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It seems like you're claiming an identity relationship between god and morality, and I find myself very confused as to what that could possibly mean.
I mean, it's sort of like I just encountered someone claiming that "friendship" and "dolphins" are really the same thing. One or both of us must be very confused about what the labels "friendship" and/or "dolphins" signify, or what this idea of "sameness" is, or something else...
See Alejandro's comment. Define G-d as "that which creates morality, and also lives in the sky and has superpowers". If you insist on the view of morality as a fixed logical abstraction, that would be a set of axioms. (Modus ponens has the Buddha-nature!) Then all you have to do is settle the factual question of whether the short-tempered creator who ordered you to genocide your neighbors embodies this set of axioms. If not, well, you live in a weird hybrid universe where G-d intervened to give you some sense of morality but is weaker than whichever Cthulhu or amoral physical law made and rules your world. Sorry.
Out of curiosity, why do you write G-d, not God? The original injunction against taking God's name in vain applied to the name in the old testament, which is usually mangled in the modern English as Jehovah, not to the mangled Germanic word meaning "idol".
People who care about that kind of thing usually think it counts as a Name, but don't think there's anything wrong with typing it (though it's still best avoided in case someone prints out the page). Trying to write it makes me squirm horribly and if I absolutely need the whole word I'll copy-paste it. I can totally write small-g "god" though, to talk about deities in general (or as a polite cuss). I feel absolutely silly about it, I'm an atheist and I'm not even Jewish (though I do have a weird cultural-appropriatey obsession). Oh well, everyone has weird phobias.
How interesting. Phobias are a form of alief, which makes this oddly relevant to my recent post.
I don't think it's quite the same. I have these sinking moments of "Whew, thank... wait, thank nothing" and "Oh please... crap, nobody's listening", but here I don't feel like I'm being disrespectful to Sky Dude (and if I cared I wouldn't call him Sky Dude). The emotion is clearly associated with the word, and doesn't go "whoops, looks like I have no referent" upon reflection.
What seems to be behind it is a feeling that if I did that, I would be practicing my religion wrong, and I like my religion. It's a jumble of things that give me an oxytocin kick, mostly consciously picked up, but it grows organically and sometimes plucks new dogma out of the environment. ("From now on Ruby Tuesday counts as religious music. Any questions?") I can't easily shed a part, it has to stop feeling sacred of its own accord.
Thought experiment: suppose I were to tell you that every time I see you write out "G-d", I responded by writing "God", or perhaps even "YHWH", on a piece of paper, 10 times. Would that knowledge alter your behavior? How about if I instead (or additionally) spoke it aloud?
Edit: downvote explanation requested.
It feels exactly equivalent to telling me that every time you see me turn down licorice, you'll eat ten wheels of it. It would bother me slightly if you normally avoided taking the Name in vain (and you didn't, like, consider it a sacred duty to annoy me), but not to the point I'd change my behavior.
Which I didn't know, but makes sense in hindsight (as hindsight is wont to do); sacredness is a hobby, and I might be miffed at fellow enthusiasts Doing It Wrong, but not at people who prefer fishing or something.
1) I don't believe you.
2) I don't respond to blackmail.
My usual response to reading 2) is to think 1).
I wonder if you really wouldn't respond to blackmail if the stakes were high and you'd actually lose something critical. "I don't respond to blackmail" usually means "I claim social dominance in this conflict".
Not in general, but in this particular instance, the error is in seeing any "conflict" whatsoever. This was not intended as a challenge, or a dick-waving contest, just a sincerely proposed thought experiment in order to help me better understand MixedNuts' mental model.
(My response was intended to be within the thought experiment mode, not external. I took Eugine's as being within that mode too.)
Thanks, I apppreciate that. My pique was in response to Eugine's downvote, not his comment.
“In practice, virtually everyone seems to judge a large matter of principle to be more important than a small one of pragmatics, and vice versa — everyone except philosophers, that is.” (Gary Drescher, Good and Real)
What???!!! Are you suggesting that I'm actually planning on conducting the proposed thought experiment? Actually, physically, getting a piece of paper and writing out the words in question? I assure you, this is not the case. I don't even have any blank paper in my home - this is the 21st century after all.
This is a thought experiment I'm proposing, in order to help me better understand MixedNuts' mental model. No different from proposing a thought experiment involving dust motes and eternal torture. Are you saying that Eliezer should be punished for considering such hypothetical situations, a trillion times over?
Yes I know, and my comment was how I would respond in your thought experiment.
(Edited: the first version accidentally implied the opposite of what I intended.)
