Yesterday I dealt with Bernardo Kastrup’s weird Idealism. Today I have just a simple thought to offer on why the equally weird theology of Alvin Plantinga is fatally incoherent, building on two prior articles of mine: Is a Good God Logically Impossible?, where I analyze James Sterba’s book of that title (finding that in essentials it’s spot on, erring only on one point of semantic trivia), and How Not to Live in Zardoz, where I analyze what one might have thought was a completely different question (how we can live in simverses without getting trapped in a psychopathic hell). It turns out, these connect. And they connect in a particularly useful way for refuting Plantinga’s Free Will Defense of Evil (which is indifferent to what free will actually is, so I won’t digress on that here).
The Point about Strategy
Because human beings are universally irrational and often delusional, the truth is not inherently persuasive. It is easy to escape admitting the truth or its consequences. Indeed it gets easier the more copious or complicated that truth is, because there is “so much of it” that it is easy to just lazily dismiss it all, or straw man it, or “choose your adventure” and nitpick one thing and ignore the rest, and every other strategy people use to avoid any causal effect of learning the truth. Critical thinking is hard; and requires genuine commitment. People are lazy. And disinclined to commit to anything they find uncomfortable. So there is a strategic value to single-point arguments: they can be truths that are more effective at changing minds, not because they are comprehensive, but precisely because they are not. The art of persuasion is not the same thing as the art of telling the truth.
Hence having an incomplete but slam-dunk point is rhetorically and emotionally useful. And to illustrate what I mean, I’ll first start with an analogy. While we do need to know all the ways that biblical morality is flawed, toxic, or bankrupt, and we do need to know where moral facts really come from and what they really are, it is psychologically more persuasive if we can slam dunk the point with a single irrefutable example: slavery. This was an approach Matt Dillahunty developed, and it’s pretty effective. Imagine our world, and an alternative one identical in every way (every single way), but one: in that world, the Biblical God consistently condemns slavery (rather than consistently endorses and even occasionally commands it), complete with reasons why His People must never practice it and instead always morally condemn it. In which world is that God more moral? There is no honest way around the answer: the non-existent God is more moral. Which entails any existent God cannot be moral. Mic drop. You’re done.
Needless to say the cognitive dissonance that creates is literally painful. So Christians, thus cornered, and being trapped in a delusion, will resort to absurd and illogical defenses to try and keep believing their God isn’t evil (literally, a vile slavemaster who is utterly against basic human rights). The three most common approaches are to defend slavery as somehow actually moral (at which point the Christian has lost all moral ground and thereby advertised their religion to everyone as morally repugnant) or to change the subject with a tu quoque fallacy (which advertises to everyone that the Christian has no response to the point) or to ironically resort to moral relativism and claim God “couldn’t” preach any true morality to the ancient Israelites because they were too primitive then or the culture was different then—or whatever illogical excuse. Which directly contradicts their claim that the Bible contains true moral guidance, and thus they have just refuted their own religion. Ouch.
Of course, usually what atheists will point out is not that (even though that is a more decisive kill, destroying the inner logic of the entire religion), but that the excuse doesn’t even make sense: if God can insist (even under pain of death) that the Israelites follow such difficult and bizarre rules as not eating bacon or picking up sticks on Saturday, surely he can teach them slavery is wrong (with, indeed, the same ruthless insistence); moreover, ancient Israelites are no less intellectual humans than anyone else today, or in ancient China, who were more than able to accept and understand that slavery is wrong. If you can teach that to a baby today; you could teach it to a baby then. So the excuse doesn’t work, no matter which way you look at it. The fatal weakness of this excuse is thus, again, a self-defeat, advertising to all watching that Christianity is internally incoherent—and cannot get its God out of being evil (even as a fictional character).
Yes, desperate Christians can try every rabbit hole here. For example, they can try digging in on the tu quoque argument and insist atheists can’t make moral judgments, etc. But that Christians have to resort to that destroys its appeal to potential converts. That strategy is designed only to keep Christians from leaving, not spread the faith. That mission was already killed by losing the argument. All the rabbit holes after that just reveal how screwed the Christian is, exposing the lengths they have to go to to avoid admitting that. Which is not a good look to outsiders. But even those who care whether the rabbit holes get anywhere will find, of course, that they do not. They all end the same way.
