I can’t really look at this through the idea of God creating man. So i suppose I shouldn’t be here.

in fact if free will has any role, it would be to allow the robot to be good, not bad. — TheMadFool

I can’t think of anything that’s only bad. So when you create a robot that’s bad then it’s not a very realistic proposition. God or nature did not create a bad creature. They created a creature capable of being good and bad, that is they were whole, complete. Whether you believe in God or not they have free will.

I am grateful but the free will defense for the problem of evil is wrong. — TheMadFool

Probably so. So what? What did the Church and the Apostles mean by “free will” anyway? The ability to choose evil? That’s simplistic bullshit. If you’re going to read any sacred text, you can’t check your mind at the door. You have to know how the text came about, which parts were chosen to be included and why and by whom, and you have to search for truth in it. It takes a critical mind. It’s not all bullshit, but some of it doesn’t serve God but instead serves the corrupt men responsible for its distribution. The Bible is part truth and part propaganda. You have to have world experience to know what’s what. I’m sorry that “Christians” have ruined God for you.

A well-known "solution" to the problem of evil is that god allows evil because he desired to bestow free will upon us. Thus, we, possessed of free-will, have the liberty to do anything and "sometimes" we do evil and hence there is evil in the world. — TheMadFool

I just want to clarify this. You mean that in order for free will to exist, to be given it by God, we must be evil and good, there must be two opposites to chose from otherwise there is no free will. If we are just evil then there is no other way of acting and vice versa.

So therefore to have free will we must have a tendency for evil. So yes, God allowed for evil so that free will could exist.

Edit: but it’s an interesting notion that God gave us free will when he could have just made us good. Only in terms of the God, story though.

Would we have been complete if we were only good?

No, because we had to be free otherwise we were not complete.

I’m sorry. I got a little agitated. It wasn’t really about you.

This is very enlightened. I just prefer the theistic bias as opposed to the atheistic or other bias. I think there is something in us that continues on after our bodies die. I have no proof of this in a scientific sense, but what would that proof even look like? I have my reasons which are sufficient for me. — Noah Te Stroete

That’s fair enough - I have a problem with ignorance in preferring either bias, but otherwise I think it’s possible for a both/and approach to this question of existence. I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘something in us’. Personally, I think it’s our perceived potentiality that continues on in the minds of those with whom we’ve connected in life, which enables ‘who we are’ to interact with the world after our bodies die. So, for me, it’s not something in us, but the immaterial and irreducible qualities of our relations with others that we should be maximising while we’re alive.

That’s fair enough - I have a problem with ignorance in preferring either bias, but otherwise I think it’s possible for a both/and approach to this question of existence. I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘something in us’. Personally, I think it’s our perceived potentiality that continues on in the minds of those with whom we’ve connected in life, which enables ‘who we are’ to interact with the world after our bodies die. So, for me, it’s not something in us, but the immaterial and irreducible qualities of our relations with others that we should be maximising while we’re alive. — Possibility

This is also a good, honest philosophy. I can’t say I find fault with it.

What is happiness? — TheMadFool

The way I see it, ‘happiness’ refers to an interoception of positive affect in the organism. What we do with that and how we conceptualise these instances in our subjective experience is continually up for debate. We like to think of ourselves as an essence that doesn’t change over time, and we prefer ‘happy’ as a more permanent state for that essence, so we attempt to attribute this positive affect to more observable/measurable concepts or ‘causes’, like wealth and property, friendships and family, work-life or pleasure-pain balance. ‘Happiness’ may be relative to all of these (or none), depending on the unique combination of value systems we subscribe to. The problem is that nothing is permanent, and so we spend all our energy trying to conceptualise a sustained state of ‘perfection’ that doesn’t correspond to reality.

