Talk:Argument from nonbelief

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To-do list for Argument from nonbelief: edit · history · watch · refresh
  1. The stubs, the stubs!!
  2. Expand the section on Divine Hiddenness drawing from more than one source.
  3. Make entire article more encyclopaedic and less like an essay.
  4. Discuss relationship to the problem of evil.
  5. Add something about divine hiddenness & religious ambiguity.
  6. Do something about Theodore Drange's arguments....

Contents

[edit] Real word?

I couldn't find "omnibenevolent" in Wiktionary or Dictionary.com. While it's definition is pretty self-evident, is it actually a real word? --LtNOWIS 02:44, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes. --Maru 16:50, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Yes, it's very common in philosophical texts. Dylan 00:23, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] So what's the difference from nonbelief to evil?

What is the difference between the problem of evil and Argument from nonbelief? It seems to be the same from a different point of view and therefore easily unifyable: You just equal "not believing" with "not obeying or ignoring gods moral amendments" and nonbelief equals imoral and evil. Common practice in religion. "You're either good or bad, go to heaven or hell, belief in this god or don't, are with us/god or against us/god." Religion seems intollerant to neutrality and calls evrything "is not good" autimatically "is evil", therefore "nonbelief" equals "evil" and both arguments are unified.

Any dogma here?

[edit] Actually, something similar can be said easier.

I will always say free will is a purely metaphysical term, therefore it's not at all a thing of world construction (and also nothing to be measured or estimated in any way). World construction means relations (at worst, we can draw a function of something only in the variable of time - and if the function is irregular enough, we say it's "random"). Either there are some relations or there are none, which means an absolute chaos. Ideal hazard is by definition a situation that cannot be foreseen. (How can we make one responsible for something that is not connected with anything? How can we say it is HIS will?) Ideal causativity is when everything can be foreseen if only enough is known. (But this leads to a regression of responsibility one step backwards.) You say "you" are the cause? Then what is the cause of this in "you"? And so on. In the real world we have a mixture of hazard and causes, there are some relations but they don't cover everything (e.g. quantum mechanics). So in the physical world and statistical examination there is no place for free will. (There are also many other reasons: some involve the infinite regression of consciousness, others are about self-knowledge, neuropsychological experiments like Libet, Kornhuber, finally the story of Buridan's donkey etc.) But this all is about nothing: because free will means 'feel responsible before something unknown', it MEANS responsibility: and only that. A smart theologican will say you are responsible for anything: that the laws of physics already include your choices even before the world was created etc., some liberal theologicans say all nature has some kind free will (so not only people, but also animals and even non-organic things, ending with an apple falling down at a certain place because of its will, an electron caused by its free will etc.). Again: this is all unverifiable through statistical insight into the physical world - and we have nothing better - it is pure metaphysics and calling you 'responsible': and still responsible for something that is either completely arbitrary (even unrelated to your current affairs) or that is in some way caused. An ideal hazard, ideal freedom means that everything is equally probable: therefore we have a noise. As long as this noice becomes "loaded" in some direction, we can diffuse the directing vectors (which represent some relations) and leave the rest as the matter of ideal chaos. If people all do the same, we can extract the law that forces them, while still leaving some randomness around it (just like anything can be described with a concatenation of calculable and random functions). Anyway... I believe this belongs somewhere else. ;)

The contradiction of, say, Christian God is as follows: He at the same time wants and doesn't want human freedom. He at the same time likes and doesn't like relativism. He would like to give the Earth to people (and their sense of morality) - but at the same time keep it in his hands. He is never able to finally decide. And this main contradiction is what allows them to say "God's will is unfulfilled" (for me, any consistent God's will is by definition automatically fulfilled).

"God Gave Human Free Will" (whatever that means; and I'd rather say he gave us ignorance) - therefore various possibilities are realized. It's very simple. Imagine: at some point in the Universe's history God "gives" the free will to humans (hurray, we have it, they think - and the whole world construction suddenly changes; a saint gene?). (Let's not ask to which people and whether to all of them or only to the ones grown up enough, etc.) And what then? All of them suddenly start doing the same? I don't feel the necessity to talk with theologicans who consider it possible. The truth is there is no freedom if only one option is realized and only one is known (therefore, Churches are always acting in the opposite way God did: they are trying to reach universalism and posess some kind of absolute truth, to create a 'herd', but this is just going towards determinism despite differencies in various human natures). Again: when there are various options possible, they will all be realized, more or less often depending on specific sociological and psychologicals relations, but they'll be tried. (Even more: we need this trying, because all sense of evilness and remorse comes a posteriori; when we act, we believe this is right for the moment.)