For example, atheists are judging the Christian God here by the Christian’s own moral standards, and thus the observed internal incoherence cannot be escaped by complaining that atheists have nothing to replace it with. You cannot claim atheists don’t get to use the word “evil,” because it’s the Christian who is making these claims about their God, and the atheist is simply pointing out that their own definitions entail fatal contradictions in their entire worldview. But also, of course, it isn’t true anyway. Atheists can certainly use the word “evil,” because they have a universal definition all peoples, of all religions and none, agree with, and which makes or entails no appeal to gods or the supernatural: evil is simply any malignancy or malevolence. If it causes needless suffering, we disapprove of it. And so, even if you should insist that atheists can only say this is a subjective opinion, it remains true as a subjective opinion: if we disapprove of needless suffering, and your God inflicts needless suffering, we cannot approve of your God. You therefore aren’t going to sell us on him. You are just stumping for Hitler. However much you insist “But Hitler was right” isn’t going to appeal. It’s just going to make us dislike you even more.
Ultimately, trying to sell a gross and toxic religion, once it is exposed as gross and toxic, simply isn’t going to work. Your religion’s days are numbered, once that curtain is pulled and everyone sees it as malignant. That’s why you need all those dubious apologetics to try and rescue your slavemaster God from being evil, rather than simply admitting evil is the new good. And that is why single-point slam-dunks like Dillahunty’s point, that God cannot be both good and someone who endorsed slavery, are so effective: they isolate the problem to a single point, thus preventing Christians from hiding in a maze of constant subject-changes, allowing them to disguise any apologetic as sound. With a single point of focus, it is easier to keep pointing out that none of their excuses are logical, and only further expose the bankruptcy of their entire worldview. And audiences of all intellectual levels will start to see that (as long as you don’t fall for their trick of changing the subject, but stay ever-on-point).
The Point about Plantinga
In Is a Good God Logically Impossible? I analyzed James Sterba’s already-decisive refutation of Plantinga’s Free Will Defense against the Argument from Evil thus:
Allowing freedom actually consequentially results in greatly reducing it.
For example, allowing tyrants freedom to take power and oppress a population results in a vast net reduction in freedom. If physically restraining me from doing my will violates my free will, then allowing someone to physically restrain me violates my free will. God therefore cannot use “free will” as an excuse not to intervene. To the contrary, if “free will” is really so supremely important, that fact would compel him to intervene a great deal more than he is observed to do, specifically in order to maximize the abundance of free will.
After all, a free society contains more unrestrained free will than an oppressed one, obviously. That one must violate some free will to maintain a free society is a logically necessary fact (e.g. tyrants, killers, slavers must be thwarted in their designs); but if the goal is to reduce violations of free will, a good ruler must do this. Not doing so has the opposite result—and thus cannot be justified by any principle on which maximizing free will is the greater good.
One could extend this even to natural evils—which [Plantinga’s] Free-Will Defense has never plausibly accounted for. Indeed Sterba has a closing chapter on natural evil that addresses the difficulties it adds to theism. Merely among which are the fact that such evils produce violations of free will on a massive scale: killing people without their consent certainly violates their free will; as does inflicting them with disease; crippling someone without their consent—especially mentally but more obviously also when physically—certainly impedes their freedoms, no differently than binding them in chains or beating them with sticks; taking away one’s hard-earned property by disaster leaves them less free than people who were able to avoid that same fate by having access to protective resources; and so on. If a good God really would value “free will” above all else, then we would not see the world around us that we do—directly contrary to Plantinga’s thesis. His excuse is thus self-refuting. It leads not to a justification of god, but to an even more glaring logical contradiction between his god as-defined and what we observe.
Sterba demonstrates this result holds even for moral evil…
Sterba further points out that thwarting the effects of immoral acts does not even qualify as violating anyone’s free will. Making me invulnerable to disease with a vaccine does not violate my free will. Just as making me invulnerable to a murderer’s bullets would not. Which means God’s just making us all immune to disease wouldn’t violate anyone’s free will, and thus his failure to do so cannot be justified. But it would not even violate a murderer’s will to make me as immune to bullets as to disease—any more than putting me in a bullet proof vest would. No one would dare argue bullet proof vests are immoral and should be banned because they violate the free will of gunmen who wish to shoot at people. They can shoot at them all they want. Their will is free. Their evil is also thwarted. The Free-Will Defense is thus defunct. It can no more justify God, than it would justify you preventing anyone wearing a bullet proof vest. Indeed your doing so would make you evil, not good. Plantinga’s argument thus does likewise to God.
