21st-century Christian Philosopher

Lamar from The Philosopher’s Corner stopped by and gave me this poser:

Do you agree that it is better to stop a baby from drowning, if you have the ability to, than to not do so? Obviously the answer is yes. In fact, we’d call anyone who does not stop a baby from drowning, if he could, a very bad person (let alone a not all-good person).

Now, do you believe that God is all-good (i.e., always does the right thing)? Do you believe that God can do anything logically possible? Do you believe that this God exists?

(here)

I have to admit that stumped me, until I realized he was right.

No Drowning at Any Time

But I can do him one better. Don’t babies themselves argue against a “Good God”? You see babies are just people at their most vulnerable. People that God seemingly singled out to be the easiest to abuse or kill.

Since nothing should happen to babies, they shouldn’t be vulnerable. You ought to be able to toss a baby into a pool and know it’s not going to drown. We shouldn’t even be able to think of the two together. We should be able to think. “Whoops! Ran over the baby again…”

Except there’s something odd about that. Obviously since knowledge isn’t a factor, nothing else in what Lamar said suggests that it is insufferable that God created us as “empiric beings”. So we might not know what we’ve never seen. And we wouldn’t know a baby is not going to drown, unless something could drown.

Now, I don’t think we can let God get away with anyone drowning. Thus creatures don’t drown. And water is not dangerous. And it’s curious why someone might think it was. It’s pointless to point out that the baby won’t do what we’ve never seen anything do. Water just doesn’t kill. It’s kind of like thinking about God saving us from “colors that kill.”

But of course, God’s not on the job if a baby should fall from a high window. So were God truly loving, you should be able to throw your baby out of a 15-story window into a pool–or then again, to the pavement if you were going somewhere in a hurry.

Of course, nothing hurts them babies–have you ever heard of a baby getting damaged?!! But wait, there’s more! God’s not going to let his guard down; if you don’t feed them, why should they starve to death, simply because you forgot. Why should they die of exposure, just because you left one out in the driveway for a week?

Let’s say nobody dies. (Sounds like God’s starting to pull his weight, now.) Nobody would say “You’ll live through this,” because…well…(du-uh?).

But that makes me wonder why we need God. The world exists without this imaginary concept called “death” that the religious nuts have tried to explain to me once or twice. I told them that the Flying Spaghetti Monster also doesn’t exist, as does (or “doesn’t”?) his cousin the Divine Teacup. If God exists, perhaps he’s keeping us from “death” (???) or perhaps its non-issue because beings just exist. You can’t by definition see an absence of being, so it might be a contradictory concept–it’s definitely not an observable one.

And why would we say that God is in any sense “benevolent” when it’s not clear he’s done any of this. Would knowledge help?

The God Next Door

But let’s say that a guy named Theo lived down the street from you. He had the best lawn, and gave the best lawncare tips. He impressed you with his constant uncanny knowledge and awareness. You’ve often thought that you couldn’t guess what he might not know.

Surely, in the case, Theo exists. But suppose he let on the idea that someone–perhaps even him–was holding back death and destruction. And you noticed a curious tendency of him preferring to keep conversations simple. If asked about it, he would tell you that there are so many things that would take you endless hours for you to even understand, and that there were so many pitfalls into misunderstandings, that he preferred to avoid talking about the real hairy issues.

Of course, there is this whole curious “non-being” thing he let slip, but absent any proof or direct relation to it, we might just choose to think that Theo is just putting on airs. Beings just are. Sure rocks may crumble and seas rise and recede, but people and animals are just stay around. Sure babies once weren’t, but non-being comes before being. As it can never be that time again, because any time referred to as “past” cannot follow what is called “present”. So which one of these principles do you disagree with:

1. We were babies in the past.
2. All babies were not before they were.
3. The past cannot come after the present
4. We are now, in the present.

Thus, we cannot “cease to be”, otherwise that would suggest that being can precede not being. Theo’s a nice guy–but there really is no proof he’s holding back anything.

