Michael Egnor on why evil shows that there IS a God
| March 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Religion |
Big Bang/NASA
From Michael Egnor at ENST, replying to one of the universe is “itself a mind” philosophers, Phillip Goff:
Evil is not a problem, and in fact does not exist, if there is no God. And Goff errs in proposing that the universe is a Mind and that the Mind embodied in the universe is the ground of existence.
The universe is not a Mind. It is a manifestation of a Mind, the creation of a Mind, but it has no mind itself. A mind is an aspect of a soul, and what characterizes a mind is its ability to hold the form of another substance in it without becoming that substance. For example, my mind can grasp the idea of a tree or of justice, but I do not therefore become a tree or justice. The universe certainly has forms, but those are substantial forms, which make the universe and the component parts what they are. There is no reason to impute “mind” to what is clearly an assemblage of material substances.
Furthermore, the universe is contingent. Its essence — what it is — does not include the necessity that it is. Nowhere in a physical description of the universe or of its laws is there any necessity of its existence. When we describe a distant galaxy or the Big Bang, it is possible that we are engaging in fantasy or error. But the ground of existence must have necessary existence — its essence must be existence. What it is must be that it is. That is clearly not true of the physical universe. More.
See also: At Aeon: Fine-tuning is easy to explain: The universe itself is conscious, and somewhat like a human. Goff: “However, it now seems to me that reflection on the fine-tuning might give us grounds for thinking that the mental life of the Universe is just a little closer than I had previously thought to the mental life of a human being.” Indeed. If we keep going in this direction, we will run into Zeus. The only remaining mystery is why our Stone Age ancestors gave up on him after a while.
At Quartz: Materialists are converting to panpsychism
Latest consciousness theory: Rocks have minds
The universe may be conscious?
Evading hard problem of human consciousness: Consciousness is in everything!
The illusion of consciousness sees through itself.
And the naturalist’s biggest problem, to hear him tell it, is the persistence of stubborn doubt about naturalism.
89 Responses to Michael Egnor on why evil shows that there IS a God
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That evil exists shows that there is a God.
As per the atheists, the cruelty and hate defined by Judeo-Christian ethos would most certainly remain there just is nothing to authoritatively define them as, well, evil.
God is pure goodness itself.
Something exists that is not God.
Therefore, some degree of evil has to exist.
That’s and interesting conjecture. How might we go about finding errors it might contain and discarding them?
There are reasonable sounding opposites for nearly all of these arguments.
Example? God could be perfectly evil and still allow good. Why? Because, being perfectly evil, it would be necessary for us to know what we were missing when the tortured us for eternity.
That says the opposite is true, in really, yet explains what we experience, “evil”, just as well. This is an example of an easily varied explanation.
The existence of a concept or the word for that concept does not necessarily mean that the thing referred to must exist as something other than a concept. Middle Earth does not necessarily exist just because Tolkien named and described such a place. So what do we mean by “God” and “goodness” and what reason do we have for thinking that they exist as more than fictions?
Seversky states:
Hmmmm, like the claim from materialists that the entire ‘concept’ of say a person named “Seversky’ must not necessarily exist as a real person but must instead be a neuronal illusion?
And to echo Ross Douthat’s question to Coyne, and exactly why should I or anyone else take what the illusion named ‘Seversky’ says about what is real and what is imaginary seriously? Illusions, by definition, are unreal to begin with!
ba77 – why do you think Seversky is an illusion?
Hmmm Bob (and weave) O’Hara, as was gone over with you in detail before,,,
https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/jonathan-mclatchie-vs-keith-fox-has-id-stood-the-test-of-time/#comment-652410
,,,it is not I that think that you or Seversky are illusions, it is your own ‘chosen’ materialistic philosophy that insists that consciousness (i.e. personhood), free will, and morality, are illusions.
That you yourself do not think you are an illusion is in itself a testament to the fact that atheistic materialism is false.
In fact, the more you insist that your consciousness, free will, and morality are not illusions, and that you are indeed a real person with real meaning and purpose in your life, then the more you in fact testify to the fact that your own atheistic worldview is clearly false (and insane).
I certainly don’t think that you and Seversky are illusions. It is an insanity, out of many insanities, that arises strictly from your own atheistic materialism.
But don’t feel bad Bob that you have been so badly suckered by your own atheistic worldview. The false presupposition that material reality takes precedence over conscious reality is fairly common, even among Christians.
The fact that it is a fairly common false presupposition on the part of many people in general is revealed by the ‘shock’ that people feel when they first learn that quantum mechanics reveals that external ‘material’ reality does not exist without conscious observation.
In fact, the confusion between what is actually real (consciousness) and what is actually illusory (materialism) is so great that quantum mechanics falsified a materialistic model that is actually named ‘realism’.
Which is basically a materialistic model of the world in which it is held that material reality exist apart from consciousness in general, and conscious observation in particular.
Thus, by naming the materialistic model ‘realism’ in the first place, the confusion between what is actually real (i.e. consciousness) and what is actually illusory (i.e. materialism) is shown to run fairly deep in the human psyche.
Though it may be shocking to first learn that ‘reality’ does not exist without conscious observation in particular (and consciousness in general),,, the fact of the matter is that plain old fashioned logic dictates that ‘reality’ must simply be this way or else all reason is lost,,
Of supplemental note:
bornagain77 @ 6
We have good evidence that the way we see the world is that image-forming light enters our eyes and is transduced into electrical signals passed along the optic nerve to the visual cortex of the brain. There it is processed to form the visual image we see in front of us. Similar processes for converting external stimuli into electrical signals transmitted to the brain occur in our other sensory channels.
