People don't have Free Will. They have choice in direction, but so does everyone else. Some may choose to try to abuse animals, while others may choose to resist their attempts. Choice in direction does not determine outcome. No one can predict outcomes. It all depends.

This is concretely how nature evolves. There is no reason to introduce God, Laws of Nature, Free Will, or any other notion. All we have to do is observe what is actually taking place. People are choosing what they would like to do, but it never happens in exactly the way that it is imagined. The future is unknown.

I think it's nonsense because "free will" is vague, and I think something like constrained intentions. We can't freely will things, except in some imaginary sense that need not actually come to fruition. We can just try to make things happen, and we basically start out playing a game that we don't even know the rules of.

But God, having much greater ability than us to prevent evils, does not do so. — Marchesk

Your post is entirely anthropomorphic. 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.

According to the main Christian denominations, humans are autonomous agents who are able to behave as they wish. They might say that the superior way of life has been revealed through the Mosaic law and the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, and that if more people followed it then these atrocities would be less frequent.

But the idea that God is the kind of being who can appear on a hypothetical chariot - I suppose it would be a helicopter nowadays - and command malefactors to 'cease and desist' is a caricature of the idea. God is not a movie director, or a super-hero, or even a super-parent. I'm sure the allegory of 'father' is just that - an allegory.

So, again, you take it that the world is not actually like heaven, where nobody ever is hurt or dies, where there is no disease and everyone is always happy, as an indication that God is responsible.

I haven't read C S Lewis God in the Dock, but I have a feeling that this is what it is about.

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

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.

But God, having much greater ability than us to prevent evils, does not do so. The conclusion from this is that God values free will more than the good, which makes God something other than perfectly good. — Marchesk

Free will is the good because it is what allows the truth to be known.

We can imagine another being who values free will to such an extent. Lucifer of yth and fiction is often portrayed as the embodiment of free will, rebelling against God's plan, and embracing or promoting all that is bad. — Marchesk

Lucifer is the exact opposite of the embodiment of free will. Lucifer is fated to eternal damnation, for clinging to false belief, and being the false authority, "promoting all that is bad", denying that the free will to choose for oneself what to believe, is the true good.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The idea that God is good is an anthropomorphic idea, based on what human beings value as good. — Marchesk

It has turned out that way, but it's not the intent. I think that is how it is understood in an unreligious age.

I found the quote I was thinking of:

The 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

Christians don't behave as if being wholly autonomous in society is desireable. — Marchesk

But that's because they don't believe that freedom consists in pleasing yourself, or doing what you like. According to them, freedom is found in abandoning the self, not in fulfilling it. That is of course inconceivable for most of us, who believe nihil ultra ego.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is believers who put the notion out there that a perfect being permits such things to happen. — Marchesk

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

The problem is that you (not just you) don't understand what is the problem that religions seek to solve. Modern cultures, generally, have lost all sense of what that might be, and so the religious ideas that are associated with the problem and its solution, don't make any sense in this context.

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.

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.

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. However, I have never been (as is probably obvious) an atheist and/or materialist (the two often go together) - so the upshot is, I tend to respond from a more 'pan-spiritual' or universalist perspective.

So, on those grounds, I really don't see any merit in the argument that deity is responsible for the obvious evils that you see in history. Looking at the most egregious evils of the 20th C, and surely the Holocaust must be one of them, how would deity supposedly go about interfering with that, or stopping it happening? I just think the idea that God 'permits' such things, as if he or she or it has some executive ability to legislate what ought or ought not to happen, is a misperception of what the meaning of God is in the first place.

I think a plausible conception of deity is 'transcendent yet immanent' - one who is both beyond the world, yet also within it, as intelligence and compassion. When beings manifest intelligence and compassion, then they are figuratively speaking acting in conformance with the divine will (logos or dharma or tao). When they act out of fear, hatred, jealousy, nationalism, and all of the other obstructions, then they're contravening that. And it is that contravention or 'privation of the good' which is the source of evil as far as I am concerned.

And that has even been done by those purportedly acting on behalf of religion itself, which is even more egregious. I would never deny that religions are responsible for evils, as they so clearly have been. But again I attribute that to human ignorance and hatred rather than anything supposedly done by deity.

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.

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.

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.

Imagine parents who permit their kids to torture animals, terrorize neighborhood kids, steal and vandalize, etc. They do this because they value the free will of their children, which is considered a higher good and more loving than constraining their will. — Marchesk

Let's give God a break. The problem is parents and their children. The parents exercise their free will by allowing their children to behave like monsters (which is an act of commission). Their monster-children have a vague but strong id which drives all kinds of behavior, some of it pleasant, some of it not. In the case of many younger people, I wouldn't even call it "will" yet. It's more like "urge".

Parents have the capacity, duty, and responsibility to curb the urges of their offspring. This is what parenting is all about: civilizing id-driven savages so that the are socially acceptable, socially useful, and capable of being happy without mayhem.

Having free will is no guarantee that things will work out well.

If the defence is that the Problem of Evil accusation is too anthropomorphic, CS Lewis is not a suitable lawyer for the defence, as he, being a very traditional, orthodox Christian, is deeply mired in the anthropomorphic concept of God - the 'God made man in his own image' idea that is encouraged by the Bible.

A better choice would be a Christian mystic - say somebody like Simone Weil.

I also think that Lewis is wrong to say that God is in the dock. What is in the dock is the anthropomorphic concept of God promoted by doctrinaire apologists like Lewis. If that concept were to be convicted and sent into exile (which, alas will not happen), everybody would be a winner, including Christians, who could then flourish with a more authentic religious form of devotion.

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. — Marchesk

Of course, Yahweh didn't flood the earth in Noah's or anybody else's time. Are you trying to sound provocative?

God didn't make Adam and Eve, put them in a zoo, and tell them not to eat certain plant products, either. You know as well as I do that much of the Bible is a mythopoetic account of the alleged actions of an alleged god toward his alleged favorite group of people, who are apparently quite ungrateful for his alleged efforts on their behalf.

God neither started nor failed to prevent WW2. That was, as usual. human folly at work.

Yet the God of monotheistic religions is said to permit this sort of behavior from us because of free will. Slavery, genocide, war, child soldiers, rape, etc. is allowed to take place, even though God is good and able to prevent them. — Marchesk

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, cancer cures, Ben and Jerry's great flavors of ice cream, high quality rapid transit systems, fine gin, whiskey, and bourbon, kind humble people (millions of them--count 'em!), smart, polite children and pets, and so on.

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.

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

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.

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.

Metaphors are not to be taken literally.

Metaphors are not to be taken literally. — Bitter Crank

Sure, but they can aid an argument. If parents allowing their kids to have free reign over the neighborhood is considered immoral, then God allowing us to have free reign over the Earth can't be good.