What do we fear? Do we fear to be unhappy, whatever that means? In my book, we seem to fear suffering, itself and its cause, generally identified as evil. If so, do you think fear is conducive to free will? Can we fear and still be free? What about the problem of evil? If our motivation is based entirely on fear of evil (suffering & its cause) does it make sense to claim god allows evil so that we may be free? — TheMadFool

I think our fear of ‘suffering’ or ‘being unhappy’ and therefore associating these instances with ‘evil’ is where we create a distorted perspective of reality. Like ‘happiness’, we also attempt to attribute the negative affect from ‘suffering’ (pain, humility, loss or lack) to more observable/measurable concepts or ‘causes’ that we are motivated to ignore, isolate or exclude from our conceptualisation of the world. When we label something as ‘evil’, we’re no longer trying to increase awareness, connection or collaboration with it, are we? In fact, we even value an ignorance of evil as innocence, or a hatred of evil as righteousness. This is fear talking.

Experiences of pain, humility, loss and lack point to the reality of our relationship with the universe in contrast with our conceptualised predictions. If we fear these experiences, then we are motivated to ignore reality in favour of retaining the concepts we construct, and we limit our capacity to interact with the world. This where our will is free only insofar as we are aware of our capacity to interact with whatever it is that we fear.

In my view, we cannot exclude ‘evil’ from our understanding of ‘God’ and still claim to be free. But I think we also need to recognise that ‘evil’ is a category of our own making, not of ‘God’’s. We won’t eliminate ‘evil’ from reality by excluding it from our concepts. I think the hardest part about understanding ‘evil’ is realising that the only ‘evil’ in the world from ‘God’’s point of view is in humanity’s fearful interaction with the world.

I think the hardest part about understanding ‘evil’ is realising that the only ‘evil’ in the world from ‘God’’s point of view is in humanity’s fearful interaction with the world. — Possibility

Awesome! Like the Psalm that goes “I shall fear no evil...” You’ve been brilliant in this thread. Just don’t let it go to your head, as no state is permanent! :wink:

Without getting into modern or even classical Calvinism (there are like 10 different versions of Calvinism or reformed faith), you are 100% correct. Failure is always found by those who actually have the ability to see reality for what it is. I'm not saying we need to go out of our way to be sad but the saying goes like this "ignorance is bliss". This is why some people go sky diving or shark fighting. I wish you all the happiness in the world my friend.

I believe humans are motivated primarily by a desire to be happy. When a person's actions do not contribute to or even undermine their happiness, I consider those actions ignorant. — Tzeentch

Are you talking about modern humans or human nature since they stood on two legs? At what stage do you think a desire for happiness entered the picture?

That’s where we’ll never agree.
— Brett

You don't think chimpanzees have a culture? — Isaac


Maybe you’re being amusing. But in any case I mean we’ll never agree over the whole nature/nurture thing. — Brett

There were only two parts to the post to which you responded. One was an assertion about animal culture...

"But all creatures like us are embedded in a culture"

The other was a question...

".. so how would you know that angry behaviour isn't also the product of culture, learned during childhood?"

Since you can't very well disagree with a question, I could only presume that our disagreement was over the assertion - that animals have a culture.

If that's not what you disagree with, then I'm at a loss to understand your reply, I'm afraid.

I've read that it's possible that animals such as chimpanzees have a "proto-culture" or "pro-morality or premoral sentiments).

I'm not an expert on ants, but ant colonies are comparable in a lot of ways to human cities.

But all creatures like us are embedded in a culture, s — Isaac

I understood your post to mean us and animals.

Embedded in culture was the point. Your post suggests that we are our culture. That was what I could not agree on. My position is that we create our culture, not the other way around.

My position is that we create our culture, not the other way around. — Brett

I see. You'd said that...

Those are actions of free will, maybe imbedded in culture over time but not inherent in us, they’re learned. — Brett

... as a means of distinguishing anger (as an example of a 'natural tendency') from civility (which I introduced as a convenient catch-all term for what you were describing as choosing sometimes not to assert anger).

Since all intelligent animals have a culture, then all intelligent animals have the possibility that the behaviour they exhibit is 'learnt behaviour', yes?

So what I'm asking is - if any exhibited behaviour could be learned behaviour (including the behaviour of other animals), then how do you know that anger-associated behaviour is not learned (but rather is a 'natural tendency'), but civility is learned?