All that data is integrated to form the HD, stereoscopic, full color model complete with touch, taste and smell which is what we use to navigate the external reality we assume the model represents. And this is a partial model or representation of what is out there, good in some respects, not so good in others, but not the whole thing. The are birds of prey whose visual acuity is far greater than ours. I have read that if we could see in the dark as well as owls, we could read a newspaper in pitch darkness by the light of a single candle set a mile away. Dogs and cats have a far better sense of smell than we do and they and other animals can hear sounds that are completely inaudible to us. Some creatures can “see” by infra-red radiation or by ultra-violet wavelengths that are beyond the range of our senses.
My question to you is, if there is some other, more direct extra-sensory way of perceiving external reality, what is the point of this immensely complex sensory apparatus and the very expensive processing capacity that converts that data into what you and I are experiencing now?
If you think we are able to do without it then there is a simple experiment we can perform where a volunteer is placed in a sensory-deprivation tank and challenged to provide information about objects brought into the same room. How do you think they would do?
Coming back to the question of our conscious experience of self we can say that, if we are using the model of external reality to navigate around it, then it must also include a representation of ourselves and how we are orientated with respect to the external world. It is but a short step from there to see that information about our internal physical states could be used to create a representation or model of ourselves as a physical beings within the greater model. The hard problem is explaining how our undeniable sense of individual self emerges.
Is our conscious model or representation of external reality and self an illusion? Only if there is no external reality to be modeled. Otherwise, it is a model or map and they are not illusions but abstractions of what is being modeled or mapped.
If you really think that I am an illusion then you are under no obligation to take anything I say seriously.
If you take the solipsistic position that you are the only conscious entity then why are you talking to yourself?
If, on the other hand, you believe that there are others like you out there, how do you know that your understanding and explanations of external reality are better than theirs? Are you interested in testing one against the other or are you only interested in finding confirmation of your own presuppositions?
That says the opposite is true, in really, yet explains what we experience, “evil”, just as well. This is an example of an easily varied explanation.
CR, you are arguing like a second grader on the playground. With enough imagination you can always think of an argument against something.
The reality, though, is that you have to put your chips on something. Natural science is a very silly way to determine what that something is.
Are you trying to outdo ‘Bob (and weave)’ in non-sequitur argumentation Seversky?
Again, it is not I that is saying that consciousness (i.e. personhood), free will, and morality, are illusions (or a ‘model’ as you try to term consciousness), It is your own materialistic philosophy that insists that consciousness (i.e. personhood), free will, and morality, are illusions.
And again, the more you fight against what your own atheistic philosophy dictates, i.e. that you are an illusion, the more you testify to the fact that it is false (and insane).
Of related note: As to (re)establishing the Agent Causality of God back to physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned, it is good to see how Quantum Mechanics has now validated certain aspects of “Mind”, (particularly validated the aspects of ‘the experience of “the now”‘ of the mind that Albert Einstein himself once claimed would never be a part of experimental physics and also validated the aspect of free will which Einstein claimed did not really exist but was only an illusion:
Seversky @ 9: “If, on the other hand, you believe that there are others like you out there, how do you know that your understanding and explanations of external reality are better than theirs?”
This, of course, is the question that everyone must ask him or herself. Surely you know that BA77 has already asked it of himself and he remains a theist. You presumably have asked it of yourself and you remain an atheist.
“Are you interested in testing one against the other or are you only interested in finding confirmation of your own presuppositions?”
I would presume that both you and BA77 are interesting in testing the reasonableness of your worldviews. Nevertheless, the divide between you exists, not because either of you refuses to test your worldview but because some things are beyond testing empirically. Some things ultimately come down to faith. BA77 has faith that theism is true. You have faith that atheism is true. Neither can be proved empirically.
And we have good reasons to say all of that is the result of intelligent design We don’t have any reason, besides personal bias, to say that non-telic processes did it. There isn’t even a way to test such a claim.
@tribune7
And the opposite is true, in that you can always think of an argument for something, as well. That’s my point. Thanks for making for me.
We start out with a conjecture, which we develop using our imagination. Then we come up with ways to test those guesses in hope of finding and discarding errors they contain. So, how do you know your explanation for “evil” is the right one? How could we go about finding errors in it?
We can always think of criticisms of our ideas. And we continue to do so long after they are developed.
And, as I pointed out, your explanation is easily varied. That is you can modify it significant without impacting its ability to explain “evil”. Being easily varied is the hallmark of an bad explanation.
ET @ 13, excellent point. and since Sev champions the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution, and since the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution is now proven to be false by advances in ‘quantum biology’, I really don’t think that Sev should ever be referring to biology in any way, shape, or form, to try to make his case for atheism since, as far as biology is concerned, he is now shown to not even be on the correct theoretical foundation in order to properly understand biological organisms in the first place.
Biological ‘form’ is also excellent for falsifying the reductive materialistic foundation of Darwinian evolution:
CR
And the opposite is true, in that you can always think of an argument for something, as well.
And you still have to come to a conclusion.
So, how do you know your explanation for “evil” is the right one?
Because it is impossible to refute. Give it a shot.
@tribune7
The Christian God, as an explanation of “evil” and “good” in the world, is a bad explanation because it is easily varied.
Again, it could just as well be that God is actually perfectly evil. And, being perfectly evil, he has no choice but to allow us to experience the good we will be missing when we are tortured for eternity. Otherwise he wouldn’t be perfectly evil. Right?
What’s worse? An eternity of torture without knowing good your missing or an eternity of torture knowing what good you could be having and experiencing instead?
That explains “evil” and “good” we experience in the world just as well, yet suggests the exact opposite his happening in reality. They are both bad explanations because they can be easily varied.
See above.
I wonder what would happen if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the forbidden fruit and actually hadn’t sinned?
