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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2744 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 6, 2023

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Which religion or culture do you think has the most satisfying solution to the Problem of Evil? Not just, “why does pain exist” but “why do diseases and catastrophes kill innocents”.

I don’t think Christianity nails it. A person is left either believing everything is God’s Will, or believing that a Perfect Being created Satan / disasters when he did not have to. It seems to me a much better alternative would be to state that there is a sovereign evil force, which does not originate from God, who is the cause of not just natural ills like disease and disaster but also ignorance, temptations, etc. This is more satisfying because we keep God purely good and wise, although we do this at the expense of his omnipotence. Ultimately any good explanation should be understood by a child, have a layer of complexity that an adult can appreciate, and allows a person to handle the existence of evil in an optimal way (either aversion or acceptance depending on scenario) while still loving God as before.

All of these problems can be mitigated if we relinquish the autistic-like need for the one deity to be omni-anything. Why should it be omniscient, omnipotent or omnibenevolent?

Because then it doesn't have a moral authority, and you're no better than Yazidis, who believe that Satan doused the fires of hell with his tears and escaped and now rules the world, so you'd better worship him if you know what's good for you.

Maybe I'm just weird but moral authority does not follow from being omni. Also, I'm really down for some greek/roman style polytheism.

If a being is all-knowing, said being must know the most moral thing to do in all possible situations. If a being is all-benevolent, everything said being tells you must be the thing that is best for you to know, and all advice the best advice for you to follow.

I don’t think Christianity nails it. A person is left either believing everything is God’s Will, or believing that a Perfect Being created Satan / disasters when he did not have to. It seems to me a much better alternative would be to state that there is a sovereign evil force, which does not originate from God, who is the cause of not just natural ills like disease and disaster but also ignorance, temptations, etc. This is more satisfying because we keep God purely good and wise, although we do this at the expense of his omnipotence.

Yes this is roughly the LDS position. There is the chaotic universe, full of preexisting matter, and then there is the space (I think within it) which God has organized. That force is not sovereign per se though--allowing it to have influence within the world suits God's purposes.

I think the idea of a benevolent God is an oversimplified one. Creating perfect souls is boring and they would all be boring and bland, tiny little perfect things. He already has a perfect thing of a completely different magnitude, himself. So he makes imperfect things, gives them agency, now they can do anything, help each other, hurt each other. Why does he tolerate all this suffering these imperfect creatures cause each other? Because he's the utility monster. He's such an enormous and ideal being that utility calculus has to switch to dual numbers: a > bε for any positive a and b, so the sum total of suffering happening in the universe is nothing compared to God quietly snorting when he reads something funny on 4chan.

The Problem of Evil isn’t just “why does evil exist” it’s “how to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of a benevolent, Omnigod (omnipotent/omniscient)”. I think it’s intractable and so it’s a good argument against the existence of said God.

A similar problem from a nondual perspective is why does the Universal Self experience itself as separate selves that go on to hurt each other? Darwinism explains most of this after the original dissociation, but that dissociation still needs an explanation. I’m not sure we’ll ever find it but I’m not sure it’s truly intractable either.

I think that any religion where the material world is just a present state and we are operating with limited information basically gets you there. I believe that death isn't the end and that a human life is just a part of an ongoing process, but from my limited vantage point I can't see the shape of the whole thing. From within that perspective it would be silly to assume that any given difficulty is "evil" even very sad difficulties like people being mean to me or loved ones dying. It's even questionable whether bad or evil things happen at all or they're just a trick of perspective. It's like how you could do a ton of burpees and then lay on the floor breathless in exquisite pain, but because it's part of a larger story about how you are doing something healthy and beneficial for yourself you find it good. But if you were just to be in that gasping state with your muscles aching but not knowing the whole story you would be terrified. Inhabiting the material world implies the limitations of matter which means our knowledge and perspective are finite, so we don't know the whole story which leaves room for fear, but that doesn't mean there's actually anything to be afraid of.

Yeah, there are beliefs which hold that. The problem is trying to keep good 'better' than evil. After all, if they are both equal and opposite forces, then we get the Balance View: evil is as necessary as good and part of the universe, too. You accept your evil side, not reject and fight it. There isn't any point in saying one is 'better' than the other, anymore than saying night or day is better, water or fire, winter or summer. Don't do bad things, but that's more along the lines of personal choice.

A belief that has the evil and the good as parts of the universe, but the good is better or slightly stronger (see classical Hinduism where Vishnu is on the side of the devas and helps them to defeat the asuras) still has to grapple with "but why then does the good side tolerate the existence of evil?" and that comes right back to the Balance argument: it is a necessary part of the universe.

And if it's a necessary part, can you then call it evil?

I disagree with this conception of evil. Or rather I think there is a better conception available. IMO we want a formulation that answers “how do I feel about inexplicable suffering in a way that preserves an optimal state of mind, ie continues to encourage optimal behavior.” Just as an example, you want someone to pursue things which maximize happiness without ever being perturbed by the inevitability of random miseries, like the fact that his brother could have randomly been killed by a car, or his country could be affected by the plague. The best way to handle these random miseries is to not mind them, because you can do nothing to prevent them, or perhaps also to see them as metaphorical warning. This requires a simplified explanation of the world that answers why unfair evil occurs. If you say, “because evil is necessary”, this goes against the idea of a loving powerful God who created everything. If you say “evil balances good”, this disincentivizes the pursuit of Goodness. You want someone to continue to cling to the Good in spite of the fact that he could randomly die at any moment, and still believe God is Perfect despite the existence of evil.

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