In other words - all you can see is behaviour, you are divining the origin of that behaviour (natural vs learned), I'm asking what features you're using to make that determination.

Tricky subject, but I think that it's well documented, such as by biology or evolutionary psychology that not all behavior is "learnt", as in the outdated myth of "Tabula Rasa" (which even during the day and age when it was popular, was known to be nonsense by legal theorists, such as Holmes in "The Common Law").

As far as "civility" or the law is concerned, the premise of the legal philosophy seems to be that some things are more or less rationally discernable, such as once a person enters the "age of reason" (e.x. that rape and murder is illegal and immoral), and a person can't claim "ignorance" of the law or "bad parental upbringing" as an excuse for their behavior.

... as a means of distinguishing anger (as an example of a 'natural tendency') from civility (which I introduced as a convenient catch-all term for what you were describing as choosing sometimes not to assert anger). — Isaac

Anger = natural tendency

Civility = free will applied, creates cultural styles

Since all intelligent animals have a culture, then all intelligent animals have the possibility that the behaviour they exhibit is 'learnt behaviour', yes? — Isaac

Not necessarily. Not all behaviour can be learned. Cultural norms are learned, passed on through mimicry.

So what I'm asking is - if any exhibited behaviour could be learned behaviour (including the behaviour of other animals), then how do you know that anger-associated behaviour is not learned (but rather is a 'natural tendency'), but civility is learned? — Isaac

Anger could be learned as a tool to get what you want. Animals may mimic their elders. But you have to possess that anger first. It’s real, not an act. It’s like our mind learning to speak or write, there has to be something inherent in us to approach those possibilities.

They created a creature capable of being good and bad, that is they were whole, complete. W — Brett

So therefore to have free will we must have a tendency for evil. So yes, God allowed for evil so that free will could exist. — Brett

How would you describe the world in terms of good and evil? Balanced? More evil? More good? Examine the prize and the punishment on offer. That which we don't want to do but we should be doing needs incentives and being good earns you a ticket to heaven. That which we want to do but shouldn't do needs disincentives and being evil assures eternal torment in hell. The way the reward-punishment system in religion is structured suggests in no uncertain terms that we prefer not to do good (why promise heaven?) and, not surprisingly to me, that we prefer to do evil (why threaten hell?). Why would god offer an incentive to do good if people wanted to do good? Why would god threaten people who didn't want to do evil? It is precisely because people don't want to be good and people want to be bad that we have an incentive/disincentive scheme. Ergo, people have a, if you wish, a greater tendency to be evil. Some very wise person once told me that being good is like climbing up a hill, tough and being bad is like walking down a hill, easy.

I think fear has a lot to do with morality: fear of hell for the religious and fear of incarceration or even the death penalty for those who think religion is bullshit.

Fear is extremely important to my point because hell/jail/the gallows serve as threats to prevent people from doing what they want as opposed to heaven, tax breaks, recognition, respect, all rewards to encourage people to do what they don't want. Since it doesn't make sense for god to incentivize something we already want to do and threaten us with dire consequences for something we don't want to do, the concepts of hell and heaven, reward and punishment testify to what our nature is: we're disinclined to do good, thus the reward and we're innately evil, thus the punishment.

That which we want to do but shouldn't do needs disincentives and being evil assures eternal torment in hell. The way the reward-punishment system in religion is structured suggests in no uncertain terms that we prefer not to do good (why promise heaven?) and, not surprisingly to me, that we prefer to do evil (why threaten hell?). — TheMadFool

Like I said, if it’s all based on a belief in God then I can’t really engage with this idea of heaven being a reward.

How would you describe the world in terms of good and evil? Balanced? More evil? More good? — TheMadFool

I would say balanced and leaning towards good.

Fear is extremely important to my point because hell/jail/the gallows serve as threats to prevent people from doing what they want — TheMadFool

But the gallows doesn’t stop that.