How would they have known what good and evil is? Would there be evil at all?
I guess the perfect “Christian God” of the many at UD would’ve had to found another way to trick them into committing evil otherwise they would be like God or the would be God, as per Dr. Egnor’s theory:
“Evil exists because the created universe is not God, but His creation, so it must of necessity fall short of God, who is perfectly Good. After all, if the universe were perfectly good, without evil, it would just be God.
https://evolutionnews.org/2018/02/cosmic-fine-tuning-and-the-problem-of-evil/
Funny how atheists deny that evil (i.e. morality) even exists on the one hand, and then on the other hand always pretend that they know morality better than God does because they say God would never allow evil to exist.
Don’t believe me? Richard Dawkins himself is a raging moralist who thinks he knows morality better than God:
Might I suggest that God knows a lot more about morality, i.e. good and evil, than the atheist does? Especially since he used evil against itself on the Cross in order to bring redemption to man,,, which I hold to be supremely good
The problem with Egnor’s argument is that the atheist could simply substitute “suffering” for “evil” and avoid the pitfall of an atheist using moral terminology.
CR,
You miss the point. Cruelty, indifference to suffering, hate etc. are realities.
What makes them evil?
The pitfall is still immovably there Dick:
Hmmm, sounds a lot like what is happening now in China and the former Soviet Union:
Of related note: The reports of the death of Christianity in America are, much like Mark Twain’s death, greatly exaggerated
The ultimate good cannot be evil.
ba77 @ 8 – if you don’t think that Seversky is an illusion, then stop saying he is!
And also please stop telling me what I think. You don’t know, and a lot of what you write is plain wrong.
THis is always fun stuff because the parsing game begins.
If you notice Egnor parses the universe as being separate from humans and their minds when they are as part of it as a galaxy and all of its stars. Is the universe conscious? Why obviously. I am conscoius but I don’t claim my fingers are. That part of me that is conscious makes the claim stand.
then our materialist commenters start parsing human concept from material reality – but all things being material a concept is a material system.
CR adds to the parsing game trying to seperate Evil and good from a standard begging God could be evil which is just a trojan for a totally fallacious argument that assumes its own comclusion – that evil or good stands outside of an authority. Note – God could no more be evil than a ruler that determines what a foot is could be less or more than a foot. Good news for CR is that he’s apparently totally uaware of the circularity he’s employing.
its always with the sleight of a magician’s hand that atheist and materialists beg themselves out of addressing issues of morality, evil or even emotion. As if they can categorize it to something outside of materialism when they claim nothing is outside of it.
I don’t know that Evil PROVES there is a God but I find it oddly ID based that our sense of morality conjured up by the material in our minds just happens to match ( or dare I say it? be finely tuned) with health and other benefits to the rest of my body, my world and all those living in it.
the argument that concepts of the mind let the materialists off of explaining them by beggin they are not real and material is a magic trick I no longer buy.
Bob, do you have a reading comprehension issue?
Once again, it is not I that is saying that consciousness (i.e. personhood), free will, and morality, are illusions, It is your own materialistic philosophy that insists that consciousness (i.e. personhood), free will, and morality, are illusions.
And again, the more you fight against what your own atheistic philosophy dictates, the more you testify to the fact that it is false (and insane).
Moreover, if atheists were consistent with what their atheistic materialism actually entails, then they would also adamantly claim that mathematics itself is illusory, since it, like consciousness, free will and morality, also has no material basis,.
The argument from evil is an attempt to show that there is no all-loving God. The argument is not about there being no God at all.
of related note to this transcendent world of mathematics:
Of interest to theoretical mathematics that are fruitful to the progress of science, it is said that the best mathematical theories, that are later confirmed empirically to be true, were born out of the mathematicians ‘sense of beauty’. Paul Dirac is said to have mathematically discovered the ‘anti-electron’, before it was empirically confirmed, through his mathematical ‘sense of beauty’:
As the preceding video highlighted, Paul Dirac was rather adamant that beauty was integral to finding truth through math:
Albert Einstein was also a big fan of beauty in math. Einstein stated:
In regards to General Relativity, mathematical physicist Clifford Will and others also claim that it is beautiful
Alex Vilenkin, who mathematically proved that all hypothetical inflationary universes must have also have had a beginning, commenting on Euler’s Identity, stated,,,
As well, Richard Feynman called Euler’s Identity a ‘jewel’:
‘Mathematical beauty’ even had a guiding hand in the fairly recent discovery of the Amplituhedron:
Paul Dirac, when pressed for a definition of mathematical beauty, reacted as such:
And indeed, just as Dirac held, it is found when mathematicians are shown equations such as Euler’s identity or the Pythagorean identity the same area of the brain used to appreciate fine art or music lights up:
But where this ‘sense of beauty’ in mathematics, that apparently has been so fruitful for science, breaks down is with string theory, (and m-theory):
What is astonishing, in this seemingly deep connection between math and beauty, is the fact that the ‘argument from beauty’ is in fact a Theistic argument:
Even Darwin himself conceded that ‘beauty’ was fatal to his theory:
Thus, if you believe that beauty exists then you should reject atheistic materialism as false. As for myself, I certainly believe that beauty exists
@Tribune
Justification doesn’t help because reason always comes first. You use reason to choose between what you think are infallible sources, when to defer to them, how to interpret them, etc. So, who choses what is “evil”? You do. We all do. And we do so via criticism of moral ideas.
From this article at Nautilus
ba77 @ 27 – it’s you who wrote “… exactly why should I or anyone else take what the illusion named ‘Seversky’ says about what is real and what is imaginary seriously?” @ 8, and you’ve done this before. If you don’t think people are illusions, then don’t call them illusions. And my world view doesn’t lead me to the conclusion that we are illusions, so don’t claim please don’t be so arrogant as to tell me what I think.