If God wanted everyone to be saint, that would mean the share of saints would be 100% regardless of how broad range of time we consider. That would however mean - basing on Bernoulli's law of big numbers, and also on the meaning of 'probability' itself - that the probability of encountering a saint is always 100%. No, not 50% like some teologicans would like to say, not even 80% or 90%: it is really 100% as long as you know much enough. But the probability of 100% means sureness; and if something in this world is sure, then it is what we call 'determined'. No other way: if you want all people to behave in some way, you want determinism of their behaviour. You can say it's a sacred determinism, a free determinism, but still a determinism. Either you want causality or randomness. Of course, you can then give people the feeling of freedom and various paths, the cascade of self-consciousness and thought, the conviction etc.: but still they all, one by one, go down the same path, so what exactly do you mean by their 'freedom'? What do this metaphysical and completely unreal term, one of the last fortresses of Christian metaphysics, mean then? Is it when there are no external obstacles? Well, there are some automatic reactions that come from our interior. Is it when we consider both possibilities, good and evil one? But then we never actually know which is which. And respectively, what is unfree?... Actually, notice one thing: there is nothing on THIS world which could make a Christian believe he is not free in general. The world could be completely deterministic and still he would say he's free. What better proof can there be that we're not talking about anything lying in the world construction?

On the other hand, if you want to "give earth to people", if you want their relativism and self management, then you accept what this carefully selected range of freedom brings. Actually man has always been relativistic and there were always various views from his earliest history: how can we say then it is not what God desired? Even if you keep saying the senseless phrase 'God gave human free will', then still: he knew how the world will look like - that there will be not only believers of the only right faith (he must have invented some destiny for the world; otherwise the Churches would never "get in touch" with the truth; but this destiny then is still in relativism, and also interferes with Church people's alleged free will). And - anyway he made all this world come by his will. And even happily created the hell... And all this worthless passing vale of tears only to select bonds for the Happy Eternity (couldn't he build them immediately?)...

83.31.21.41 01:16, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Terrible, absolutely terrible

This is by far one of the worst written articles I've ever come across. I know that isn't saying much for Wikipedia, but the way this article is worded, particularly the "Summary of proposed resolutions" section, simply amazes me. I have never seen such an awful display of rhetoric. The extent of unnecessary wordiness and illogical orderings/bulletings is astounding. I cannot even being to attempt to salvage anything that makes any kind of normal sense in this article.

69.0.39.195 03:26, 02 January 2007

Well, this is quite a fringe article, most editor attention go to more common arguments. Maybe I will work on this one a bit, because I think it is quite a good argument. --Merzul 00:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I think it is a terrible argument. --69.0.39.195 09:38, 09 January 2007
I think he meant argument in the sense of a bust-up, barney or ding-dong, not in the sense of cogent justificationary support for a claim.1Z 22:58, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Your pretentious language is even worse than the article itself. And the guy above (who wrote volumes) really needs a life. 69.37.105.233 04:42, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
I wish I had the time to continue writing volumes... Hopefully though, some day I will find the time to do some of the issue on the TODO list. --Merzul 14:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Theodore Drange's argument

This part was marked as NOR, and it probably is, so I'm dumping it here:

A shortcut of this argument is as follows: God gave us complete unawareness; therefore various paths are realized. He cannot say they are realized against his will, because his decision whilst creating the world guaranteed there will be no sooths. The less prerequisites, the more nearing are the probabilities of various options and therefore their relative frequency tends to be equal. And vice versa, the more knowledge, the more probable (and therefore dominant) is one path over another. (Actually, Christianity in the Middle Ages used to explain e.g. attacks of faithless Normans as 'the punishment for the sins', therefore admitting these peoples were there in God plans.) In short: God wanted relativism (and actually it is hard to talk about free will when anyone since their birth thinks the same).