But the gallows doesn’t stop that. — Brett

SYSTEM FAILURE

I’m sure there’s meaning there but I don’t get it.

It doesn't matter. Thanks for your input.

Fear is extremely important to my point because hell/jail/the gallows serve as threats to prevent people from doing what they want as opposed to heaven, tax breaks, recognition, respect, all rewards to encourage people to do what they don't want. Since it doesn't make sense for god to incentivize something we already want to do and threaten us with dire consequences for something we don't want to do, the concepts of hell and heaven, reward and punishment testify to what our nature is: we're disinclined to do good, thus the reward and we're innately evil, thus the punishment. — TheMadFool

‘Want’ is an unhelpful way to describe it, IMO, because what we want right now doesn’t always correspond to what we want a year from now, or over the course of our lifetime, or what we want for our children or our community. This is the main reason for morality and incentives: that we recognise what we do as connected not just to the present, but also to past and future interactions with the world and with other moral agents. The capacity we have to anticipate or dread, to value the potential of events, actions and experiences in relation to time and in relation to the experiences of others, enables us to predict long-term collaborative benefits in a behaviour whose immediate or short-term value to the individual is negative, for instance, and to then incentivise that behaviour so that it appears more valuable to those whose awareness, connection and collaboration with the world may be more limited. Or alternatively, to predict long-term or widespread harm in a behaviour whose immediate or short-term value to the individual is high, and then to attach a threat to that behaviour so that it is devalued sufficient to deter those whose focus is more limited.

So I don’t think it’s a matter of being ‘disinclined to do good’ or being ‘innately evil’, but rather that these values of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are at the very least relative to the variable 4D relations between events.

‘Want’ is an unhelpful way to describe it, IMO, because what we want right now doesn’t always correspond to what we want a year from now, or over the course of our lifetime, or what we want for our children or our community. This is the main reason for morality and incentives: that we recognise what we do as connected not just to the present, but also to past and future interactions with the world and with other moral agents. The capacity we have to anticipate or dread, to value the potential of events, actions and experiences in relation to time and in relation to the experiences of others, enables us to predict long-term collaborative benefits in a behaviour whose immediate or short-term value to the individual is negative, for instance, and to then incentivise that behaviour so that it appears more valuable to those whose awareness, connection and collaboration with the world may be more limited. Or alternatively, to predict long-term or widespread harm in a behaviour whose immediate or short-term value to the individual is high, and then to attach a threat to that behaviour so that it is devalued sufficient to deter those whose focus is more limited.

So I don’t think it’s a matter of being ‘disinclined to do good’ or being ‘innately evil’, but rather that these values of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are at the very least relative to the variable 4D relations between events. — Possibility

To begin with, I want bracket off all moral theories other than religious morality in this discussion. Within the realm of religious morality, it is an undeniable fact that goodness is rewarded and evil is punished and it is this that gives us a glimpse of how we've assessed our own nature: a tendency towards evil and a reluctance to be good. If we are good by nature, why would we need positive reinforcement? Had we not the tendency to be bad, why would we put in place deterrents?

Look at the ten commandments below:

1. I am the Lord thy God
2. Thou shalt have no other gods before me
3. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
4. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain
5. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy
6. Thou shalt not murder
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery
8. Thou shalt not steal
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor
10. Thou shalt not covet (thy neighbor's house, wife, slaves, etc)

In the context of this discussion, we can add the phrase "or else...hell" after each of the commandments.

As you can see the Decalogue is primarily concerned with preventing immoral actions as indicated by all moral injunctions that have a place in the modern world beginning with the phrase "thou shalt not". This clearly shows that religious morals are essentially deterrents; in other words they exist to put a lid on a natural tendency, the tendency towards evil.