What Are We Doing Here?

So what are we doing? Well we’re considering scenarios and interactions and categorizing things. It’s a tough sell that knowledge doesn’t help with categorization, or that it doesn’t help with deciding on the logical implications of scenarios.

If we decide that not saving babies is “wrong”, do we have an absolute or a convention. Wouldn’t an absolute, unfailing view, tell us better? Let’s decide it’s an absolute. Fine. Truly God cannot withstand our logic, so he must take our criticism. We are authorities on the matter, because we agreed. No facts that God could muster can come between our absolute and God’s dereliction.

That’s right, if everything were not as it is, only if we had no knowledge of evil, could we even credit God with having everything under control or knowing what he was doing. Except, it’s a stretch giving him credit unless we know what he did.

No Knowledge Required

Lamar’s right. Knowledge is no part of the Problem of Evil (PoE). We only need to be convinced that God has an amped-up version of the Superfriends’ Trouble Alert to know where the Evil is, then it’s just a cross-section of his Power and his Goodness. It’s only necessary for God to know how to use his cosmic blast and that blasting a planet out of existence is no cure when on the call for a drowning baby, and that you and I agree that we’d save the baby. So God’s got needs the skill of operating his awesome superpower. Aside from that he’d have to know what we know, that neglecting drowning babies is wrong.

Really, the way it is phrased, knowledge played little part. And as I assessed it more and more that what caused me to suspect that it is overly simple.

Still though, let’s get this back to what I was doing: I was assessing the PoE. And my comment on the PoE was an examination of whether God would have to throw up his hands at the PoE and say “You’re right, boys. There’s no way you can be wrong with 5 simple principles. It’s not like I made a complex world in the first place. It’s not like some things in my world are hard to judge and that the most important questions can’t be decided with 5 easy principles of a dozen or so words each. Why you should be able to project outside of your sphere of knowledge with mathematical accuracy, whether or not you know the curve or whether or not the concept is projectable.”

It was a meta-question of could God, while we’re granting his existence, have an argument against it. Would having a wider range and a greater depth of knowledge help him?

So yeah, I misunderstood the simplicity of it. If we keep it simple, there’s almost no way that God can go. We’ve got him between the flat planes of mathematical projections in the Tron world.

A Little Knowledge Now and Then….

Interestingly enough, something just happened with my daughter that I thought related to this concept. She wanted to turn on the TV, but couldn’t manage it. She complained “I keep pressing power!!” (She was pressing the right button too.)

There is no reason in her mind that it shouldn’t turn on. It was the principle of the thing. When you’ve pressed the TV button on the remote, and when you press power afterward, and you know that you’ve pressed the right buttons, with a simple enough model, there is NO reason that the TV shouldn’t eventually come on.

The weird thing was that a little extra knowledge helped(!!) I told her that the TV, for whatever reason, didn’t come on immediately, and she was probably turning it off before it came fully on. When she accepted that there is something that she didn’t know that could interrupt this very simple scheme she laid out. (Is it the power button or isn’t it?!) Then she stopped pressing the power button–imagine the incongruity of not pressing a button to turn on the TV–and the TV eventually came on.

So I’ve got this curious idea–and scientists and skeptics have had it too-that incremental knowledge helps assess a situation and counter a simpler model. Sextus Empiricus so believed that new knowledge invited a reversal of some things that were known that he thought it best not to be overly ardent about any item currently considered “knowledge”.

Most atheists I’ve met have little idea IF there is a universal standard of Good. It would be curious for me to understand how, were such a detail to exist, knowledge of it’s shape–it it had a non-linear shape–it it existed–wouldn’t help.

Knowledge has contents.

You might like me to sharpen the picture of this three-word cipher. But a firmer principle underlies it than the atheists’ nebulous “omniscience” uttered without examination in the Argument From Evil.

First of all atheists, usually adherents of empericism, have no Russell-ian entity that they can point a finger to and say “That is omniscient”. So we’re out of the evidential, the only thing left from an atheistic standpoint is the axiomatic.

