it has aged). But something I took from this book, is that the cause of suffering is a consequence of our mis-identification with who or what we really are. Because of this mis-identification - this is what 'ignorance' means - we fall into states of suffering, which can extend over lifetimes (or 'aeons of kalpas' in Indian mythology). Realising the 'supreme identity' is the seeing through of that illusory sense of identity, and the awakening to our true nature, which is somehow beyond death and decay. Of course, this is a motif that is found in many cultures (think Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey). You can find analogies for it in philosophies East and West. And I think seeing it in those terms (rather than just through the prism of inherited religious lore) gives it credibility, at least for me. So again, in analytic terms, the aim of the paths of liberation or enlightenment, is to come to know directly a higher intelligence - not theoretically, not dogmatically, but through insight, always hard won. And that awakening, or 'return to the source', is what is being alluded to through the various religious lores that have been handed down. That on that return, the being realises it's original identity as one with that source and beyond suffering (although each cultural tradition may have very different understandings of what that means.)

I didn't intend this as an essay in religious apologetics, and I didn't (and generally don't) quote scripture. It's an essay in philosophy of religion, the point of which is to try and articulate what I see as a misconception about the problem of evil, based on a misunderstanding of some religious perspectives on that question.

That said, the passage from David Bentley Hart offers a powerful theological stance worth acknowledging. His view, as I read it, is not that suffering is part of God's plan, but that it stands as a distortion of it — something God opposes and ultimately redeems. So he's breaking from the 'it's all part of the plan' rationalisation which sometimes characterises traditional theology. He distinguishes between optimism, which attempts to rationalize suffering as necessary, and hope, which insists that suffering and evil really are evils, but are destined to be overcome. From that perspective, God is not the author of suffering but its adversary — not the architect of the “charnel house,” but the sure refuge beyond.

'Dragging Trump out of the White House' won't happen, but there's a lot of protest movements starting to appear. The judges are holding firm (the Boasberg case has another hearing tomorrow, meanwhile the Judge Xinis has issued a blistering rebuke of Adminstration foot-dragging in the Abrego Garcia case.) And, we've read about the Prada case in the NY Times. If it happened in Russia, nobody would ever read about it. So all is not lost.

Of course there are many legitimate grounds for deporting illegally-arrived migrants
— Wayfarer

They're being in the country, for one. — AmadeusD

There's a story today about a Venezualan immigrant, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, (whether documented or not, it doesn't say) who mistakenly crossed the bridge from Detroit into Canada whilst on a food-delivery run. Trying to come back into the US he was stopped at the border and taken into custody. 'On March 15, he told a friend in Chicago that he was among a number of detainees housed in Texas who expected to be repatriated to Venezuela. That evening, the Trump administration flew three planes carrying Venezuelan migrants from the Texas facility to El Salvador, where they have been ever since, locked up in a maximum-security prison and denied contact with the outside world. But Mr. Prada has not been heard from or seen. He is not on a list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador that day. He does not appear in the photos and videos released by the authorities of shackled men with shaved heads.' Nobody now knows where he is. To all intents and purposes, he's dissappeared, like people do in Russia and China and Iran. But not, until now, in the USA.

Couldn't he have left well enough alone? — goremand

You mean, not created the world?

the obvious answer to the problem as you put it is to conclude that suffering is in fact not evil — goremand

It's one answer, although suffering that is inflicted, or intentionally brought about, is generally regarded as evil (although to explore that topic would require further consideration.)

I don't see relying on philosophy for that, though again you may disagree, and think more benevolently of it. — J

I believe that this is where philosophy started, but that it's not necessarily where it has remained. But one of the things I liked about John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is that he takes this broad and holistic view of philosophy which updates the language of philocophical praxis in the light of science, but tries to retain that sense of striving for the 'unitive vision' (hence his frequent appeals to neoplatonism.) But that is a separate discussion. (Take that comment as a footnote ;-) )

I thoroughly agree with everything you say here (until the last paragraph). To go from "each individual must make their own judgments, illuminated by reason and conscience as best they can" to "all individual judgments are equally perspicuous and moral" is the mistake, and a big one. — J

It's a thorny issue and one which I've by no means resolved. But I appreciate the opportunity to try and spell it out in response to your perceptive remarks.