The perverse flaw in Platinga’s Free-Will Defense is that it entails a nightmarish anarcho-libertarian worldview wherein if I have the physical means to kill or abuse you, I therefore in effect have the moral right to do so, because no one ought take any measure to stop me—in fact it would be their doing so that’s evil, not the act of a good person. Because maintaining my freedom is a greater good than thwarting my victim’s fate. But this flips around the entire meaning of good and evil, turning every act we deem good, evil; and every act we deem evil, good.
Plantinga’s Free-Will Defense is thus another semantic trick: he actually is defining his god as a horrific monster, and simply “chooses” to call being a horrific monster “good.” All just to avoid admitting to himself that he admires a horrific monster. Placing freedom above justice quite simply is evil. For evil is by definition the absence of justice. Just as placing freedom above respecting people’s well being is the absence of goodness, precisely because respecting people’s well being is what goodness means. Freedom is only good when thwarting it would do more harm than exercising it, thus we thwart murder but not speech, rape but not consent, theft but not commerce, and so on; recognizing this distinction is literally what goodness and justice are.
Sterba thus shows that Plantinga’s god as-defined cannot be good. It is a logical impossibility. Therefore one must abandon that definition and retreat to some other conception of a good god, for there to be any logical possibility of one.
This is a powerful point. And it is conclusive. But you will notice it’s long and has many parts. And I’m just summarizing Sterba’s case, which is chapters long, not just paragraphs. This is no discredit to my summary or his argument. We’re just respecting the truth and being as thorough as the medium allows. But notice how it affords many escape routes to the lazy or the delusional. It takes work to vet what we’ve said and honestly think through any knee-jerk reactions to it you may have. It provides many opportunities to avoid the conclusion by nitpicking some minor detail, and constantly changing the subject, so as to avoid ever admitting (or even realizing) that you are cornered. It has lots of rabbit holes to flee into, numerous semantic tricks to playground in, and all the other strategies people employ to avoid confronting what they’ve just been told.
But there is a way to Dillahunty this.
And that comes from my article How Not to Live in Zardoz. I realized this a while ago when I started linking to that article when making the point that we already know what more morally designed worlds would look like—and it isn’t the one we are in. In my Zardoz article I set aside the whole ridiculous debate over spaceghosts and ask a more practical question: when we atheists do eventually create the only possible eternal heaven that there will be, how do we prevent it becoming a hell? The answer is, really, the same as any moral God would have arrived at. Because God by definition would have far more resources, and far less fallibility, than human engineers, and thus could only do the same thing better. It therefore is no longer arguable that he “had” to do it so much worse (as our present world is, by comparison with what well-designed simworlds can be).
I won’t belabor all the ways this is true—though, per my strategic point, we should do that, just not here, as here we are talking about persuasion, not learning, and one needs first be persuaded before they will be willing to learn. I will instead take one single point from my Zardoz article: the safe room. Which I detailed there under the heading of the “Law of Inviolable Escape” but can summarize here as: every person, whenever they themselves choose, can teleport to an inviolable safe room, where they will be comfortable and their basic needs met, and no villain can reach them (and this is by the individual’s choice, hence exercising their free will that God is supposed to respect). Let’s suppose that this comes with one other rule, which is that whenever you choose to leave your safe room, you will be teleported to a relatively safe spot in a randomly selected city, and thus have to make your way home (or to the authorities or whatever else). And we’ll call those two rules the Saferoom Law.
Now, imagine our world, and an alternative one identical in every way (every single way), but one: that world is governed by one more law of physics, the Saferoom Law. And assume each world was created by a God. In which world is that God more moral? There is no honest way around the answer: that non-existent God is more moral. Which entails any existent God cannot be moral.
Mic drop. You’re done.