??? Ok, skipping over the bizarre irrationality of your making that assumption in the first place, now that I've clarified the situation and told you in no uncertain terms that I am NOT planning on conducting such an experiment (other than inside my head), are you saying you think I'm lying? You sincerely believe that I literally have a pen and paper in front of me, and I'm going through MixedNuts's comment history and writing out sacred names for each occurance of "G-d"? Do you actually believe that? Or are you pulling our collective leg?
In the event that you do actually believe that, what kind of evidence might I provide that would change your mind? Or is this an unfalsifiable belief?
Oops. See my edit.
Why should s/he care about what you choose to do?
I don't know. That's why I asked.
Isn't blackmail a little extreme?
Yes, which is why I explicitly labled it as only a thought experiment.
This seems to me to be entirely in keeping with the LW tradition of thought experiments regarding dust particles and eternal torture.... by posing such a question, you're not actually threatening to torture anybody.
Edit: downvote explantion requested.
Or put a dost mote in everybody's eye.
Withdrawn.
You can eliminate inconvenient phobias with flooding. I can personally recommend sacrilege.
EDIT: It sounds like maybe it's not just a phobia.
I think there's a bug in your theist-simulation module ^^
I've yet to meet one that could have spontaneously come up with that statement.
Anyway, more to the point... in the definition of god you give, it seems to me that the "lives in sky with superpowers" part is sort of tacked on to the "creates morality" part, and I don't see why I can't talk about the "creates morality" part separate from the tacked-on bits. And if that is possible, I think this definition of god is still vulnerable to the dilemma (although it would seem clear that the second horn is the correct one; god contains a perfect implementation of morality, therefore what he says happens to be moral).
Hi there.
Are you a real theist or do you just like to abuse the common terminology (like, as far as I can tell, user:WillNewsome)? :)
A real theist. Even a Christian, although mostly Deist these days.
So you think there's a god, but it's conceivable that the god has basically nothing to do with our universe?
If so, I don't see how you can believe this while giving a similar definition for "god" as an average (median?) theist.
(It's possible I have an unrepresentative sample, but all the Christians I've met IRL who know what deism is consider it a heresy... I think I tend to agree with them that there's not that much difference between the deist god and no god...)
That "mostly" is important. While there is a definite difference between deism and atheism (it's all in the initial conditions) it would still be considered heretical by all major religions except maybe Bhuddism because they all claim miracles. I reckon Jesus and maybe a few others probably worked miracles, but that God doesn't need to do all that much; He designed this world and thus presumably planned it all out in advance (or rather from outside our four-dimensional perspective.) But there were still adjustments, most importantly Christianity, which needed a few good miracles to demonstrate authority (note Jesus only heals people in order to demonstrate his divine mandate, not just to, well, heal people.)
That depends on the Gospel in question. The Johannine Jesus works miracles to show that he's God; the Matthean Jesus is constantly frustrated that everyone follows him around, tells everyone to shut up, and rejects Satan's temptation to publicly show his divine favor as an affront to God.
He works miracles to show authority. That doesn't necessarily mean declaring you're the actual messiah, at least at first.
So you can have N>1 miracles and still have deism? I always thought N was 0 for that.
I think (pure) deism is N=1 ("let's get this thing started") and N=0 is "atheism is true but I like thinking about epiphenomena".
I'm not actually a deist. I'm just more deist than the average theist.
OK, you've convinced me you're (just barely) a theist (and not really a deist as I understand the term).
To go back to the original quotation (http://lesswrong.com/lw/fv3/by_which_it_may_be_judged/80ut):
So you consider the "factual question" above to be meaningful? If so, presumably you give a low probability for living in the "weird hybrid universe"? How low?
About the same as 2+2=3. The universe exists; gotta have a creator. God is logically necessary so ...
And also, to occasionally demonstrate profound bigotry, as in Matthew 15:22-26:
Was his purpose in that to demonstrate that "his divine mandate" applied only to persons of certain ethnicities?
One, that's NOT using his powers.
Two, she persuaded him otherwise.
And three, I've seen it argued he knew she would offer a convincing argument and was just playing along. Not sure how solid that argument is, but ... it does sound plausible.
Deism is essentially the belief that an intelligent entity formed, and then generated all of the universe, sans other addendums, as opposed to the belief that a point mass formed and chaoticly generated all of the universe.
Yes, but those two beliefs don't predict different resulting universes as far as I can tell. They're functionally equivalent, and I disbelieve the one that has to pay a complexity penalty.
I typically don't accept the mainstream Judeo-Christian text as metaphorical truth, but if I did I can settle that question in the negative: The Jehovah of those books is the force that forbade knowledge and life to mankind in Genesis, and therefore does not embody morality. He is also not the creator of morality nor of the universe, because that would lead to a contradiction.