I'll try and explain what I meant by subjectivism. It's not as if it's a doctrine or school of thought; only that, for deep questions of value and meaning, as these are not necessarily adjudicable by science, then whatever is held about them, is said to be a personal matter, or a matter for individual judgement.
— Wayfarer

Let's make it a little clearer. Deep questions of value and meaning are matters for individual judgment; how could they be otherwise? You can't look them up in a textbook. What you mean, I think, is that subjectivism believes that human judgment has no further court of appeal, where it might receive an answer as to whether the judgment is correct or not. In that sense, these judgments are either based on subjective considerations that don't necessarily hold from one person to the next, or they are unfounded by a first principle of rationality. — J

Yes, you've put your finger on the core of the issue. It's not that I dispute the necessity of individual conscience in matters of value and meaning—on the contrary, I believe it's fundamental. But when conscience is understood as operating in a vacuum, with no orientation toward something beyond the self, then we begin to slide into a kind of subjectivism by default. That is, moral and existential judgments are no longer seen as having truth value—only personal significance.

This is where Protagoras' dictum, “man is the measure of all things,” becomes relevant. In its modern form, it translates into the belief that each person determines what is true or good for themselves. But Plato's critique in the Theaetetus still holds weight: if each individual's judgment is equally valid, then there is no way to distinguish between wisdom and ignorance, or truth and error. That undermines not only moral philosophy, but the very idea of reasoned discourse

For Plato—and for the classical tradition more broadly—there is a real Good, not merely as a cultural construct, but as a reality to which human reason and conscience are oriented. The challenge of philosophy is not to invent values, but to perceive them properly, through moral discernment, reflection, and a kind of intellectual eros.

The modern difficulty is that, with the decline of metaphysical traditions (including Christianity), we've retained the form of conscience and moral autonomy, but severed it from the structure that once gave it direction. And so we end up with a curious inversion: the authority of the individual is absolute, but the content of what they believe is seen as purely personal. Hence, nihil ultra ego. It's what I was saying earlier in this thread.

It's been slow to dawn on me that others on TPF, including yourself to an extent, view "liberalism" as an entire panoply of philosophical and ethical attitudes, intent on various levels of proselytizing — J

That's fair. It might be that my criticism is more of modern culture. For instance that provided in 'The Blind Spot of Science, by Thompson, Frank and Gleiser. It's not as if liberalism 'proselytizes' so much as embodies an assumed consensus that puts the burden of proof on those who question it.

I'll try and explain what I meant by subjectivism. It's not as if it's a doctrine or school of thought; only that, for deep questions of value and meaning, as these are not necessarily adjuticable by science, then whatever is held about them, is said to be a personal matter, or a matter for individual judgement.

I agree with your depiction of an ideal liberalism, and I'm inclined to support liberalism as a political philosophy, but modern liberalism is typically missing a dimension of existence, one that used to be supplied by religion(s). (Nevertheless if I were a US voter, I'd vote Democrat, but I think more of the 'Christian democratic' ilk - politically conservative but socially progressive, if that makes sense.)

They're being in the country, for one — AmadeusD

That can't be assumed. A subject might arrive illegally seeking refuge from threat of death or starvation. That's why they have to be assessed. Agree that border policy was a major weakness of the previous administration, but abnegation of the Constitution is not a remedy.

I don't think anyone should have rights simply by arriving (illegally) in the country. — AmadeusD

But they do! That’s the whole point. It’s the same in Australia. It also precipitated a political crisis about ten - fifteen years ago when boats kept arriving, mainly via Indonesia, with asylum seekers from many different countries. Once they’re in Australian jurisdiction, then they do have rights, even if they’ve arrived without any authorisation. Australia developed a pretty draconian exclusion policy and started to incarcerate arrivals in offshore detention in New Guinea and Nauru where many languished for years before ultimately being re-settled. The situation is not so intense now, but then, Australia is an island. But the same kinds of problems are occurring in crossings of the English Channel. That’s what I meant by ‘osmosis’ - once they arrive in a country where human rights are recognised, they can’t be returned to one that doesn’t recognise them, as it’s a human rights violation.

