Do you prefer "free-will suffering"or "robots

[Jagella]

As we all should know, apologists often employ the "free-will" defense against any argument from suffering or evil that serves to cast doubt on the existence of the Christian god. Doubters might maintain that no good god would allow suffering. Since suffering exists, God probably doesn't exist. Apologists often counter telling us that God needs to allow suffering so that we may have free will to do evil as well as good.

Needless to say, there are several objections that might be raised to this apologetic, but I'd like to start out by pointing out that it makes an assumption that may not hold for all people. That assumption is that suffering and evil is universally preferred over our being robots programmed to do only good. Personally, I'd take the robots! My being programmed to do good is fine with me, and giving up my choice to do evil is a small price to pay to attain safety, security, and happiness. Besides, I have no desire to do evil. So my being programmed to do only good would make little difference for me.

Question for Debate: Do you prefer suffering or people being "robots"?

[Divine Insight]

Just a note about robots.

As far as we can tell we are robots. We are biological robots. Our brains consist of basically an analog computer. We are indeed "programmed". Our programming begins at the moment we first become aware of our surroundings and begin to think about our experiences. We are also programmed by our parents, teaches, peers and siblings.

So in the end, we are indeed "programmed robots".

The real theological question would be to ask, "If we were created by a creator God, why wasn't He, She, or It better at making sure that we were all programmed successfully?"

As far as I can see there is absolutely no excuse to do otherwise.

Moreover, if the idea is that our creator God wanted to test us to see how well we could be programmed, or program each other, then this creator God should have made that perfectly clear from the get go.

Again, that wouldn't be anywhere near close to the Biblical story. So the Biblical theology is out no matter what.

So in the end we are robots. We are just poorly programmed robots. Although some of us are obviously programmed better than others. But again, why would a creator God allow even that to be the case?

[William]

[Replying to post 44 by Divine Insight]

But they would have plenty of suffering to compare this with.

But they would not have the ability to feel anything which might cause them suffering.

I disagree and this is not my position. So apparently you are debating with yourself.

Again, I am bouncing off the OP, which states;

My being programmed to do good is fine with me, and giving up my choice to do evil is a small price to pay to attain safety, security, and happiness.

Happiness would be threatened due to emotional robots existing in this world witnessing the suffering of other beings on the planet.
If on the other hand the robots did not have to deal with feelings, then there would be no risk of them suffering, as the OP stipulates. Being robots = 'no suffering'.

So I am debating with the OP stipulations, rather than your own position, which apparently is different from that. Or if it is not, then the stipulations of the OP are obviously false because one cannot have emotional robots which also cannot know suffering.

[William]

[Replying to post 50 by Divine Insight]

The OP was addressing Christian Apologetics. It wasn't addressing your random personal ideas about what a robot might be that have nothing to do with Christian Apologetics. .

As much as I understand you prefer to argue only against Christian belief systems, we do not have to adhere to your particular preferences DI, because this sub-forum is intended as a meeting ground for any and all theistic positions " none of which are given preferential treatment.

You wanting to give ONLY Christian Apologetics preferential treatment is a fallacy on this sub-forum. That is just the way it is.

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 50 by Divine Insight]

The OP was addressing Christian Apologetics. It wasn't addressing your random personal ideas about what a robot might be that have nothing to do with Christian Apologetics. .

As much as I understand you prefer to argue only against Christian belief systems, we do not have to adhere to your particular preferences DI, because this sub-forum is intended as a meeting ground for any and all theistic positions " none of which are given preferential treatment.

You wanting to give ONLY Christian Apologetics preferential treatment is a fallacy on this sub-forum. That is just the way it is.

Sorry, but you are barking up the wrong tree William.

This has nothing to do with me at all.

Haven't you read the OP?

Here's the very first sentence to get you started:


From the OP:

As we all should know, apologists often employ the "free-will" defense against any argument from suffering or evil that serves to cast doubt on the existence of the Christian god.

Underline is my highlight.

If you want to make an argument for some other God be my guest. But don't blame people in this thread for not being interested in those arguments. It's not related to the discussion suggested by the OP.

[Divine Insight]

William,

By the way, William, there are other religions where it makes sense for a God to allow humans to choose to do evil things. But keep in mind that those theologies don't claim that their God is going to pass judgement on people and cast them into an eternal hell either. Also, those theologies don't try to pin the blame onto humans for this either.

So those theologies are a totally different subject entirely.

So Jagella's concern with Christian apologetics simply wouldn't apply to those other religions anyway.

So you're trying to make arguments that don't even make sense in the context of this thread.

What other religions might have to say about their theologies is a totally different subject entirely.

[Bust Nak]

Can you elaborate on your belief above please. What is this 'other method' you infer, which doesn't involve suffering, actually gain anyone understanding of and through suffering?

The other method I had in mind is invoking the supernatural powers of this omnipotent being to wire that knowledge directly into our brains.

[Mithrae]

By the way, everything else in your post was addressed from the perspective of humans trying to restrict humans to only choosing to do good. Again, yet another strawman.

You would need to address this question from the perspective of an omnipotent omniscient God restricting humans to only choosing to do good. So there would be no questions concerning what constitutes "good". That simply wouldn't be an issue in this context.