I dunno, dude could have good reasons to want knowledge of good and evil staying hush-hush. (Forbidding knowledge in general would indeed be super evil.) For example: You have intuitions telling you to eat when you're hungry and give food to others when they're hungry. And then you learn that the first intuition benefits you but the second makes you a good person. At this point it gets tempting to say "Screw being a good person, I'm going to stuff my face while others starve", whereas before you automatically shared fairly. You could have chosen to do that before (don't get on my case about free will), but it would have felt as weird as deciding to starve just so others could have seconds. Whereas now you're tempted all the time, which is a major bummer on the not-sinning front. I'm making this up, but it's a reasonable possibility.
Also, wasn't the tree of life totally allowed in the first place? We just screwed up and ate the forbidden fruit and got kicked out before we got around to it. You could say it's evil to forbid it later, but it's not that evil to let people die when an afterlife exists. Also there's an idea (at least one Christian believes this) that G-d can't share his power (like, polytheism would be a logical paradox). Eating from both trees would make humans equal to G-d (that part is canon), so dude is forced to prevent that.
You can still prove pretty easily that the guy is evil. For example, killing a kid (through disease, not instant transfer to the afterlife) to punish his father (while his mother has done nothing wrong). Or ordering genocides. (The killing part is cool because afterlife, the raping and enslaving part less so.) Or making a bunch of women infertile because it kinda looked like the head of the household was banging a married woman he thought was single. Or cursing all descendents of a guy who accidentally saw his father streaking, but being A-OK with raping your own father if there are no marriageable men available. Or... well, you get the picture.
You sure? They believed in a gloomy underworld-style afterlife in those days.
Well, it's not as bad as it sounds, anyway. It's forced relocation, not murder-murder.
How do you know what they believed? Mordern Judaism is very vague about the afterlife - the declassified material just mumbles something to the effect of "after the Singularity hits, the righteous will be thawed and live in transhuman utopia", and the advanced manual can't decide if it likes reincarnation or not. Do we have sources from back when?
As I said, that's debatable; most humans historically believed that's what "death" consisted of, after all.
That's not to say it's wrong. Just debatable.
Eh?
Google "sheol". It's usually translated as "hell" or "the grave" these days, to give the impression of continuity.
There's something to be said against equating transhumanism with religious concepts, but the world to come is an exact parallel.
I don't know much about Kabbalah because I'm worried it'll fry my brain, but Gilgul is a thing.
I always interpreted sheol as just the literal grave, but apparently it refers to an actual world. Thanks.
Well, it is if you expect SAIs to be able to reconstruct anyone, anyway. But thanks for clarifying.
Huh. You learn something new every day.
No, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge (of Good and Evil) were both forbidden.
My position is that suppressing knowledge of any kind is Evil.
The contradiction is that the creator of the universe should not have created anything which it doesn't want. If nothing else, can't the creator of the universe hex-edit it from his metauniverse position and remove the tree of knowledge? How is that consistent with morality?
Genesis 2:16-2:17 looks pretty clear to me: every tree which isn't the tree of knowledge is okay. Genesis 3:22 can be interpreted as either referring to a previous life tree ban or establishing one.
If you accept the next gen fic as canon, Revelations 22:14 says that the tree will be allowed at the end, which is evidence it was just a tempban after the fall.
Where do you get that the tree of life was off-limits?
Sheesh. I'll actively suppress knowledge of your plans against the local dictator. (Isn't devil snake guy analogous?) I'll actively suppress knowledge of that weird fantasy you keep having where you murder everyone and have sex with an echidna, because you're allowed privacy.
Standard reply is that free will outweighs everything else. You have to give people the option to be evil.
There is no reason an omnipotent God couldn't have created creatures with free will that still always choose to be good. See Mackie, 1955.
Well, that depends on your understanding of "free will", doesn't it? Most people here would agree with you, but most people making that particular argument wouldn't.
The most important issue is that however the theist defines "free will", he has the burden of showing that free will by that very definition is supremely valuable: valuable enough to outweigh the great evil that humans (and perhaps other creatures) cause by abusing it, and so valuable that God could not possibly create a better world without it.
This to my mind is the biggest problem with the Free Will defence in all its forms. It seems pretty clear that free will by some definition is worth having; it also seems pretty clear that there are abstruse definitions of free will such that God cannot both create it and ensure it is used only for good. But these definitions don't coincide.
One focal issue is whether God himself has free will, and has it in all the senses that are worth having. Most theist philosophers would say that God does have every valuable form of free will, but also that he is not logically free : there is no possible world in which God performs a morally evil act. But a little reflection shows there are infinitely many possible people who are similarly free but not logically free (so they also have exactly the same valuable free will that God does). And if God creates a world containing such people, and only such people, he necessarily ensure the existence of (valuable) free will but without any moral evil. So why doesn't he do that?