In the US, there is an over-arching need to be seen to be deporting millions of people, and ICE is unable to meet its targets by legitimate means. So it seems that ICE is just pulling out files of individuals and stamping them VIOLENT CRIMINAL - FOR DEPORTATION, and then going and picking them up, bundling them onto planes and out of US jurisdiction. It’s a blatant violation of the constitutional rights of even non-US citizens, which is the grounds on which it has been challenged in the courts. The Supreme Court issued an emergency stay the other day ordering these deportations under the Alien Enemies Act to be stopped pending further consideration.

Of course there are many legitimate grounds for deporting illegally-arrived migrants, but Trump, and especially Stephen Millier, are explicitly xenophobic in their attitude. I expect this is going to continue to be a major source of conflict. Trump’s administration is literally disappearing undesireables to draconian prisons without trial. Like Stalin might have.

Sure, but I would say it is arguably still better than many other interpretations given it provides an explanation for quantum behavior, it completely deflates the measurement problem and classical limit, it returns metaphysics to what is intuitive and commonsensical. — Apustimelogist

But notice that embodied unstated realist assumptions about 'what the world is like'. And as Sabine Hossenfelder points out in Lost in Math, there's this tendency in today's physics to rationalise posits on the basis that they supposedly make intuitive sense and then to devise the mathematics to make them stand up. So given your realist predilections, then this approach seems natural to you.

(As I've made clear in the other thread on this topic, I'm highly suspicious of the many-worlds theory.)

I would say from a standpoint of rationality this is a preferable theory because arguably we shouldn't update our beliefs about the universe (or anything) any more than required given the evidence. — Apustimelogist

Right - but this is because of a prior commitment to realism, right? Whereas QBism says that the wavefunction ψ does not describe something that exists objectively “out there” in the world. Instead, it represents the observer’s knowledge of the probabilities of the outcomes of observations. In other words, the wavefunction provides a rule that an agent/observer follows to update their beliefs about the likely outcomes of a quantum experiment. These probabilities, much like betting odds, are not intrinsic features of the world but rather reflect the agent’s expectations based on their unique perspective and prior information.

In QBism, measurement outcomes are seen in terms of experiences of the agent making the observation. Each agent may confer and agree upon the consequences of a measurement, but the outcome is fundamentally the experience that each of them individually has. Accordingly the wavefunction doesn’t describe the system itself but rather the agent’s belief about what might happen when they interact with it. So while quantum theory has extremely high predictive accuracy, no two observations are ever exactly the same, and each observation is unique to a particular observer at that moment. And this is being borne out by experimental validation of 'Wigner's Friend'-type scenarios.

(This doesn't mean that the outcome is entirely subjective, either, as it is constrained by the Born Rule to a range of possibilities. But it's not entirely determined, either.)

I don't know. — Quk

I'm not a physicist, what I know about it is based on readings of science and listening to lectures. But you're grasping for a simple explanation of a phenomenon which defies simple explanations. Have a look at this primer https://brilliant.org/wiki/double-slit-experiment/

The Hegseth issue continues to fester, as he's plainly, utterly incompetent for the role of CEO of the largest organisation in the world. But, hey, since when do facts matter for Trump? Besides, he won't give the media the satisfaction of a resignation. He'll dig in with the usual fire hydrant of mendacity.

On another topic, the vexed question of illegal deportations of immigrants also continues to fester.

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” Trump added in his Truth Social post. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do. What a ridiculous situation we are in.”

I've often mused in the past that one of the major problems with unauthorised immigration, is that when a subject arrives in, say, the United States, they are automatically granted certain rights, not on the basis of being citizens, but because they're humans. Among those rights are habeus corpus and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. So returning them to countries which don't recognise human rights is a violation of their rights! It's a kind of osmosis.