As I highlighted, it's entirely possible or even probable that trying to entirely eliminate evil choices would drastically curtail or eliminate free will in ways you are not considering. We're already largely limited - by physical reality and by the biological and sociological programming you've highlighted - from some of the worst evils we can conceive and probably even worse things we can't imagine. Perception of suffering and by implication the main component of 'evil' exists on a sliding scale; for a pampered western kid missing a meal might seem like a terrible ordeal and a computer glitch might send her into fits of rage. Therefore it's entirely probable that if the bar for which evils we're restricted from were raised even further, we would simply start viewing talking during movies as an unspeakable act on par with child molestation, and still have the same complaints against a deity who would permit such horrors.

In fact any decision which is less than optimal - any decision which reduces the wellbeing of oneself, one's family and/or society at large, relative to other options - could be viewed as as a bad decision worthy of elimination from the realm of possible choices, which really would eliminate all meaningful choice. YOU are the one trying to redesign the universe here, so these are issues which you need to consider. Merely saying "Oh, a real omni-God could and should have done it better" is not an argument. If you want your ideas to be taken seriously you need to coherently explain how it could be better.


####

Here in the real world, the question is moot; we have some freedom of choice and that's all there is to it. Moving off into the theoretical but still somewhat feasible possibilities of what we might do with our societies, I find this ideal of limitation and control quite horrifying. But venturing even further into the wilderness of philosophical abstraction of how God might limit our choices, I'm not even sure that what you're describing really forms a coherent concept at all... let alone one which I'd like. Robots yes, I can understand that, and free will I can understand; but being unable to do 'evil' while still having morally-significant free will? On face value that seems to be a contradiction in terms, and I'm not sure how coherent such limitations could be even we ignored the moral significance aspect of it.

By the way, your argument in the quote above would necessarily also need to apply to the Christian Heaven or "God's Kingdom".

If there is no evil in heaven, then by your own argument everyone who goes to heaven would need to be converted into a "robot" that never chooses evil.

But you have just claimed that this would constitute a "Contradiction".

Therefore you have just effectively argued that the very concept of the Christian Heaven is a contradictory concept.

Okay... and? That's actually a very specific notion of heaven you're talking about there; even when I was a Christian lad I believed that it would be theoretically possible to sin in heaven, albeit infinitely less likely than here on an imperfect earth and even less likely than was Lucifer's rebellion or Adam's sin. You don't seem to be considering the effects of experience, environment and selection in your argument. But even more obviously, even if sin were impossible in the Christian heaven it wouldn't particularly change their apologetics as far as I can see: The argument is that we need the freedom to choose the red pill or the blue pill, not that the effects of the blue pill must forever be a conditional, unstable state. The bible itself is pretty explicit that Christians choose to 'put on Christ' and become a 'new creation' etc, so even if it's important for that to be a free choice from a being capable of choosing otherwise (which as I noted earlier Calvinists and probably Paul for one would dispute), it needn't follow that the new creation still be capable of evil. Honestly, this is fairly basic stuff; almost as if you're intent on attacking some caricature or only the weakest fringes of Christianity.

[Jagella]

I rather like my free will. Not wanting to give it up.

If a gang of thugs was ready to rape your mother, would you still want a "free-will world" in which men can freely will to rape women?

I take offense.

If you're not going to answer my questions, then please don't engage in debate with me.

But of course, any person with a bit of decency would never want a gang of rapists to freely choose to attack their mother. In a scenario like that, they'd beg for those robots I mentioned in the OP. "Free will" ends where the person's personal interests begin. So the free-will defense employed by Christian apologists is not only not well-thought-out, it is hypocritical.

If mechanical robots are good because they are programmed to be good, then why wouldn't programmed people be good as well?

Not if you didn't leave anybody to appreciate the goodness.

Again, if you want to dodge my questions, then don't respond to them at all.

Obviously, if it's good to make kind, loving and harmless robots, then it's good to make people that way too. Only a fool or a scoundrel would create robots that can choose to needlessly harm people, so why would a god who created us with the free will to do evil be any less a fool or a scoundrel?

It wouldn't be good if there was nobody left to appreciate it. If something isn't good to someone or for someone, then it isn't good at all.

No problem at all! The robots will be programmed to appreciate goodness even more than we do.

I like free will. It isn't the doing evil that I'm after, but the freedom to choose.

Agreed! I love free will too. Now if I could only freely choose to rid the world of evil. And I'd love to do so much good, but for some reason I can't do a lot of good. Hmmm. Why don't I have the free will to cure cancer? Maybe I have no such free will. It looks like the very idea of free will has nothing to do with the real world. It's a phony idea made up by Christian apologists to explain away the evils of a world they claim was created by a good god.

[Divine Insight]

No problem at all! The robots will be programmed to appreciate goodness even more than we do.

Exactly.

And why is it that atheists are always willing to give a God true omnipotence while theists are always demanding that their God is extremely limited in what it can do?

The apologies for their God basically always end up being nothing more than a claim that their God is utterly inept and can never do much of anything. They are always restricting their God to make excuses for his extreme ineptitude.

[1213]

Any God who threatens to condemn those who refuse to accept his marriage proposal to an eternal hell fire of condemnation wouldn't be worth marrying anyway.

It is like, if you get invitation to party and then refuse to receive it and refuse to go to there, it is not fault of the inviter, if you dont like the conditions outside. People are free to be without God, but being without God is godless world, where there is no God to say what would be good to do and no God to protect you from godless ways. I think hell is what the people who get it want, eternal separation from God. Eternal separation from God then also happens to mean eternal separation from all good things that are from God. And I dont really see why God should give all nice things, but not expect that people use them for good and not for evil.