Bob (and weave) continues his disingenuous debating style.
He partially quotes me and leaves out the qualifier for the statement that it is indeed his atheistic philosophy that makes the claim,,,
Context is everything,,,
Thus either Bob (and weave) has a serious reading comprehension issue or else, as is in all likelihood, he is being thoroughly disingenuous to the issue at hand (as is usual for internet atheists), that it is indeed his own atheistic philosophy that makes the claim the he, as a person, does not really exist.
And to reiterate a obvious point in all this, that Bob (and weave) would take such exception to being thought of as an illusion is yet more proof that his atheistic materialism is false and even insane.
Of supplemental note: The insanity inherent to atheism, especially the denial that real meaning and purpose exists for our lives, plays out in the ‘real’ world:
Right. I’ve told you repeatedly that I don’t think I’m an illusion. And your response … to accuse me of lying.
To reiterate: no, my philosophy does not lead to the conclusion that I don’t really exist. And I think I might just possibly have more knowledge of what I think than you do.
Without light there are no shadows.
“There are reasonable sounding opposites for nearly all of these arguments.
Example? God could be perfectly evil and still allow good. Why? Because, being perfectly evil, it would be necessary for us to know what we were missing when the tortured us for eternity.
That says the opposite is true, in really, yet explains what we experience, “evil”, just as well. This is an example of an easily varied explanation.”
I don’t often agree with an atheist, but you do make a very good point here. I read Dr. Egnor’s piece and it feels more like word games used to support wishful thinking than a well thought out, logical exercise. Because we are God’s creations, we trust him with regard to what is good and what is evil. But that says nothing about the nature of God himself. Is it not possible that we perceive as being all good simply because to think otherwise scares the crap out of us? Although none of us believe that God is actually evil, is there anything that is stopping this from being fact? Being God, can’t he be anything that he wants to be?
Bob (and weave) claims
“my philosophy does not lead to the conclusion that I don’t really exist.”
Really?? You better inform all the atheistic professors of that:
Hey, I got an idea Bob, since you say atheism does not say that consciousness, (i.e. personhood), is an illusion, and all the atheistic professors and authors say otherwise, why don’t we run a test???
Prove to me empirically that you really exist as a real person and that your concept of personhood is not just an illusion that is being pawned off on you by the randomly colliding particles of your brain,,, 🙂
Myself, I can empirically support my belief in a ‘transcendent’ soul and mind, but, you being a reductive materialist (i.e. Darwinist), that is not the type of evidence that you are looking for is it??? 🙂
Materialists, despite their belief that consciousness is ’emergent’ from a material basis, simply have no evidence for that belief:
Whereas atheists have no empirical support whatsoever for their belief that matter generates consciousness, I, on the other hand, as a Christian, can support my beliefs that #1, the immaterial mind interacts with the material brain, and #2 that consciousness precedes material reality:
For example, in direct contradiction to the atheistic claim that our thoughts are merely the result of whatever state our material brain happens to be in, ‘Brain Plasticity’, the ability to alter the structure of the brain from a person’s focused intention, has now been established by Jeffrey Schwartz, as well as among other researchers.
Then there is also the well documented placebo effect in which a person’s beliefs have pronounced physiological effects on their body
Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
also see “Albert Einstein vs. Quantum Mechanics and His Own Mind’
Why? They have different opinions. Should I ask you to confront rabbis about why Jesus is you lord?
I’ve never said that, though. I only stated my beliefs, not those of other people. As far as I can tell, I exist (Cogito ergo sum and all that). I can’t prove it, though, as it isn’t a mathematical theorem. Sorry.
Molson @36
“Is it not possible that we perceive as being all good simply because to think otherwise scares the crap out of us? Although none of us believe that God is actually evil, is there anything that is stopping this from being fact? Being God, can’t he be anything that he wants to be?”
Actually no he can’t because
A) there is no time (as we know it) for him to change his mind
B) There is no fact or occurence that would cause him to change his mind that he does not already know.
This is not even remotely a good point or argument. It merely assumes good and evil is something that finds its root in something outside of the authority that establishes it. Besides how would created beings come to hold a standard that is more right than God who in fact is what indues them with any sense of right and wrong?
Unfortunately we no longer really grasp what the word God means when we talk of him. Its just a word with an assumed understood meaning when it often isn’t understood at all.
Again Claiming God coud be evil is like saying a ruler that determines what a foot is, is shorter than a foot.
Bob (and weave),,,
and your ‘illusory’ opinion is suppose to outweigh the empirical evidence and the opinion of leading experts how exactly?
Moreover, since atheism denies the reality of free will, did you really choose your opinion or did the particles of your brain just give you the illusion that you chose your opinion?
And why should I care what the particles of your brain did? And even if I did care, since according to atheism I have no free will, how could I possibly change my opinion? I’m a friggin complete victim of the particles of my brain according to your unsubstantiated opinion,, an opinion that you have by no power of your own! 🙂
“Actually no he can’t because
A) there is no time (as we know it) for him to change his mind
B) There is no fact or occurence that would cause him to change his mind that he does not already know.”
But that assumes, a-priori, that he is good. But if he was evil from the start, why couldn’t he proceed with us as he already has?
“Again Claiming God coud be evil is like saying a ruler that determines what a foot is, is shorter than a foot.”
Yet we have no qualms about claiming that God is good. Would the same hold true for that?
And, to reiterate, I am not suggesting that God is evil. This hypothetical is just a counter-point to Dr. Egnor’s claim, which I think is flawed.
ba77 @ 41 – what “empirical evidence” do these experts have that I am an illusion?
Also, I don’t see that atheism denies free will – I think such a denial would have to rest on more than just the non-existence of any gods.