You can’t get around this with Plantinga’s defense, because the world governed by the Saferoom Law preserves more free will than our world does. Victims have the free will to escape villains. And there is nothing logically impossible about the Saferoom Law. We will be able to enact it when we make our worlds (the simworlds, or virtual worlds, we will eventually some day live in). And we are far less capable than God. So God has no excuse not to have commanded our world obey the Saferoom Law. You can’t defend this by saying villains should have the right to victimize people, because that simply isn’t true. Villains may have the right to freely choose to attack people; but they do not have the right to kill or harm them thereby. On no moral theory (especially the Christian’s own moral theory) is it moral to enable the wills of villains at the expense of the wills of victims. In that context, the only free will it is moral to preserve is the victim’s. And so on down the line: no matter what excuse you come up with (no matter what rabbit hole you attempt to flee into), the same end will befall you. I recently went through the rubbish heap of Christian attempts to explain away evil in Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? In every case, if you think it through, you’ll realize none of them can explain why our world is not governed by the Saferoom Law—if it was designed by a morally good God.
In the Saferoom World, villains still have the free will to choose villainy, while victims have the free will to escape it. No one’s will, really, is violated at all. And even if you try to push the point that the villain’s freedom to succeed is being thwarted (which is not the same thing), in any contest between who, morally, should succeed, a villain or a victim, there is no moral way to argue it’s the villain and not the victim. You would then just be defending villainy. Just like defending God as a slavemaster admits he is evil, so defending God as an aider-and-abetter of villains and thwarter of victims admits he is evil. To then call this evil “good” is simply a semantic trick no one half-awake is going to fall for. You might be able to sustain your own delusion with such irrational moves, but you will only be destroying your religion’s credibility in the eyes of outsiders.
It also will not do any good to complain that there is still “evil” in the Saferoom World (it doesn’t stop theft or disease, for example; and saferoomers still face some inconvenience of relocation that villains can nevertheless exploit; and so on), because the point of this one argument is that a Saferoom World is logically possible yet less evil than our world. That’s enough to prove no good God exists. Everything else is just a quibble over how good a God need be to qualify, which I effectively address in the rest of my Zardoz article. That’s the learning part of this equation. But to start with the persuasion part, it’s enough to force a Christian to stay on this one single point and not evade it by running away, changing the subject, straw manning the example, or any other device. Once this breaks through their delusion (if ever it does), then they will have the motivation to take the time to explore the rest of the equation (and ask, really, honestly, what a world would look like that actually was built by a moral person).
Conclusion
Three points have been made here. One, the strategic difference between persuasion and learning. Two, how to apply this by extending Dillahunty’s single-subject “slavery” argument against the existence of a good God into a single-subject Saferoom argument against the existence of a good God. And three, that once one escapes their delusion and realizes God is implausible, there is much left to learn about how to build a morally just world (rather than foolishly defend as moral the amoral one we live in). But, “Big Picture,” you need to realize that any Argument from Evil against God is, really, a refutation of the Design Argument. There are nonmoral points of bad design that prove our world cannot have been intelligently designed (I outline several in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics and Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed). But the moral points apply to any claim that the designer is good, and thus worthy of respect and allegiance (rather than disgust and disregard).
Since no one believes in malevolent gods anymore, because modern people only believe out of an emotional desire that there be a good God (theism is thus now a delusion, and not, as once it was, a mere epistemic error), refuting the goodness of God is the gateway drug to escaping that delusion and realizing there is no god at all, of any character. And then we can get to the business of admitting the only thing we have is each other, and the world we design and maintain. And then rather than wait around for a non-existent savior and a non-existent immortality in a non-existent paradise, we can get cracking on investing in saving each other, and building our own paradises to live our extended blessed lives in. We might not see that world ourselves. But we could be working to build it for our children, or their children. And that’s better than it never existing at all.
Which you must agree with, if you believe living in a future paradise is a moral good worth helping others to—which all Christians must already believe in…if they are not liars or hypocrites. Although, experience tells us, quite a few are. But the rest can be saved.
-:-
Christians keen on learning why the claims of their mental slavemasters are all lies, such as that abandoning that faith entails abandoning moral goodness and every other real thing of value, will benefit from reading my entire series on Justin Brierley.