To begin with, I want bracket off all moral theories other than religious morality in this discussion. Within the realm of religious morality, it is an undeniable fact that goodness is rewarded and evil is punished and it is this that gives us a glimpse of how we've assessed our own nature: a tendency towards evil and a reluctance to be good. If we are good by nature, why would we need positive reinforcement? Had we not the tendency to be bad, why would we put in place deterrents? — TheMadFool

I wouldn’t say it was an ‘undeniable fact’ that any reward or punishment is carried out (by ‘God’) according to ‘goodness’ or ‘evil’, particularly within the realm of religious morality. It is a claim that’s often made in Christian morality (not so much in the OT, though), but it’s a deniable one, surely. Not to mention that it’s openly questioned by biblical writings such as Job and Ecclesiastes. Its uncertainty and deniability is why this kind of religious morality often struggles in modern thinking, but that’s not the point.

The unwritten implication of “or else...hell” was added to religious morality many centuries after the ten ‘commandments’ were written - the Decalogue itself refers to a set of principles expressed in the reduced format of behaviour guidelines in a bid to reduce the perceived potential for ‘evil’ within the community. A series of “or else” deterrents were added in the rest of Deuteronomy - which effectively reduced these recommendations even further to enforceable ‘commandments’ or ‘Law’ as we understand them. But any individual judgement, rewards or punishment pertaining to the Decalogue at this stage were imposed by the people/priests, not by ‘God’.

Given that what we describe as ‘evil’ is mostly ignorance, the idea that we seem more ‘evil’ by nature suggests to me only that we’re acting in ignorance of our potential. To increase a tendency towards ‘good’, we must increase awareness of our potential for ‘good’. The Decalogue refers to an awareness of human potential beyond murder, adultery, theft, deceit and jealousy (behaviour common to most social animals), and towards previously unfamiliar notions of love, loyalty, respect, humility, courage and patience. The idea behind preventing those ‘immoral’ actions we’re familiar with - yet know to be destructive long-term - is to challenge us to increase our awareness of what else we can do instead, without setting an upper limit to our potential.

Let’s say, for instance, that instead of the Decalogue as a set of DON’Ts, we were given a set of DO’s. Would that have increased our potential to interact with the world, or stifled it - given that most people at the time would not have understood what it even meant to act with courage, love or respect?

I think we often take for granted our capacity to understand these concepts of ‘goodness’ as beyond what was once a far more ignorant perception of potential in humanity. I think we have a tendency to be ignorant of our ultimate potential, which translates to an apparent tendency towards ‘evil’.

Let’s say, for instance, that instead of the Decalogue as a set of DON’Ts, we were given a set of DO’s. — Possibility

I think we have a tendency to be ignorant of our ultimate potential, which translates to an apparent tendency towards ‘evil’. — Possibility

I was thinking about that. So kind of you to bring it to my attention. It does seem that every don't can be rephrased as a do e.g. thou shalt not kill can be expressed with the equivalent thou shalt value life. The intriguing question is why were most of the 10 commandments expressed in the negative, "thou shalt not" rather than in the positive, "thou shalt"? A possible answer is that people were ignoring, most probably out of ignorance, the positive forms of the negative injunctions which had the undesirable effect of what were classified as immoral behavior being common practice. Thus the need to clearly spell out what not to do rather than what to do. For instance, to tell someone not to smoke makes sense only if that person had a smoking habit. Ergo, people were murdering, stealing and coveting like no one's business which translated into the don't, thou shalt not format of the 10 commandments.

It's a good thing you brought up the issue of ignorance and while I accept, given that morality needs an understanding of what has moral value, that ignorance has a role, it's neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for immorality; after all many immoral people have a very sound knowledge of ethics and yet choose to act in violation of moral principles and I haven't heard of people who're mentally challenged, the quintessentially ignorant person, being accused of immorality.

I haven't read this whole thread yet, but just responding to the OP: I agree completely that the free will theodicy fails, but (aside from it hinging on the wrong notion of "free will") I'd argue instead that if it were to succeed, that would entail that all laws and other human-imposed "restrictions of free will" were morally wrong too; or conversely, that if it is morally correct for us humans to stop each from, say, selling children into sex slavery, even if someone has the will to do that and we'd impinge on their freedom by stopping them, then it would also be morally correct for God to stop us from doing such things, and so God would not be all good for his failure to do so.

in fact if free will has any role, it would be to allow the robot to be good, not bad. — TheMadFool

This is my view as well. The kind of "free will" that people like Plantinga (originator of the free will theodicy) use is incompatibilist, where it just means non-determinism, which is to say, randomness. They say that without free will, humans would have been like robots, and so not moral agents, just doing what God programmed them to do. But take a robot and then add randomness somewhere to its programming. How does that make it in any way better, or more of a moral agent? It randomly does otherwise than it was programmed to sometimes. What use is that?

