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Decius comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong
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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.
Maybe I have gotten mixed up and it was Mackie who conceded to Plantinga? Unfortunately, I can't really check at the moment. Besides, I don't really disagree with what you said about most people who are making that particular argument.
Fair enough.
Well, having looked into it, it appears that Plantinga wasn't a compatibilist, while Mackie was. Their respective arguments assume their favored version of free will. Wikipedia thinks that Plantinga's arguments are generally agreed to be valid if* you grant incompatibilism, which is a big if; the LW consensus seems to be compatibilist for obvious reasons. I can't find anything on either of them conceding, I'm afraid.
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.
Suppose that the writer of the book isn't moral. What would the text of the book say about the morality of the writer?
Or we could assume that the writer of the book takes only moral actions, and from there try to construct which actions are moral. Clearly, one possibility is that it is moral to blatantly lie when writing the book, and that the genocide, torture, and mass murder didn't happen. That brings us back to the beginning again.
The other possibility is too horrible for me to contemplate: That torture and murder are objectively the most moral things to do in noncontrived circumstances.
Taboo "contrived".
"The kind of obscure technical exceptions that wedrifid will immediately think of the moment someone goes and makes a fully general claim about something that is almost true but requires qualifiers or gentler language."
That's not helpful, especially in context.
That doesn't help if wedrifid won't think of as obscure and noncentral exceptions with certain questions as with others.
(IIRC, EY in his matching questions on OKCupid when asked whether someone is ever obliged to sex, he picked No and commented something like ‘unless I agreed to have sex with you for money, and already took the money’, but when asked whether someone should ever use a nuclear weapon (or something like that), he picked Yes and commented with a way more improbable example than that.)
I'd take “contrived circumstances” to mean ‘circumstances so rare that the supermajority of people alive have never found themselves in one of them’.
No. But I will specify the definition from Merriam-Webster and elaborate slightly:
Contrive: To bring about with difficulty.
Noncontrived circumstances are any circumstances that are not difficult to encounter.
For example, the credible threat of a gigantic number of people being tortured to death if I don't torture one person to death is a contrived circumstance. 0% of exemplified situations requiring moral judgement are contrived.
Taboo "difficult".
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.
I draw comparisons between the serpent offering the apple, the Titan Prometheus, and Odin sacrificing his eye. Do you think that the comparison of those knowledge myths is unfair?
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.