Yes! I’m reminded of my experience at the Creed concert in San Antonio where I was under the impression that I had the freedom to use my vape pen, but it turned out that, in the platonic cave of the Frost Bank Center, I didn’t have that freedom, and it was, in fact, the “freedom” of whoever was in charge of “security,” expressed through their staff, not only to eject me from the venue (seems a bit authoritarian, though not quite “unjust”), but also to inject me with ketamine (the drug that killed Elijah McClain) and Ativan (the drug that killed Chris Cornell)! I think I could argue that’s where the injustice occurred! But my little story doesn’t make a big impression on people who view morality as “following rules.” I ran into that view just about every day of the 9 years I lived in Texas! Yikes! You can’t make a rule that an autistic person can’t have a meltdown! THAT’S unjust! Stuff like that results in terrible abuses and injustices against us! But I’m not even seen as a human being if I don’t exude the phenomenon of “respectable behavior,” which, as a phenomenon, is, by definition, not an “essence”! But people are fkn delusional about autism! A lot of them think the meltdown is a form of demonic possession! Even at the behavioral center, where they were supposed to be professionals, they were acting like the meltdowns were an “expression” of my will rather than something that wasn’t coming from my will, but my will was simply “letting happen” because the source is factors beyond my will! It’s actually always related to things other people are doing to me! Like not listening or being bigoted! Ok, so I can’t tolerate bigotry! Bigots see that as a weakness on my part because they’re inside the bigotry delusion! Yikes! I shouldn’t have to exude the phenomenon of respectable behavior around bigots! No one should! That’s one of the reasons why there are still bigots! They’re too comfortable! Our whole society is set up to keep them comfortable!
I’ve never been under the impression that God, in and of Himself, can be “good”. “Good” is a word WE use in describing God, from our perspective. (And, most of us shouldn’t use that word at all to describe God).
Take humans out of the picture entirely, or, better yet, just take the whole of “creation” out of the picture, such that all that’s left is “God” (and yes, I’m talking from the Theistic point of view here), then God Himself can be neither “good” or “evil” (or “moral” or “immoral”). If there were “standards” of, say, “good and evil” that God was subject to, then, He wouldn’t be God at all. Whoever created those standards (presumably) would be.
But, God isn’t subject to anything. Not if He’s God (in the Theistic view). So, He’s not subject to ideas of “good” and “evil” that are somehow “over and above Him”. There is no “over and above” God. God does whatever He does, and simply isn’t subject to judgements of Him being either “good” or “evil”.
Now, the idea that “God is good” is certainly found in the bible. But, what’s being said can only mean “God is good – TO US” – and almost invariably, in the OT in particular, the “US” being referred to is the “chosen people”. But, even there, the statement isn’t a statement of any “necessary characteristic” of God. If it was, then, it could only be that there was a “standard” that God Himself was subject to. But, there’s not.
I’m totally OK with the idea that God told the Jews they could have slaves under certain circumstances. That’s His business with THEM. I’m totally OK with it if God told the Jews to kill all the Amalekites. Again, that’s His business with those “chosen people”. He’s THEIR God, not necessarily a generic, one-size-fits-all God,
Me? I’m not a Jew. God never told me I could have a slave. He didn’t tell me to kill Amalekites. Maybe, in God’s mind, He had some justifiable reason for telling His chosen people to do this-or-that. But, that doesn’t mean I have to do those same things, or that I somehow have God’s permission to do those things. That’s another matter altogether.
Bottom line: I look at the arguments in this post and see “strawmen”. “God is supposed to be ‘good’ by OUR standards” – which is a strawman. “God told the Jews that they could have slaves, and slavery is ‘evil'” – another strawman.
I think I’ll leave off here….
I’ve noted in other articles before how, objectively, anything that actually was like a “God” as theologians describe would sooner be expected to be a cold alien inhuman monster, and not a warm fuzzy friend of men.
So we cannot allow the equivocation fallacy whereby “God is good” means, really, “God is evil.” That’s just semantic dishonesty.
Hence language doesn’t work the way you think. To wit:
This isn’t true, because analytically, “good” can mean whatever we want. Words are just codes for ideas. Humans made them up. They do not cosmically exist in supernatural stone somewhere. Words are just tools for transmitting and computing ideas. Any idea can be plugged into any word. And for effective communication, we need to follow the connections already established by practice.
