Hi VicqRuiz,

That's all fair enough. I hope I am not one who denigrates "simple honest disbelief", and I certainly hope I have never implied that it's intellectually dishonest to "just not believe". It has never been my intention to do so, in any case. As you correctly imply, plenty of believers and nonbelievers alike just don't have the luxury of extended philosophical reflection that many of the posters here seem to enjoy. Most people just need to get on as best they can with taking care of their sick parents, their barfing kids, their impatient customers, and all that. We should all be respectful of whatever "simple belief" or "simple disbelief" helps people get through the day with a degree of humanity.

I would say though, that if one ventures into an internet forum like this with a somewhat sophisticated question or criticism (and most especially if one does so in an arrogant fashion, something we have seen plenty of in both directions), then one has to expect a somewhat sophisticated answer. This isn't exactly the heights of academia, but it isn't the old neighborhood of your youth either. In this forum I think it's fair to ask you to engage the best of theism, just as it's fair for you in this forum to ask me to engage the best of atheism.

I know I don't do a lot to discourage the arrogant theist comments that we sometimes see here. I used to try to do it a bit, and I sometimes still do it a little, but I've come to think that probably the best use of my time is just to set a good example for what charitable engagement can look like. Their are just too many knuckleheads out there (on both sides) to do much more than that. I appreciate that you make a similar effort at charity.

--Jim

Jim -

Was looking through my old Disqus file yesterday and realized that I'd neglected to answer you here.

What I am bothered by (and you may have seen me comment on it here in the past) is that non-believers don't seem to be cut the same slack as believers do when it comes to supposed intellectual rigor.

The Polish and Czech families who were my childhood neighbors were not Thomist or Augustinian scholars by the remotest stretch of imagination. From my observation, the God they believed in was very much a Big Guy in the Sky With a Beard, who doled out rewards and punishments according to rigidly defined schedule, and who could be placated only by a very specific series of ritual observances. Yet they were decent and honest people who I knew took their beliefs very seriously.

I would never have told them that their faith was unsupportable because they hadn't read and refuted all the points made by Hume, Spinoza, Paine, or Popper. But the mirror image of that attack takes place at SN and similar sites all the time.

I've been told many times that it's intellectually dishonest to "just not believe", by the same apologists who readily endorse the faith of those who "just believe".

There's several approaches to evil and God's interventions. One of interest here might be this:

The Free-Will Theodicy and Divine Intervention:

Quote:

The second theodicy is the free-will theodicy. According to the free-will theodicy, God is justified in permitting evil and its consequences because “he has to do so if he is to bestow on some of his creatures the incommensurable privilege of being responsible agents who have, in many areas, the capacity to choose as they will, without God, or anyone else (other than themselves), determining which alternative they choose.”

When Adam partakes of the fruit in Genesis 3, the most severe charge brought against God is not that he caused Adam to sin, but that in making Adam significantly free God brought about the possibility that Adam might misappropriate his freedom and choose a course of action that is morally wrong. God is not responsible for Adam’s choices given that Adam was endowed in creation with self-determining free will.

The ground for denying God’s causing evil is that human freedom is conceptually incompatible with divine determinism (not divine sovereignty).

Otherwise stated, determined choices are not free. Solidifying a free-will theodicy usually requires assent to the idea that being significantly free is intrinsically valuable rather than fleshing out the value of freedom from how people exercise it, that is, from freedom’s instrumental value. If it is intrinsically better to be significantly free than not, then questions concerning divine decisions in creation are asked and answered; objections from the abuse of freedom are derived from a category confusion regarding freedom’s intrinsic value with the ends that come as a result of misappropriating it. Even so, we value human freedom instrumentally in that it enables us to choose a path for our lives, allows for unique contributions to the human story, and is the source and origin of relationship development. The dissonance about freedom is that we love its benefits and hate its deficits, at least as far as instrumental value is concerned.

If we center the discussion on the consequences of freedom rather than what freedom is, it is far from clear that God has not faltered in his providence. After all, God could allow immoral actions and then remove the harmful consequences of those actions. Freedom is preserved, and intense suffering is avoided. While such a view agrees that freedom is valuable, it denies that allowing actions to have harmful consequences justifies permitting the free act. For example, if I freely burn down my neighbors’ house while they are on vacation, God can miraculously rebuild the house so that my neighbors never knew or dealt with the ramifications of their house being burned down. Freedom is preserved, and consequences are avoided. Consider the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl. There is nothing logically problematic with asserting that God permits the rapist to commit the rape and to succeed in her subsequent murder, during which God disables the girl from ever being conscious of her rape and strangulation— and revives her upon her death without her ever knowing anything happened to her. Freedom is preserved, and consequences are avoided. Since the visceral reaction against the free-will theodicy centers on the negative consequences of freedom’s application, let us call this new construal of God’s activity a “nonconsequence world.”

Several problems attend a nonconsequence world. First, the objection does not address the free-will theodicy at all but questions the lack of divine intervention. Notice that each suggestion indicates something God can do to mitigate the effects of free decisions, which says nothing at all about the nature of human freedom or the agent performing the act in question. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we allow the question about divine intervention to remain, and we suggest that God override the consequences of our actions while still permitting our freedom to exist full force. The scenario envisioned here makes our world much like the famous pleasure machine scenario — where all of our experiences are either directly pleasurable or transformed into a pleasurable experience. In such a world we would not have any recourse from committing horrendous evils because we would not know the seriousness of the ensuing harm from acting in such a way.

