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Comment by 6502nerdface | Hacker News Reader

> As a Christian, my own answer (in short) is that true "good" requires that people can choose to either do good or evil. The only alternative is a pretty clockwork.

This doesn't really address the problem. If god is omnipotent and created the universe, he could have made things so that evil is simply physically impossible, with no contradiction of free will, in the same way that I am physically unable to flap my arms and fly to the moon, and yet I still have free will. The fact that he didn't means he's either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god). The onus would have to be on the theist to show how "no-evil" somehow logically contradicts free will; and it must be a truly logical contradiction if it is to be any constraint on omnipotence.

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I don't think you get to say "just design a universe such that X" without actually producing one. In this context, that's a circular argument, since the possibility of such a universe is precisely what we're debating. And lots of things that look reasonable turn out to have inconsistencies buried deep inside. If you're not familiar with computability, "write a program that figures out if another program will run forever" sounds possible at first. You can make specific counterexamples to my argument, but just saying "it must be possible" illuminates nothing.

Anyway, I'll try to do better. Basically, in a universe in which "evil" is physically impossible, you may have "free will" in some sense to choose which good, but you cannot choose whether to do good, because all possible choices are "good". It's specifically freedom to choose good or evil that's the key ingredient in "good" being a meaningful concept, or at least it's consistent to so assume. You're back to the pretty clockwork.

I don't know if it's possible to construct a bulletproof argument here. Shaky foundations are an occupational hazard of metaphysics, for both sides. Saying "well, he's God so he should be able to figure it out" works just as well as "he's God and couldn't do it, ergo it's inconsistent". The best we can do is show our positions are consistent under some set of assumptions.

The halting problem! Great point. I'll have to remember to bring that up next time theology comes up in a geeky context.

> The fact that he didn't means he's either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god).

This doesn't really follow. We are creative so we could come up with infinite amounts of nonsense questions that are really logical paradoxes and not real objections. Why can't God create something so heavy that he can't move it? The question of why a loving God allows evil is in that same category if you believe: - love requires free will - free will requires choices - meaningful choices require evil to be an available choice

There are probably other formulations of how love requires the option of rejection and how evil follows from there. But the point is that they turn the contradiction between omnipotence and omnibenevolence into a paradox in the same category as "could God grow a mustache so great that he himself could not shave it?"

It stands to reason, then that the job of the objectors is to show that it's possible to love meaningfully without free will, really. And if you don't believe in objective morality, it's hard to argue what love is and isn't.

Or do I misunderstand and you care to elaborate?

Or one could answer the problem of evil as saying that much like a dog can't understand physics, we can't understand the complexities of God. In this we could still choose to believe, God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent. If God created the universe surly he/she/it is beyond western logic.

"I don't know," in other words.

I mean, you must be able to imagine how your reasoning sounds to people who don't already believe in god, right?

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible." - St. Tomas Aquinas

I completely understand that my reasoning sounds rediculous from a scientific point of view. However, God is not finite, therefore you will never find or prove God using the scientific method, a method for gaining meaning from finite things.

As the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard expressed, it comes down to a leap of faith. Are you willing to believe something that you yet cannot see?

> "To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible." - St. Tomas Aquinas

And yet, when a new explanation is available that conflicts with faith, faith does not give way to it. That's simply wrong.

Why would I do that?

Could be different for many people. For me, it allows me to live in a universe that is a beautiful creation and to feel a great deal of gratitude towards God for creating it. It fills my heart with peace and love that I can spread to others.

Tdlr it makes me happy

I meant in the sense of, why would I believe something for no reason at all? I'm not terribly interested in the advantages and rewards I gain by thinking a thing, other than the basic stuff that naturally comes with seeking and discovering truth.

But, since you bring it up, I'm pretty sure I'm getting basically most of what you mention already, in one form or another, and probably some other stuff that believing in God would diminish. No thanks.

No, it's "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". An open question doesn't mean there isn't an answer.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

If you have a belief about how reality works, normally you would expect that belief to pay some dividend in terms of what you can expect to happen in this situation, or that. Otherwise you're just believing a thing for no reason at all. So you can call this anticipation of a certain result "evidence", and to have it not materialize is, in fact, a solid reason to suspect the truth of what you believe.

It is a greater good to have the freedom to do evil than to be constrained to where it is impossible. Would you prefer an all-powerful, super-totalitarian government that made it impossible for anyone to commit a crime, or would you prefer the freedom that also allows the possibility of crime?

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