I’m going for “because Jesus told us to love our neighbour as ourselves”. Which, for what it’s worth, I reckon is pretty good advice.
Materialism offers determined, indetermined and emergent events. All three fail to ground free will. So, what is that you do not see?
Origenes – Keep up. We weren’t discussing materialism.
Bob@
So, what are we discussing? Panpsychism?
Bob (and weave) states:
Bob (and weave), I don’t know about you, but all through this thread I have been talking directly about atheistic materialism, and/or Darwinian evolution, and the presuppositions inherent therein. I have been VERY specific about that!
Atheistic materialism, and/or Darwinian evolution, is exactly what I was talking about with Seversky when you jumped into the thread at comment 7 and specifically asked,,
If you are not defending atheistic materialism, then you had no business whatsoever asking that question. For you not to specify how your philosophy differs from Seversky, and Darwinists in general, if at all, is misleading and pathetic.
Another example of you being pathetic is this:
Well golly gee whiz Bob, if you can see no ‘moral’ problem with an atheistic materialist ‘borrowing’ morality from Christianity, then I guess that certainly explains exactly why you do not find it morally troubling in the least that an atheistic materialist would also help themselves to free servings of consciousness, (i.e. personhood), and free will from Christian Theism. All without batting an eye.
Like I said, your arguments are pathetic., and, in regards to that last comment you made, apparently shameless.
bornagain77 @ 11
I know you are not saying that consciousness, free will, morality, etc are illusions. Neither am I. If there are other a/mats who say they are then I disagree.
That is the strawman fallacy. You are attacking something other than what I believe. Being an a/mat does not necessarily mean you are bound to hold that consciousness, etc are illusions.
bornagain77 @ 38
Yes, we do. We have a wealth of observations of the correlation between brain states and the observed conscious behavior of the individual. We have a host of observations of how damage to the brain caused by injury or disease can change the conscious behavior of the victim. We have experiments in which electrical or magnetic stimulation of the brain can elicit a range of conscious experiences in the subject.
Finally, we have never observed consciousness existing apart from the physical brain.
You cannot demonstrate the existence of an immaterial mind so you cannot show there is anything to interact with the physical brain.
An absurd notion. As I’ve asked before, if material reality does not exist until observed by consciousness then what is consciousness observing in the first place?
Why not?
CR
Justification doesn’t help because reason always comes first. You use reason to choose between what you think are infallible sources, when to defer to them, how to interpret them, etc. So, who choses what is “evil”? You do.
IOW, what is evil for me is not necessarily evil for Pol Pot.
So we are back to comment #1. If there is no God then evil is without meaning hence doesn’t exist.
I do believe evil exists and neither you nor I get to define it.
OTOH, if you do say evil gets to be defined by beholder and there is no accountability, well, that’s what Pol Pot did.
“Bob (and weave) continues his disingenuous debating style.”
Frankly, I can only see one person continuing a disingenuous debating style. And it is not Bob or Seversky. It really embarrasses me that we are on the same side of this debate. Bob and Seversky have been polite and have presented their views honestly, politely and effectively. I disagree with their arguments but, unlikely you, I don’t resort to ridicule and telling them what they think. And neither do they.
Sev, you stated
Please get it straight Sev, “the particles of your brain disagree”. “You”, your thoughts, all your actions, are the result of material particles. As much as “you” may think that “you” have chosen to have a certain opinion, it is all an illusion. The particles of your brain just so happened to find themselves in a particular state that gave you a certain opinion. You are at the complete mercy of whatever the particles decide to do (as if particles could ‘decide’)
as to:
Yes it does, either matter is primary and consciousness is basically illusory in nature, or else mind is primary and matter is basically illusory in nature.
Funny that in quantum mechanics you often here researchers mention ‘illusory’ when they talk about materialism.
,,,next post topic,,,
Sev, You have no clue how matter might achieve self awareness. Pointing to ‘brain states’ does not answer the profound mystery of how consciousness arises in the least.
Indeed, as the following paper makes abundantly clear, finding strict correlation of mind to brain states is all but impossible:
Moreover Sev, your claim that “we have never observed consciousness existing apart from the physical brain.” is (as you have been told at least twice by me personally), just plain false. Near Death Experiences directly falsify your claim:
As to your last two supposed rebuttals, what can I say?,,,
I supported my claims with empirical evidence and you just stated an opinion that you, since you have no free will, had no power in choosing in the first place. 🙂
Why should I care that the particles of your brain made you make such an incoherent argument?
Go figure.
Molson Bleu, moral posturing again??? and I guess me telling you to go soak your pompous head again would really be too much for you? 🙂
I’ll ask one time, please quit pestering me with your moral posturing.
Any more and I will take it as trolling.
“I’ll ask one time, please quit pestering me with your moral posturing.
Any more and I will take it as trolling.”
Moral posturing? All I said was that you were being disingenuous. Would you like an example?
Why don’t you actually respond to his comments rather than say that because he is an atheist, he can have no real thoughts? That is the height of disingenuous pomposity.
If you want to label me a troll and run to the site owner and have me banned because it is easier than addressing my criticism, that is your choice. Alternately, you could simply treat others with the respect that you feel that you are entitled to.
Above someplace, someone wrote, “But that assumes, a-priori, that he [God] is good. But if he was evil from the start ….”
Assuming for the sake of argument that some type of “God” is responsible for the creation of the universe as it is, I don’t see why it is necessary that it would have a personal interest in our behavior, or judgments about whether our behavior met some standards of “good or evil”: judgments about good and evil in respect to human behavior might not be a characteristic that would apply to it all.
Even if such a God watches over the world, as opposed to just creating it, that God might be totally disinterested in the specific nature and behavior of various parts of the universe, including living things and including us.