This is a highly inconvenient truth, as far as Trump is concerned. He's right in saying that the process of giving all these unauthorised arrivals their due is highly impractical and he's saying that completely over-riding their constitutional rights is, therefore, justified. That is what is at issue. i think this will be the arena in which the impending constitutional crisis in the form of defiance of the Courts will manifest.

Are we not talking about the double slit experiment where light is sent through slits and certain interferences are observed? — Quk

Yes - but the salient question is, why does the interference pattern occur, when light is emitted at the rate of one particle at a time? How can that result in a wave pattern? That question concerns the wave function ψ, not electromagnetic nature of light. It's easy to confuse the electro-magnetic waves, and the wave-function - this is discussed in the video linked in the OP at around 3:28 ('the Dirac wave for the electron IS NOT the Schrodinger wave'.)

Thanks for the clarification — I take your point that stochastic mechanics aims to be a constructive theory, grounding quantum phenomena in classical-like processes with added stochastic dynamics.

It does seem to follow Bohm’s realist sentiment: to recover quantum statistics from an underlying deterministic mechanism. But it still relies on a hypothetical substrate — diffusing particles and a non-dissipative background — that isn't observable and must be posited as a metaphysical assumption (presumably subject to further investigation.)

By contrast, the Copenhagen interpretation is more circumspect. It doesn’t posit unknowables, but draws a line at what can meaningfully be said — more in the spirit of Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The Copenhagen attitude is not nearly so 'mystical' as many of its critics contend. It's a philosophical humility, not a metaphysical fog.

The point is that they (i.e. religious beliefs) can't play a deliberative role, other than as a statement of what the person believes. — J

Right - that is the point I’m labouring. It’s the inevitable subjectivism that now must apply in such matters - a consequence of the individual conscience as the final arbiter of value. Everything becomes a preference, and preferences are more or less sacrosanct in liberalism (within legal limits.) 'Whatever floats your boat'.

I might seem to be advocating for religion, but it’s not my intention to evangelise. It’s my conviction that the higher religious cultures embody a cosmic philosophy, a vision of humanity’s role in the cosmos, which is lacking in the naturalism which nowadays underwrites liberalism, which is fundamentally neo-darwinian in orientation ('justice evolves') and the belief that existence lacks intrinsic purpose or virtue. It is, as Nietszche foresaw, basically nihilist in outlook (bearing in mind that nihilism is often not dramatic or outwardly obvious.)

Or would you rather we adopted a set of transcendental values, and based the polity on them? How would that differ from theocracy? (An alternative, more critical, response here would be: The liberal state does adopt a set of transcendental values, but they are precisely the procedural values of neutrality and impartiality, as Janus points out. — J

I agree that it's not the role of the state to impose values. That's why I'm trying to focus on a philosophy rather than politics. Where I think liberalism oversteps, is the kind of proselytizing secularism that believes that scientific method provides the sole criterion for truth, and the forcible rejection of any idea of there being a higher truth in the sense conveyed in the religions. ('Where's the evidence?' :brow: )

One of the better books I've read is Paul Tyson, De-fragmenting Modernity (2017):

Modernity did not usher in the long-promised utopia. There are many things wrong with culture and many instances of people being wronged in culture. There are problems to be solved: the problem of meaning, the problem of value, the problem of rights and duty, and so on. But these problems can’t be solved because of a deeper systemic—or better, philosophical—problem with modernity. The root problem of modern society, according to Paul Tyson in his book De-Fragmenting Modernity, is that “Modern Western knowledge is blind to truths of being and belief” (p. 5). To moderns, only objective facts, shorn of value judgments, are knowable. When it comes to “being” or questions of ultimate reality, modernity delivers scientifically discoverable atomic truths understood within the immanent frame (Charles Taylor’s term) of a causally-closed physical universe, a universe devoid of meaning, purpose, or value. Tyson argues for abandoning of this shallow modern life-world picture and a turning back to a more ancient and Platonic way of conceiving things. Fundamentally, this change involves the adoption of the ontological priority of being and an openness to transcendence.