On the other hand, a modern compatibilist conception of free will like that of Susan Wolff's is basically equivalent to the ability to conduct moral deliberation: it's the ability to make rational judgements about what to do, and for those judgements to be causally effective on what you actually do, rather than just reacting to stimuli in an instinctual or socially conditioned way without thinking about it, without any ability to recondition your own behavioral patterns.

That kind of compatibilist is free will is something that could in principle be programmed into a robot, and it would make the robot more good, not more evil. The incompatibilist kind of free will that Plantinga thinks of would simply allow the robot (or robot-like proto-humans that, we presume, God would have otherwise programmed to do only go) to randomly fail to do what it was supposed to, i.e. to do evil. But that latter kind of "free will" is useless -- why would it be better to have that than not? The former type, on the other hand, is the quintessentially human thing that makes us moral agents capable of being virtuous or vicious.

Of course, on such an account, all wrongdoing is essentially a failure of free will, or else ignorance: it's either the lack of connection between self-judgement about what to do and what we actually do, some failure in the process of conducting that judgement, or lack of sufficient information to accurately conduct that judgement. So by giving humans stronger free will, of that kind, God would be ensuring that humans are more virtuous, not just letting us accidentally, randomly stumble into evil, like Plantinga's incompatibilist free will would do.

So there is no justification for God allowing evil on account of free will, because the two are not in opposition.

was thinking about that. So kind of you to bring it to my attention. It does seem that every don't can be rephrased as a do e.g. thou shalt not kill can be expressed with the equivalent thou shalt value life. The intriguing question is why were most of the 10 commandments expressed in the negative, "thou shalt not" rather than in the positive, "thou shalt"? A possible answer is that people were ignoring, most probably out of ignorance, the positive forms of the negative injunctions which had the undesirable effect of what were classified as immoral behavior being common practice. Thus the need to clearly spell out what not to do rather than what to do. For instance, to tell someone not to smoke makes sense only if that person had a smoking habit. Ergo, people were murdering, stealing and coveting like no one's business which translated into the don't, thou shalt not format of the 10 commandments.

It's a good thing you brought up the issue of ignorance and while I accept, given that morality needs an understanding of what has moral value, that ignorance has a role, it's neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for immorality; after all many immoral people have a very sound knowledge of ethics and yet choose to act in violation of moral principles and I haven't heard of people who're mentally challenged, the quintessentially ignorant person, being accused of immorality. — TheMadFool

Personally, I think the key here is potential. Humans evolved with the mental capacity to be aware of abstract concepts such as ‘value’ and ‘life’ - but no initial understanding or knowledge of them, and certainly no words for them (ie. ignorance). We needed to gradually develop an awareness and understanding of this ‘value of life’ in relation to observing others first, before we could apply it to our own behaviour, recognising a potential to interact in a way that values life. But you can’t just tell someone to ‘value life’ when they have no way to relate those concepts to observable behaviour. You have to build these concepts of ‘good’ behaviour out of randomness - show people their potential.

We do what we recognise as effective behaviour in others - that’s how we learn without language. The ‘morality’ of a person who is mentally challenged becomes the responsibility of those who model for them and demonstrate the value of ‘good’ behaviour, as with a child. As for those with a sound knowledge of ethics, it is their capacity to blatantly ignore, isolate or exclude information that they personally don’t value (such as predicting the potential pain of a fellow human being) that enables them to violate moral principles. These are, for me, the three ‘gates’ of the will that determine its freedom. Ignorance/awareness is just the start.