[edit] Summary of proposed resolutions

  • Some theists dispute premise 1.3, arguing that God's desire for a free willed belief in him is more important than the desire for all humans to believe that he exists before they die.
  • Others argue against premise 3 by saying that everyone does in fact believe in God, even atheists. Some say humans are born with the God-given "faith of a child" — a faith of trust, love and absolute purity — which is corrupted, but not lost, through contact with a world of evil, pain, selfishness, and harm. According to this argument, everyone retains their faith, even if they don't realize it, so unbelief doesn't truly exist.
    • A common response is to assert that anyone calling the atheist an unwitting (or unacknowledged) theist may be an unwitting atheist oneself, given the same uncertainty. As such, the rebuttal is a tu quoque, though not necessarily invalid.
  • One popular theodicy is fideism. This states that if God revealed himself he would take away our freedom to believe or not believe. Or, in the same vein, God wants our choice to follow and worship him to be genuine and one not motivated by blind fear of hell. This brings point 1.3 into question. The usual responses are that:
    • having strong evidence for a proposition doesn't deprive us of freedom, it only gives us good reason to believe;
    • post-revelation worship could and would often still be quite genuine (think of non-Christians just waiting for the right evidence to come along);
    • belief and worship are not the same thing, and compelled belief in God is not equivalent to compelled worship.
  • Another possibility is that faith in and of itself is something God wants humans to develop without divine prodding, meaning point 1.3 is false. Faith may be some valuable power that is not just a means whereby we can obey God. (This is a tenet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for one.)
    • A counter-argument is this would mean that because we have no director of our beliefs, then they are arbitrary (or caused by biological reasons and circumstances, for that matter) and therefore men cannot be punished for misbelief.
  • God might allow conversion after death. If that's so, whether people come to believe in him before or after death is irrelevant, so point 1.1 is untrue.
  • Open theists, who do not hold God to be omnipotent, would likely contest point 1.2. It might be too great a challenge for God to bring about a situation in which everyone believes in him.

If anyone is willing to work on Drange's argument that would be good, it is mostly discussed online. --Merzul 19:18, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalization of God, and masculine pronoun

I reverted a well-intended edit that changed the style of the article. The reason is that all the sources, both atheist and theist, that discuss this argument refer to God with a capital G. This entire argument has developed in a Judeo-Christian setting, and if we are discussing Schellenberg's argument, I think we should follow the style that all the sources of this article are using. Note that I don't feel strongly about this, and if anyone feels the genderless god is more appropriate I won't present any further objection. --Merzul 14:39, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

"The reason is that all the sources, both atheist and theist, that discuss this argument refer to God with a capital G". I didn't change the capitalisation on any references to God (other than pronouns, which clearly shouldn't be capitalised). I changed common nouns. Ilkali 17:20, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Actually, I see your point. You only changes things like "if there is a god". Yet, the sources do capitalize them, so I'm a bit worried that we are changing the meaning. In some sense, proving that there is no God is more narrow than proving that there is no god. This is a minor concern though, I'll leave it be, except the formalism that is taken directly from the source... --Merzul 17:27, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
The problem is that, as you're presumably aware, a significant number of theists habitually capitalise the word in all contexts, leaving us to try and determine which is intended. The safest and most natural reading in almost all cases is the common-noun one, and I think that's the one we should represent. Also, it's worth noting that the argument in question would apply to any deity with the relevant properties, so there's no sense in restricting it to the mishmash of entities commonly called 'God'.
Regarding the formalism: Mea culpa. I didn't realise it was a quotation when I was editing. Might be helpful to make it more clear in the article, to protect against people making the same mistake I did - perhaps something like "Schellenburg's formalization of the argument is as follows"? Ilkali 19:12, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 03:46, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Free will

Someone has added to the free will section:

"The question here is: does God have what he wants? E.g. if he wants people to believe or not basing only on who they are and what conditions they encountered, then the result is what we see: it might be other if people were other, or acted otherwise, but they don't, so the above question remains."

When I get the time I will expand a bit on this. This objection is questioning whether libertarian accounts of free will are possible. If they are not, then evil (and even more nonbelief) is a serious problem. For example Graham Oppy uses this reasoning in his "Why I am not a Christian":

If we suppose that claims about human free actions are intelligible, then it seems to me that it is a mistake to think that human beings have what philosophers call 'libertarian' freedom, as opposed to 'compatibilist' freedom. To act freely is simply to act on one's normally acquired beliefs and desires in the absence of certain kinds of constraints, and there is no inconsistency in the thought that actions that possess this kind of freedom have physical causes. On the libertarian conception of freedom, one acts freely only if, in the very circumstances in which one acted, it was within one's power to do otherwise--which is incompatible with efficient causation of action. But as I see it, the only alternative to efficient causation is absence of causation; and, if one's actions are only 'free' because they have no causes, then this is not a kind of 'freedom' worth wanting. Among the consequences of this view, two are particularly important. First, it is a mistake to suppose that the free choices of a supernatural agent might be 'ultimate' explainers: for if 'freedom' is libertarian, then what is appealed to ultimately has no explanation; and if 'freedom' is compatibilist, then free choices are no less in need of explanation than any other kinds of events. Second, given that freedom is 'compatibilist,' it is very hard to see how the presence of evil in the world might be explained in terms of the value that freedom possesses; for there surely are possible worlds in which agents always freely choose the good, and it is very hard to see why a perfect creator either could not or would not make one of those worlds if it made any world at all.

On the other hand, this rebuttal is better dealt with in argument from evil, I'm still thinking about how discuss those parts, which are actually the most important parts of this article. --Merzul (talk) 20:02, 22 April 2008 (UTC)