I think this possibility needs to be kept in mind.
Well Molson, since you find my mannerism intolerable, even ’embarrassing’, and cannot help yourself but to repeatedly butt in and try to correct me on my manners, I’ve asked a administrator to adjudicate the matter between us.
Perhaps you will win.
If so, I will gladly leave and/or accept my being banned.
ba77 @ 47 –
I’ve been trying to get you to understand something that I would hope would be simple – you don’t necessarily understand what other people’s view are (in particular mine and Seversky’s). It seems to me that if you don’t even appreciate that, trying to explain my views would be a waste of time, because you would be telling me that I don’t understand my own views, rather like your response in 53, where you leap in and tell Seversky what he should be thinking.
Molson Bleu @
If that is true, then you will have no problem summarizing/explaining their position for us.
Seversky’s (and Bob’s) main claim is this:
Since you hold that this view has been presented “honestly” and “effectively”, can you tell us why that is? How can free will, consciousness and morality exist in a world which consists solely of matter and impersonal laws?
Bob O’Hara you specifically stated:
If you were not trying to defend Atheistic Materialism, and Darwinian evolution in general, please state exactly what philosophy you hold as a worldview and are trying to defend. The answer should take one or two words.
What I do know for a fact, since I have been through the evidence ten ways to Sunday for the last 10 years or more, is that Atheistic Materialism is completely bankrupt as a coherent worldview.
That you basically appeal to your own subjective opinion, i.e. “my own views”, as having the final say in what is true or not, and not to any specific evidence, is even more evidence against the validity of Atheistic Materialism.
Our inner subjective experience is, to put it simply, a basic property of Consciousness and/or Mind. A basic property of Mind that will forever be beyond materialistic explanation.
Moreover, I don’t have to rely solely on a philosophical argument, as compelling as it is, to say that inner subjective experience will forever be beyond any possible materialistic explanation. I can also appeal to our best cutting edge science.
That this basic, and irreducible, element of Mind, i.e. subjective experience, will forever be beyond any possible materialistic explanation is now made evident in quantum mechanics where the subjective experience of “the now”, (i.e. of having a ‘subjective’ perspective outside space-time in which we watch as time passes by), has now been validated in several different ways in quantum mechanics, and this validation of “the now” falsifies Einsteins claim that “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.”
Thus in conclusion Bob, that you would rely almost exclusively on your own subjective opinion, i.e. “my own views”, rather than on any compelling empirical evidence, in order to support atheistic materialism, (if that is in fact the philosophy you are trying to defend), is actually another very strong piece of evidence against atheistic materialism being true since subjective experience is, and always has been, a basic, and irreducible, property of a immaterial Mind.
Materialists simply cannot assume that their own ‘subjective’ opinions. i.e. “my own views”, are all they ever need to validate their claims for materialism being true since subjective experience itself is indeed what is in need of explanation as far as atheistic materialism itself is concerned.
ba77 @ 60 – read my comment at 58, I guess it crossed your comment. I’m trying to defend the idea that I know better about what I think than you do.
I specifically addressed your comment at 58. Where do you think I quoted “my own views” from?
Again, your own subjective opinion is completely worthless in a debate about materialism’s inability to ground the subjectivity of immaterial Mind in the first place (i.e. the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness). It is called ‘assuming your conclusion’ in the premises of your argument.
As you told Origenes – “Keep up”! 🙂
No you didn’t. You responded to another comment, with no acknowledgement of my concern that you were mis-representing my views.
Follow up #59//
WRT presenting their views honestly and effectively, both Bob and Seversky could learn a thing or two from Alex Rosenberg:
… which rules out free will, consciousness, morality and even rationality.
Molson, do you now see why you were completely wrong when you wrote:
Bob (and weave) tries to bob and weave with this claim,,,
The heck I didn’t. In 58 you claimed that,,
Yet in post 60 I directly addressed the topic of a person’s subjective opinion and materialism’s abject failure to explain subjective experience in the first place, and even referenced empirical evidence from quantum mechanics falsifying Einstein’s claim against subjective experience ever being a part of experimental physics,, and as I further summarized in post 62,,
To further clarify just how insoluble subjective experience is to any proposed materialistic explanation, I further referenced a video by David Chalmers on “the hard problem”, which you apparently didn’t even bother to view,,,
Oh well Bob, I’ll leave it to the readers to ‘subjectively’ decide for themselves who is being forthright with the issue at hand and who is ‘bobbing and weaving’ so as to avoid addressing the issue of ‘subjectivity’ honestly.
Well, the last word is all yours, save for if you cite actual experimental evidence, instead of you just citing your own personal subjective opinion, to support your own subjective view that subjectivity can arise from some materialistic basis.
(talk about an augment failing because of ‘self-referential’ absurdity, your argument is it) 🙂
No, you just dismissed my views as irrelevant. Apparently it desn’t matter what I think, which I guess explains why you’re so unapologetic about telling me what I think, regardless of whether it is what I think.
If I understand correctly (and this is a big “if”) the reasoning is that evil proves the existence of God because it is an abstract thought, abstract thought demonstrates the existence of consciousness, and consciousness proves the existence of God.
I suppose those dots connect. But why go down this path when
a) Aren’t there much better ways to prove the existence of God?
b) Wait, back up – I thought that intelligent design wasn’t about proving the existence of God? I get that this post isn’t about intelligent design. But by the same reasoning, if the existence of abstract thought proves that God specifically exists, then so does intelligent design. I’m totally okay with both conclusions, but there’s 0.0% chance of persuading someone who isn’t already convinced based on that evidence.