So, on some definitions of good, any God would be either good or not, independently of whatever that God believed or insisted upon. And insofar as the word “good” only has a useful meaning when we apply the definitions most widely in use and most readily understood, God most definitely cannot be “good” in that sense. And that’s the only sense that matters. Everything else is mere rhetoric.
Case in point, in this article I took the most universally employed definition of the word “evil” as “malevolent/malignant” (and “good” therefore would be “benevolent/benign”; and everything else, neither one or admixtures of the two). God cannot “think” his way out of being malevolent. He either is or he isn’t, independent of what he values or thinks of himself. And this is true even in isolation, as even when people don’t exist, a God can still be modally malevolent (“God will be malevolent to people if or when they exist”).
So, God cannot get out of being evil even by your proposed semantic trickery.
The central thesis of what I wrote previously was “Take humans out of the picture entirely, or, better yet, just take the whole of “creation” out of the picture, such that all that’s left is “God” (and yes, I’m talking from the Theistic point of view here), then God Himself can be neither “good” or “evil” (or “moral” or “immoral”). If there were “standards” of, say, “good and evil” that God was subject to, then, He wouldn’t be God at all. ”
I think maybe you attempted to respond to my central thesis by saying “And this is true even in isolation, as even when people don’t exist, a God can still be modally malevolent (“God will be malevolent to people if or when they exist”).”
No. This is categorically wrong on virtually every level,
All you’re saying is that when people DO come along, they might form opinions about “how God is”.
But God, in isolation, cannot be “modally malevolent” or “modally good”. (And throwing in the word “modally” is as useless as throwing in the word “really”).
If there were only ONE OBJECT in existence, anywhere, then it would be ridiculous to say “that object is tall” or “it’s short”, because there are no comparatives. Certainly, that object itself cannot say of itself “I’m tall” or “I’m short”. If that was the one-and-only object in existence, then descriptives like “tall” and “short” simply do not apply. They’re utterly meaningless.
“Oh, well, that one object could be MODALLY tall”.
As if throwing the word “modally” into it changes anything at all. And it doesn’t.
In the Theistic view, God simply “is”. It’s people, using terms like “modally malevolent” that are attempting to describe God, and this, of course, can only be an attempt made from the perspective of the one making the attempt.
Which is precisely what you’ve done.
But “Take humans out of the picture entirely” does not remove modal facts (what God would be if humans did exist, i.e. if humans encountered him; e.g. Darth Vader remains evil even if he were the only entity in existence) nor does it alter human lexical behavior (the word “good” does not change meaning simply because God changes ontology; the word was invented by humans to refer to phenomena of human concern, so the ontology of God is completely irrelevant here—God remains evil in plain English).
So you can’t get God to not be evil by any of these devices.
Just a reminder that the god of the bible was not “good to” the Jews. Nor is he “good to” anyone else, not by any measure where the word “good” has substantial meaning. So the “God is good – TO US” reference is nonsense.
And sure, a theist COULD say they don’t care what a god does or says. It’s almost certainly not actually true, and just an escape hatch to avoid certain cognitive dissonance. But sure, they can say it. As the article actually lays out though, all it does is prove to everyone else that whatever they believe is almost certainly pointless, evil, incorrect, or some combination of those.
A theist would probably motte and bailey at that point, saying they aren’t trying to prove anything, just pointing out how a certain argument fails against their own (almost certainly fake) characterization of god. And sure, that’s fine. But again, it goes right back to the purpose of this article. The core retreat makes everyone around look less favorably on whatever the theist believes.
Keith is on point here.
Good and evil are the properties of the decisions, behaviors and traits of sapient beings.
If God is sapient, It can be judged by, and understand, those standards.
Fred makes a good point, and to explore why he is right see my analysis in The Objective Value Cascade.
Turning Matt’s last name into a verb is epic!
Dillahunty’s approach is to start with the premise of “slavery is evil,” equivalent in my mind to “I personally find the concept of one human being owning another human being as property to be aesthetically displeasing.” He follows up with an implicit or explicit browbeating of people who won’t agree with that premise straightaway with the equivalent of “you should be ashamed of your morally degenerate aesthetic sense if you don’t feel the same displeasure that I do.”