Admittedly the moral status of actions is not governed solely by the ends of our actions; however, we certainly deliberate about the consequences of our actions upon the well-being of others and ourselves. In other words, the suggestion that God stamp out bad consequences, albeit a freedom preserving proposal, undermines our ability to make significant moral choices. Proponents of a nonconsequence world should expect God to make acts such as rape a pleasure for the victim either directly through the sex act or indirectly through psychological manipulation. In doing so, another critique is leveraged; the proposal effectually strips the moral accountability between the perpetrator and his victim [*relational* contours are expunged of *love*] as well as what the definition of rape entails. To use a less chafing example, suppose I steal my neighbor’s birdfeeder after a squirrel breaks my own. Before choosing to steal the birdfeeder I recognize that my action is morally wrong — I am not confused about the moral status of the action. Sometime after I steal the birdfeeder, my conscience gets the better of me; I return the birdfeeder to my neighbor (with a bag of birdseed as a gesture). The only discernible response I should receive from my neighbor upon my returning the birdfeeder is one of utter perplexity; for if God replaces the stolen birdfeeder to prevent the material and emotional harm caused by the action, then my ability to set things right will be completely undermined. My neighbor will have no concept of ever having been wronged or perceive any need for apology or remuneration.

What is more, it is hard to see how I could ever actually discern that my action was worthy of reproach to begin with, for if God “undoes” the negative consequences of evil choices, then presumably the wrongdoer will benefit from this undoing as well. The line of thought is as follows: one of the harmful consequences of my choices is the effects these choices have on me. Not only is it true that malformed decisions adversely affect my character; the ability to concede one evil action makes it more probable that I will make another concession in my future deliberations and choices. In an effort to stall this decline of character, God must undo the harmful effects of my own choices on me. Such an action would be a literal divine recreation of my character such that any of my future wrong decisions would have nothing to do with my previous deliberations and choices. For this suggestion to pass muster, God would have to be the ultimate revisionist historian. These reasons, and more, provide compelling grounds to question the claim that God can undo the harmful nature of free decisions while guarding the integrity of freedom itself.

Evans, Jeremy A. (2013-03-01). The Problem of Evil: The Challenge to Essential Christian Beliefs (B&h Studies in Christian Apologetics).

End quote.

Whether or not we grant "gratuitous" evil or not, it seems that our definitions begin from the ground up. Obviously "Trinity" combined with "Imago Dei" justifies irreducible volition, and, just as obvious, there is no number of possible worlds, or options, or whatever, which we can grant the created and volitional being (Man) which can sum to a threat to God's status as *GOD*.

Just to offer more options, this may be of help:

Granting gratuitous evil: Two PDF’s which are available are “THE NECESSITY OF GRATUITOUS EVIL” by William Hasker and also “The Existence and Irrelevance of Gratuitous Evil”, by Kirk R. MacGregor [ http://www.kirkmacgregor.org/uploads/pc_14-1_macgregor.pdf ]

A brief excerpt: “The absurdity of the Greater-Good Defense is multiplied by its transformation of the universe into a philosophically overdetermined system….. Gratuitous evils are "simply a logically unavoidable necessity of contingent living in a freedom-permitting world." While God can surely use many [even all] of those individual acts of evil for our good, it does not follow that every act of evil that God allows, He allows for the purpose of accomplishing some greater good….. He allows acts of evil, even gratuitous acts of evil, because He values and honors the freedom of our will.”

Lastly, it's not clear what reality would *be* in any real sense if we were to expunge "irreducible volition" such as we find within those processions of love's irreducible reciprocity within "Trinity" and hence within the "Imago Dei".

he summarizes my thinking nicely:

"Now, as I argued in a post on relativism, moral relativism is really a kind of eliminativism about morality in disguise. At the end of the day, if moral relativism were true, then it wouldn’t be that moral goodness is a real feature of the world, but is relative to cultures or the like; rather, it would be the case that there simply is no such thing as moral goodness at all, but only the illusion of moral goodness. Now, for reasons like the ones just indicated, I would say that the same thing is true of moral subjectivism. If moral subjectivism were true, then this would entail, not that moral goodness is real, but really something subjective; rather, it would be the case that there simply is no such thing as moral goodness at all, but only the illusion of moral goodness."

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2016/07/bad-lovin.html

ok well we've exhausted this vein of analysis then.

thx again and i look forward to sparring again in the near term.

I was just using one of the responses that I've seen you use here.
What do I think you should do? I think you should go and then use the experience to bolster your comments here at SN. But be forewarned that there is potential that you might change your outlook.

I thought my answer was obvious. Considering what I told you, what do you think I should do with your advice?

You didn't answer my question.

Why do you refer to him as poor Doug?
I see him as a truth seeker who is educating himself with as much philosophical understanding as he can. And he may benefit from an encounter with the source and summit of Catholicism now that he is armed with more knowledge. I don't think those statistics matter when it is one individual that is of concern.
I don't deny that other religions provide spirituality but only one has the Eucharist, that's why I recommended it to Doug.

And I see no reason not to think otherwise.