Whether one believes in God or not, it’s sound, logical reasoning to conclude that some sort of deliberate, intentional design is a better explanation for life and the form of living things than a series of bizarre chemical reactions that no one has even clearly hypothesized.
But when you jump straight to the conclusion of God, you lose everyone but the choir. Given that half of the articles mention religion in general, specific religions, and political leanings in the titles, I can only conclude that UD has abandoned any pretense of persuasion from a scientific angle. Why? The evidence is in your corner!
Here’s what invariably happens with Atheists (and Bob O’H has once again demonstrated it with great dexterity):
Once they try to answer questions posed to them they reluctantly admit there are things out there they don’t understand.
Lo’ and behold! God fits right into the things that are out there that the Atheist doesn’t understand (and nobody does completely).
So we can see that virtually all of the Atheist posturing is ignorance-based. And it’s mostly posturing for other Atheists.
I used to think that there was an actual religious belief that There Is No God held by some Atheists. While that may be true in some cases, I don’t think many of them get past a shallow need to posture for other Atheists. That’s really all they know.
Andrew
Bornagain did not do that. He made an educated guess about your views (you left him with no other option) and next pointed out an insoluble problem.
Question: how do you reckon that your views are relevant to this discussion if you refuse to present them with any detail?
Origenes – ba77 may have made an educated guess, but I have repeatedly told him that he is wrong in his guess but he hasn’t changed his position. There doesn’t seem any point in going further trying to explain my views if I can’t even get him to acknowledge that the views that I hold are not the views he thinks I hold.
My views are only relevant in the sense that they show that the views he subscribes to atheists are not the views held by all atheists.
Hang in there, Bob: this is a critical issue. One of the key elements of constructive discussion is for people to be able to accurately represent the position of people they disagree with, both because that allows them to truly be arguing about issues of common importance, and also because it’s the fundamentally decent thing to do. People who, as you say, dogmatically insist that they know what your true position is, and what’s wrong with it, are just arguing with their own stereotypes and projecting them on to you.
Allow me to make an educated guess: you did not tell why the guess is wrong. You did not present your position with any detail. Am I right?
Indeed. That’s why it is important for participants to present their positions with some detail. Something that Bob refuses to do.
Have you had many discussion here? If I did that, it would get side-tracked (especially as my views are nuanced and I acknowledge a lot of uncertainty). So I tried to keep the subject simple and to the point.
Had ba77 written something like “sorry, I was wrong, what are your views?” we might have had a discussion about them. But we never got that far.
Bob@
So, you do not state your position with any detail in order not to get side-tracked. That didn’t work out well, now did it? Because of your lack of clarity we end up being side-tracked by speculations about your position.
Jdk is right when he wrote: “One of the key elements of constructive discussion is for people to be able to accurately represent the position of people they disagree with … “.
You have failed to provide other participants the required information to do so.
I was referring to ba77, not Bob, as ba77 seems to have made a lot of statements about what he thinks Bob must believe. As Bob pointed out, this is a discussion stopper.
OldAndrew
If I understand correctly (and this is a big “if”) the reasoning is that evil proves the existence of God because it is an abstract thought,
Evil is not an abstract thought. It’s a reality. The only way it can be a reality, though, is if God exists.
Cruelty, indifference to suffering etc. can be realities in an atheist world.
Evil, however, cannot.
Evil, though, is a reality hence God must exist.
tribune7 – how do you distinguish between cruelty, indifference to suffering etc. and evil?
T7,
I’d have to say that evil is an abstraction. The easiest way to justify that is that the only way to make it non-abstract is to use it as an adjective and give it a subject, like an evil act or an evil person. We can use it as a noun, but it’s always with the unstated meaning that we’re describing something which has the quality of being evil, which makes it an adjective again.
I’m not trying to play word games or deny that anything is evil. I’m just saying that it is an abstraction.
There’s some circular reasoning above. Either the existence of God supports the existence of evil or vice versa, but it can’t be both. I’m not fond of either. I get the idea, that without God there’s no absolute moral standard by which something can be evil – I sure don’t want to open that can of worms.
Although I doubt that the reasoning is that God created evil, it could sure look that way to someone reading this. If there’s no evil without God then that would make God responsible for evil. But God didn’t create anything evil, he just defined the standard by which something could be called evil. (Which is why it’s an abstraction.)
And if an atheist calls something “evil” I’m not going to split hairs over their use of the word like I own it.
Seversky, who is, unlike some, unashamed to proclaim he is an Atheistic Materialist,,, waaay back at post 9 Seversky referenced the way sensory stimulus is processed in the brain:
There are two problems with Seversky referencing ‘sensory pathways’ in the brain.
Number 1, as was already briefly mentioned, Darwinists have no clue how such fantastic integrated complexity in the brain (or in the eye) can arise without Intelligence.
Indeed the human brain is ‘beyond belief’ in terms of complexity:
To say that level of complexity defies Darwinian explanations is to put the situation for Darwinists very mildly.
The second problem for Seversky in referencing sensory pathways, to try to counter the fact that materialism can provide no grounds for subjective experience, is that if his Darwinian worldview is actually true, then the math of population genetics itself says that ALL of Seversky’s perceptions of reality will be unreliable.
In the following video and article, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations of population genetics, proved that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.
Thus even if Atheistic materialism could somehow provide a coherent explanation for the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, i.e. for subjective experience, I would STILL have grounds for holding the atheistic materialist’s subjective opinion as invalid since his own worldview dictates that all his subjective perceptions of the world are illusory.
Although Hoffman tried to limit his results to just our visual perceptions, as Plantinga had pointed out years before Hoffman came along, there is no reason why the results do not also extend to undermining our cognitive faculties as well:
In short, Darwinian evolution itself commits intellectual suicide against itself:
Thus, in what should be needless to say, a worldview that undermines the scientific method itself by holding all our observations of reality, and cognitive faculties, are illusory is NOT a worldview that can be firmly grounded within the scientific method!
Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the mathematics of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if atheistic materialists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory!
Then at the end of post 9 Seversky makes an astute observation and then asks some questions that are actually very interesting:
Again, it is not I that is saying that your sense of self is a neuronal illusion, I know you are a real person made in the image of God,,, it is your very own Atheistic Materialism that is telling you that you must be a illusion. That you disagree so strongly with the thought that you are a illusion, instead of a real person, is actually your own common sense trying to wake you up from the insanity that is inherent in your own worldview.,,,
and then Seversky asks
I don’t take the solipsistic position seriously
Seversky then asks:
Besides logic, and ‘trustworthy’ personal experience, I rely heavily on empirical evidence from experimental science to establish the validity of my personal Christian views of reality over and above competing views of reality.
And, as I have pointed out numerous times on this thread thus far, since we are indeed debating the origin of ‘trustworthy’ subjective experience itself, then empirical evidence and logic greatly outweigh personal subjective opinions.
And yet, apparently, this obvious and clear point, that subjective opinions must take a back seat to logic and empirical evidence, is completely lost on some of the atheistic persuasion.
Which, as usual, is par for the course in debating internet atheists.
So what? Physical damage to a computer can change how it operates. Electrical or magnetic stimulation can also alter how it functions. So computers are just hardware? Really?
Bob:
Why would you want to?
Some call intelligent design a “god of the gaps” argument because they claim it inserts God wherever we don’t understand something.
They’re wrong for two reasons. One is that ID isn’t about God. But the other is that it’s a valid inference on its own merit. I’d argue the other way – darwinism and belief in life by accident is a “‘something highly improbable that we can’t even begin to define or even imagine coherently must have happened but we’re sure it’s coming because it has to’ of the gaps” argument.
How the mind functions and interacts with the brain is a whole different story. It’s just something that we don’t understand. To say that because we don’t understand it we can automatically apply a very particular interpretation of scripture is a gaps-type fallacy. It’s an argument from ignorance even for those who do believe in God. It’s saying that because we don’t know how God would pack a consciousness into a brain, he didn’t. We believe in him doing all sorts of complex stuff we can’t comprehend and then draw the line right there.
Even from the standpoint of the Bible there’s no requirement for the human mind to be some separate spiritual entity. Genesis does not say that God placed an existing mind into Adam. He breathed life (spirit) into a lifeless body and it became a man. He told Adam that he would return to the dust from which he came. That has no meaning if Adam did not in fact return to the dust, but left his body and went somewhere else. Are we to suppose that God is really that bad at saying what he means, so that he would mislead and confuse Adam (and Moses, the author of Genesis, and all of its readers) by misstating the very nature of their existence? Psalm 146 confirms that a man dies, his spirit (life) goes out, *he* – not his body, but *he* returns to the dust, and his plans – literally “thoughts” – perish. It’s the account of Adam’s creation in Genesis except in reverse. Are we to understand that he does not return to the ground and his thoughts do not perish?
We don’t know how it works. We have to be okay with saying we don’t know what we don’t know. ID has enough of an uphill battle without discrediting it by associating it with gaps fallacies that support particular religious beliefs.
ET at 81, as to
In related interest to that, if you have ever been presented with the case of Phineas Gage by an atheist, it may interest you to know that ‘the most famous case’ of Phineas Gage, in American textbooks, has been, and in large part still is, a fraudulent account:
OA
–Although I doubt that the reasoning is that God created evil,–
My way of making sense of it is that God created Man, told us what He wanted us to do and then gave us the greatest gift a loving father can give which is pure freedom.
Since we have freedom we can choose to do the opposite of God wants for us which is to love. A point can be reached where mild petulance becomes depravity or self-centered indifference.
At that point the reality of evil occurs.
I’m not saying this is authoritative but this is how I make sense of it.
BA77 @ 79 and 80: Well done. Brilliant.
t7 @ 85 –
So are you saying that evil is just (?!) when someone is behaving really badly? My impression is that some Christians see Evil as a an actual entity, which was why I asked my question at 77 (err, my impression is why I asked the question, not Evil. At least I don’t think it was Evil that made me do it).
From what you write, my impression is that if an act is bad enough, then you would call it evil, but that this is a judgment call made by you. Is this an accurate reflection of your views, or have I extrapolated too far?
Bob
So are you saying that evil is just (?!) when someone is behaving really badly. . . which was why I asked my question at 77
I apologize. I missed 77, but why are you asking me how do you distinguish between cruelty, indifference to suffering etc. and evil?
What was the (my) very first comment on the thread?
Presume, the atheist view is correct and God — much less a loving one — does not exist. Do cruelty, indifference etc disappear? Of course not, but why would they be evil? Because it bothers your sense of aesthetics? Suppose it doesn’t bother that of the bigger group — or even that their sense of aesthetics is that you are a food source and your child is a sex toy and that roasting kittens alive on a grill is fun?
Who are you to judge? That’s a serious question. This worldview is not just historical but contemporaneous.
I’ll repeat Comment 1 for convenience. That evil exists shows that there is a God. As per the atheists, the cruelty and hate defined by Judeo-Christian ethos would most certainly remain there just is nothing to authoritatively define them as, well, evil.
.
Bob,
Let me clarify further. If you believe in a loving God you don’t distinguish between cruelty, etc. and evil.
If you don’t believe in God the thing is impossible because you cannot define evil with authority.
If you believe in an unloving god (Mars, Baal) you will call cruelty etc “good’.
These discussions are really not so much about nature but the (mis)use of a methodology designed to understand the consistencies of nature to discourage a belief in a loving God.