I agree with the rhetorical effectiveness of this approach and also its applicability to something like counter-apologetics, which is how he uses it. However, I wonder about how it may bleed into an effort to uncover what “morality” actually is, and if “moral facts” can be a thing if discernment between good and evil is predicated upon a subjective emotional feeling of the discerner based in their sense of aesthetics.
I mean, both empathy and psychopathy exist as an aesthetic in all of us, and the weighting between the two can vary a lot between individuals. How much can the psychopath see each aesthetic for what it is, and choose to embrace the one that doesn’t make him feel the way Dillahunty says he “ought” to feel about slavery?
You seem not to have read the article here. I explicitly discuss what you mean.
The thesis of the article is: persuasion must precede learning. Then an example is given of why and how that is.
This is why I note that Dillahunty’s argument operates from internal logic of Christianity. So he is not the one assuming slavery is evil. Christians are. That’s the point of the argument. This is precisely why delusional Christians can try escaping the argument by resorting to abandoning their belief that slavery is evil, the consequences of which I then discuss.
Dillahunty does make a defense of the immorality of slavery (so he does not have to simply assume it). But that’s not pertinent to the argument. Which is my entire point. If you can get Christians to publicly defend slavery as moral, you’ve won in the arena of public opinion. Persuasion successful. Then can follow learning.
The ensuing learning can indeed then lead to sound reasoning about moral facts (like “slavery is immoral”). I wouldn’t expect that from Dillahunty (he is not a professional philosopher; he does “okay” on this). But if you finally, genuinely, want to know what is morally true and why (and not whether fantasies about gods are true or how you can build some rhetoric out of all this to protect those delusions), then you’re in a different conversation.
I link to a few breadcrumbs on that already in this article, but I address slavery specifically in my peer-reviewed chapter on moral facts in The End of Christianity and more broadly in my recent discussion Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America.
The issue is that understanding what moral facts are and which they are and how they are true is complicated (it involves extensive study of psychology, anthropology, game theory, even normative semantics, as well as the end product of almost three thousand years of philosophy), so that entire dive is easy to avoid. The delusional can nitpick their way out of learning any of it or understanding any of it; they can even use its complexity as a reason to reject it (on the fallacy that truth is supposed to be simple). So you can’t gain headway there until they are motivated to care about the truth more than protecting their delusion.
So you have to start with persuasion. And the Dillahunty Method is a good starter kit for that (as is my Saferoom Worlds).
My apologies, I did read the article as well as one of the bread crumbs on what moral facts are, and didn’t finish my thought completely in my question so reading my response it seems it was my mistake and it is understandable that you felt I skipped important points you made.
What I’m getting at is a contention that moral facts are, at a fundamental level, not discerned by dispassionate intellectual methods but rather by the emotionally charged reactions to an aesthetic. That is, the Dillahunty method of persuasion is the method by which we learn morality, and not just a starting point.
Hence the “you ought” in reference to a specific emotional reaction to the very concept of human ownership of another human. I don’t think you can separate the emotion from the learning.
I am not sure what you mean.
Dillahunty gives more reasons than merely “the emotionally charged reactions to an aesthetic” for concluding slavery must be immoral (I don’t find his explanation as clear or logically structured as I would like, but it is certainly more substantive than that).
And Christians who already internally conclude slavery must be immoral are not defending that with “the emotionally charged reactions to an aesthetic” but with a belief that morality comes from God, which is precisely the problem—and why they can try escaping this conundrum by abandoning the belief that slavery is immoral, but with consequences fatal to their mission.
Countless ex-theists will tell you the same story: that they realized something repugnant (like, that they can only keep believing in God if they adopt an immoral belief), which led them to start questioning everything (and within a year or two, they’ve left the faith).
Even if this is explained as solely aesthetic (the religion became repugnant to them) it still ends with a more substantial result (they will pick up secular reasons for moral conclusions, beyond happenstance aesthetics), because that’s how the process of “learning” proceeds.
re: ““Take humans out of the picture entirely” does not remove modal facts (what God would be if humans did exist, i.e. if humans encountered him; ”
No, that’s where your wrong. What you’ve done here is to bring in (supposed) “comparables” – ie, God and man. And then, you’re making man the “supreme judge” over “who’s good (or, “malevolent”) and who’s not”.