See Quentin Smith for more on this.
You may be aware of Smith's argument, and may be able to point me at an article where Plantinga has acknowledged and refuted it. If so, please do so.
Well sure. But that's a separate argument, isn't it?
My point is that anyone making this argument isn't going to see Berry's argument as valid, for the same reason they are making this (flawed for other reasons) argument in the first place.
Mind you, it's still an accurate statement and a useful observation in this context.
I think this is an excellent summary. Having read John L. Mackie's free will argument and Plantinga's transworld depravity free will defense, I think that a theodicy based on free will won't be successful. Trying to define free will such that God can't ensure using his foreknowledge that everyone will act in a morally good way leads to some very odd definitions of free will that don't seem valuable at all, I think.
It was my understanding that Alvin Plantinga mostly agreed that Mackie had him pinned with that response, so I'm calling you on this one.
Most people making that argument, in my experience, believe that for free will to be truly "free" God cannot have decided (or even predicted, for some people) their actions in advance. Of course, these people are confused about the nature of free will.
If you could show me a link to Plantinga conceding, that might help clear this up, but I'm guessing Mackie's argument (or something else) dissolved his confusion on the topic. If we had access to someone who actually believes this, we could test it ... anyone want to trawl through some theist corner of the web?
Unless I'm misunderstanding your claim, of course; I don't believe I've actually read Mackie's work. I'm going to go see if I can find it free online now.
Yeah, or at least put the option to be evil somewhere other than right in the middle of the garden with a "Do not eat, or else!" sign on it for a species you created vulnerable to reverse psychology.
My understanding is that the vulnerability to reverse psychology was one of the consequences of eating the fruit.
That's an interesting one. I hadn't heard that.
There is a trivial argument against an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent god. Why would a god with up to two of those three characteristics make creatures with free will that still always choose to be good?
No, if I give the creator free will, he doesn't have to give anyone he creates the option. He chose to create the option or illusion, else he didn't exercise free will.
It seems like you require a reason to suppress knowledge; are you choosing the lesser of two evils when you do so?
I meant free will as a moral concern. Nobody created G-d, so he doesn't necessarily have free will, though I think he does. He is, however, compelled to act morally (lest he vanish in a puff of logic). And morality requires giving people you create free will, much more than it requires preventing evil. (Don't ask me why.)
Sure, I'm not Kant. And I'm saying G-d did too. People being able but not allowed to get knowledge suppresses knowledge, which is a little evil; people having knowledge makes them vulnerable to temptation, which is worse; people being unable to get knowledge deprives them of free will and also suppresses knowledge, which is even worse; not creating people in the first place is either the worst or impossible for some reason.
I disagree with your premise that the actions taken by the entity which preceded all others are defined to be moral. Do you have any basis for that claim?
It says so in the book? (Pick any psalm.) I mean if we're going to disregard that claim we might as well disregard the claims about a bearded sky dude telling people to eat fruit.
Using your phrasing, I'm defining G-d's actions as moral (whether this defines G-d or morality I leave up to you). The Bible claims that the first entity was G-d. (Okay, it doesn't really, but it's fanon.) It hardly seems fair to discount this entirely, when considering whether an apparently evil choice is due to evilness or to knowing more than you do about morality.
Presumably the creator did want the trees, he just didn't want humans using it. I always got the impression that the trees were used by God(and angels?), who at the point the story was written was less the abstract creator of modern times and more the (a?) jealous tribal god of the early Hebrews (for example, he was physically present in the GOE.) Isn't there a line about how humanity must never reach the TOL because they would become (like) gods?
EDIT:
Seriously? Knowledge of any kind?
Yes. Suppressing knowledge of any kind is evil. It's not the only thing which is evil, and acts are not necessarily good because they also disseminate knowledge.
This has interesting implications.
Other more evil things (like lots of people dieing) can sometimes be prevented by doing a less evil thing (like suppressing knowledge). For example, the code for an AI that would foom, but does not have friendliness guarantees, is a prime candidate for suppression.
So saying that something is evil is not the last word on whether or not it should be done, or how it's doers should be judged.
Code, instructions, and many things that can be expressed as information are only incidentally knowledge. There's nothing evil about writing a program and then deleting it; there is something evil about passing a law which prohibits programming from being taught, because programmers might create an unfriendly AI.
Well, the knowledge from the tree appears to also have been knowledge of this kind.
Fair enough. Humans do appear to value truth.
Of course, if acts that conceal knowledge can be good because of other factors, then this:
... is still valid.