= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheAncientGeek comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (482)
I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking of infinite entities as very large finite entities, nor was I claiming that infinite sets must have infinite complexity or anything of the kind. What I was claiming high complexity for is the concept of "good", not God or "perfectly good" as opposed to "merely very good".
Wouldn't "perfectly good" be the appropriate concept here?
Yes, but the point is that the "perfectly" part (1) isn't what I'm blaming for the complexity and (2) doesn't appear to me to make the complexity go away by its presence.
I don't see how you can be sure about, when there is so much disagreement about the meaning of good. Human preferences are complex because they are idiosyncratic, but why would a deity, particularly a "philosopher's god", have idiosyncratic preferences? And an omniscient deity could easily be a 100% accurate consequentialist..the difficult part of consequentialism, having reliable knowledge of the consequences, has been granted...all you need to add to omniscience is a Good Will.
IOW, regarding both atheism and consequentialism as slam-dunks is a bit of a problem, because if you follow through the consequences of consequentialism, many of the arguments atheism unravel: a consequentialist deity is fully entitled to destroy two cities to save 10, that would be his version of a trolley problem.
It seems to me that no set of preferences that can be specified very simply without appeal to human-level concepts is going to be close enough to what we call "good" to deserve that name.
I entirely agree, but I don't see how this makes a substantial fraction of the arguments for atheism unravel; in particular, most thoughtful statements of the argument from evil say not "bad things happen, therefore no god" but "bad things happen without any sign that they are necessary to enable outweighing gains, therefore probably no god".
Not if the deity is omnipotent.
That's debatable, at which point it is no longer a slam dunk.