That’s just starting with the one object that exists, which can neither be called “tall” or “short”, because there’s nothing else to compare it to. Then, you’re adding in another object, and that second object then decides that the first object is “tall” or “short” in comparison to itself.
That would be fine, if the two objects were comparable. But the problem is that the FIRST object is one who’s height cannot be determined at all, perhaps because it’s “existence” is not even in the same relational dimensions as the second object.
So, putting “man” in as a comperable to God is just to introduce an entirely false equivalency (in a sense): the two things are simply NOT comparable; they are as different as an object that has dimensions of height, width, and depth, and one that doesn’t.
You are missing my point. Morality does not come from God. Yet you seem to be starting with that illogical premise.
Morality only derives from human interests (if humans had no interests, there would be no morality; and if humans had different interests, moral facts would differ accordingly; we can expand this to include all “persons,” e.g. aliens and A.I., but it gets the same universal conclusions).
It does not matter what a malevolent monster from outer space “thinks” is moral; it’s still evil to us.
And objective moral facts come from the sum facts of the world, not from individual beliefs or whims.
Thus, in ordinary English, where the word “evil” means, simply “that which is malevolent or malign,” there is no semantic way to get any alien monster from being evil—so long as its actions are malevolent or malign. Because that’s what the word “evil” means.
There’s no way to talk your way out of this with semantics. You cannot change what things are by changing what you call them.
I studied under Alvin Plantinga. Though I disagree with his Free Will Defense, I want to clarify that he is not employing it as a theodicy the way that St. Augustine did. He is using it as a possibility, however remote, to show that Christian faith is not being irrational in believing in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being. He is arguing that it just might be the case that God could not have created a world in which no sin could have occurred. It just might be the case that in every possible world God could have created, human beings would have chosen to do wrong in at least one instance. That being the case, Christian faith in an all-powerful, all-loving God is not a logical contradiction given the free will of human beings. This is not a theodicy for Plantinga; it is merely a demonstration that the Christian is not committing any rational errors. Plantinga concedes that he does not know with any certainty why God allows evil. His free will defense is only a possible explanation for why God might allow it.
Note that that is precisely what fails by my analysis. His defense does not create a logical possibility for the Christian. My analysis therefore keeps even the logical problem of evil still in play. So even his intention to eliminate only that version of the argument also fails.
(Note that I myself do not believe there is a successful logical argument from evil, but not because of Plantinga’s argument, which fails to give us any reason to believe that. For a real reason to believe that, see my analysis in Is a Good God Logically Impossible?)
I haven’t seen this mentioned before, but wouldn’t the free will defense even fail internally in Christianity? Since Christianity already posits a morally perfect world of heaven, if there is free will in heaven, then god had to specifically allow evil in our world, and if there isn’t free will in heaven, then free will is evil.
That is also a problem (and it’s one I point out in Sense and Goodness without God where I give a more complete account of all these problems).
But it is broader than even specifically for the free will defense. Because it is a general fact that heaven cannot exist if this world is the best of all possible worlds. Therefore the Christian is forced onto the horns of a dilemma: reject heaven, or reject a good God.
The way they try to weasel out of this is even more irrational than Plantinga’s Free Will defense, e.g. some nonsense about testing people (omniscient deities don’t need tests, and moral deities have less horrific ways to test people).
This is the whole theodicy problem I tackled last time (see Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism?).
That was great fun to read. I’ve always wondered about christians and their claims that their god can’t stop villians or free will ends. Per their own jesus, the intent is the same as the action, and thus as soon as any villian chooses to do something,and, as you have shown, this god has no limits on what he can interfere with and thus must stop the villian to not be evil.
To be clear, there can be and probably are some limits on what a good God can do to intervene case-by-case. The problem is not that some evils can be justified. The problem is that all evils cannot be justified.
This might be clearer if you read the Zardoz article, where I describe a universe that would be much better than this one, and indeed so ideal as to be preferable to everyone, but it still will have some inconveniences and injustices—just not the horrors of misery and injustice we find in our world.