This is where the character of knowledge matters. If in fact, my leading premise is true, then we cannot have a “knowledge” that ceases to have contents just because it exceeds our grasp to know what they are. This is why “knowing everything” increases as an inaccurate statement with an unknown bound.

Let me try to illustrate.

Doctors and Aliens

I am not exceptional as a human being. So I don’t think it is outlandish to imagine somebody who knows everything I do, and more. What does he know? If I posit him as a doctor, I kind of know some of that. We’ll give it the technical title of “doctor stuff”. Chances are that if we’re not doctors, though you might know something that falls in this gap, you will not know the contents of this gap.

I accept that there are some contents of “doctor stuff” that I can only guess by their relation to more familiar things. We have “bone stuff” for example. I know about bones. I can name most of them. I’ve heard about doctors setting bones. I know a bit about the role of marrow in producing blood cells. But I also accept that there are facts in bone physiology that I wouldn’t have the slightest inkling of because I don’t know what comprises what I don’t know.

Likewise you can’t guess at what the doctor knows that neither you or I have any clue about. There might be something there. Of course the existence of that set of knowledge doesn’t depend on my ability to theorize it, but the doctors’ ability to know it.

Now, if we can imagine an alien race where the a certain member knows almost everything we do about common phenomena, let’s imagine that on the scale of things he knows a lot more. What does he know? Suppose he knows of a phenomenon on his planet that acts in a totally different way than our planet. What does he know? Is there anything that we would have to find not as invariable as we thought?

But we can dream up as many potential–and hopefully somewhat plausible–scenarios as our imagination can handle. But to illustrate the concept we have to add details. Nothing in particular demonstrates “the state of knowing 60% more than the sum total of human knowledge.” No one concept demonstrates knowing double, triple, quadruple and so on. So what are the contents of omniscience?

We can imagine that it consists of everything we know, plus everything we hope to learn from science. And we can imagine that’s it. But only the omniscient entity would know the contents.

Which is why it is silly to pretend to let God sit in the room while we talk about him, call him characteristically “omniscient” and then telling him what we’ve deduced about his omniscience as authoritative, dismissing him from the room. Once we’ve allowed God to duck his head in the door, he is the authority. Not us.

The athiest has already concluded that he can’t comment on it, because he can’t be a party to the discussion, because he doesn’t exist. It’s strange to then conclude, given a lack of substantive objection on the human level, that he can’t then exist. The atheist has only played at “considering God.”

I do not find it meaningful, given my acquaintance with knowledge that there can ever be an abstract “state of knowing everything” that can ever approximate the likely case of a singular, particular state of knowing all particular states.

Afterward

I’m not trying to leverage human-specifications onto the cosmos. As a result, the vagueness of “omniscience” is not a limiting factor. But I would be more correct to leave up to a posited omniscient being the details of what it implies. Thus the “Problem of Evil” becomes only “A Case for the Non-existence of God provided an intuition of ‘Omniscience’”.

Judging from the sensible ground of facts as one thing and not others, I think it is at least a fair projection in counter to the “Problem of Evil” that omniscience has a lot of particulars. Not only that but there are perhaps more things known not to be the case, then are the case. I think it’s like that I can name more things that I didn’t have for supper, than what I had for supper. (They are arguably facts, though Carnap should object.)

On the subject of Logical Positivism (the undead material philosophy), Russell essentially doesn’t fail in Logical Atomism because there is a manifest lack of atomic positive states. Of course, he doesn’t come close to justifying that there are intelligibly distinct descriptions of all positive states, which would justify them as being “logical” (logos <=> word). But he also doesn’t justify the conjecture that takes up the last third of his essay as meaningful in the narrow sense that he defined as meaningful.

I have to credit William Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) with getting me started on this. He does an interesting job attacking the “There is evil claim” portion here. (I have to warn you, if your eyes glaze over when I skim formalism here, you’re not going to like his site–but you may get a taste for it.)