It is true that that is a much more religiously-oriented way of being, but it doesn't necessarily have to be imposed on the political level. So, ironically, it *is* up to the individual, not in reliance on some institutional framework, to see through and beyond it. Which is a very difficult thing to do.

Understood — Quk

I don't think so. I think you're confusing electromagnetic waves with the wavefunction in quantum physics. This thread is about the latter, not the former.

Wayfarer especially has this bias, which is why I can push his buttons by mentioning MWI. — noAxioms

Nothing to do with bias, but a considered judgement. I'm one of (apparently quite a few people) who simply think that Everett's metaphysics (as this is what it was) is absurd.

There's an interesting account of the genesis of Everett's ideas in a Scientific American article The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III:

Everett’s scientific journey began one night in 1954, he recounted two decades later, “after a slosh or two of sherry.” He and his Princeton classmate Charles Misner and a visitor named Aage Petersen (then an assistant to Niels Bohr) were thinking up “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics.” During this session Everett had the basic idea behind the many-worlds theory, and in the weeks that followed he began developing it into a dissertation.

(The 'slosh or two of sherry' became more than that, as he died an alcoholic, emotionally estranged from all around him, with instructions that his cremated ashes be put in the household trash, which they were, having long since left theoretical physics for a career charting the re-entry paths for ICBM warheads.)

Everett addressed the measurement problem by merging the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. He made the observer an integral part of the system observed, introducing a universal wave function that links observers and objects as parts of a single quantum system. He described the macroscopic world quantum mechanically and thought of large objects as existing in quantum superpositions as well. Breaking with Bohr and Heisenberg, he dispensed with the need for the discontinuity of a wave-function collapse.

Everett’s radical new idea was to ask, What if the continuous evolution of a wave function is not interrupted by acts of measurement? What if the Schrödinger equation always applies and applies to everything—objects and observers alike? What if no elements of superpositions are ever banished from reality? What would such a world appear like to us?

Everett saw that under those assumptions, the wave function of an observer would, in effect, bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with a superposed object. The universal wave function would contain branches for every alternative making up the object’s superposition. Each branch has its own copy of the observer, a copy that perceived one of those alternatives as the outcome. According to a fundamental mathematical property of the Schrödinger equation, once formed, the branches do not influence one another. Thus, each branch embarks on a different future, independently of the others.

Isn't it obvious that 'bifurcation' and 'branching' are in effect metaphysical postulates? And that they're postulated in order to avoid the scientifically-embarrasing implications of the so-called 'Copenhagen interpretation', which Everett sought to challenge?

What Everett avoids is wavefunction collapse — but what he adds is a multiplying ontology of parallel, and forever unknowable, worlds. That’s not an empirical discovery, but a philosophical wager — one many find less compelling than the problem it was designed to solve.

Philip Ball also has a critical chapter on Many Worlds in his book Beyond Weird, which can be reviewed here:

What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains...

What varies in an electromagnetic wave? — Quk

Good question, to which I don’t know the answer - but the wavefunction doesn’t describe an electromagnetic wave. The wavefunction is a wave-like distribution of possibilities, but it’s not *actually* a wave. That’s something the video linked in the OP explains (he also remarks that it is a source of confusion about the importance of waves in quantum mechanics.)

the stochastic interpretation amounts to a phenomenological interpretation of quantum statistics that doesn't explain entanglement and the origin of Bells inequalities. — sime

Right. The theory accounts for the observed statistical patterns of quantum mechanics (similar to the Born rule), but it does so by modelling outcomes, not necessarily by explaining the underlying quantum structure. So it’s phenomenological in the scientific sense of being descriptive, not necessarily explanatory.

Is that correct?

That's why I keep asking about if, say, a hurricane, a chair etc is really a true physical object — boundless

Which is tantamount to asking if anything is truly physical.

Let's see what the original poster has to say.