Monday, January 05, 2015

Reframing theodicy

The latest round of my recent interaction with Publius made me realize that there might be a new move in the theological chess game known as theodicy.  The usual opening gambit is, "Why would an all-powerful God allow the existence of evil?"  And the usual reply is that evil is regrettable collateral damage caused by God's granting us free will, which is necessary for our salvation (at least that's the Arminian response.  I actually have no idea how Calvinists deal with the theodicy problem.  If I have any Calvinist readers perhaps you could enlighten me?)

But it occurred to me that evil is actually a red-herring.  The real question is: how can there be unsaved souls in the presence of an all-powerful all-loving God?  To put this in the starkest possible terms:

1.  Either it is God's will that I be saved, or it is not.

2.  If it is not, then God is not all-loving.

3.  If it is, and I can thwart God's will (by e.g. not believing in Him) then God is not all-powerful.

I think this formulation is more powerful than the usual one because it prevents playing evil off against salvation as the greater good.  Unsaved souls in the presence of an all-loving all-powerful god are simply a logical impossibility.  Hence, if I (or anyone else for that matter) reject God, then that rejection in and of itself is proof that God cannot be all-loving and all-powerful.

(Note that this argument does not depend on free will.  It doesn't matter why someone rejects God, only that someone does.)

Take that, Descartes!

---

Note: this argument does have one tacit (i.e. unstated) assumption.  See if you can figure out what it is.

50 comments:

Don Geddis said...

Not sure what assumption you have in mind, but isn't your argument pretty close to an existing proof that God cannot be "all-powerful", at least as common human intuition imagines?

We already knew the immovable stone vs. irresistible force "paradox", right? Can God make a stone that he cannot move? Whether he can make the stone or not, some part of intuitive "all-powerful" seems to be violated.

So God at least seems subject to logical consistency, at least if it's a question you're willing to consider.

I wonder if "all-loving" and "all-powerful" are actually logically coherent concepts. And any case whether we could trust ourselves to recognize what a violation would really look like.

Ron said...

The theological definition of all-powerful is different from the logical one. All-powerful does not mean "able to do anything you can state in English." For example, God cannot lie (Titus 1:2). (Heh, this is interesting. In searching for Titus I stumbled across Numbers 23:19 - "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent..." c.f. Jonah 3:10 and Exodus 32:14.)

The reason theodicy is a problem is that God is clearly (on the theistic view) capable of intervening in the world. So coming up with a plausible story to tell about why He doesn't intervene to stop, say, child rape is a lot harder than figuring out why He doesn't make immovable objects. Figuring out why an all-powerful god permits some souls to be damned for all eternity is harder still.

The usual Christian play is to blame all the bad stuff on humans, e.g.:

"[T]he Scriptures make it plain that God did not create the world in the state in which it is now, but evil came as a result of the selfishness of man. The Bible says that God is a God of love and He desired to create a person and eventually a race that would love Him. But genuine love cannot exist unless freely given through free choice and will, and thus man was given the choice to accept God’s love or to reject it."

My argument is intended to refute this by taking free will and temporal evil out of the equation.

Frankly, the whole bad-things-happen-because-people-reject-God's-love argument pisses me off. Either we humans have the power to thwart God's will or we don't. If we do, then God is a liar, and if we don't, then this is His mess, not ours. With ultimate power comes ultimate responsibility.

Luke said...

Does God lose anything valuable by setting things up so that you necessarily choose him? You seem to think you can argue about end state and not how you get there. And yet, I'm not convinced that is at all legitimate. If we require discussion of "how you get there", that in and of itself helps put constraints on which states of affairs we think can actually be brought to pass, even by an omnipotent being. Indeed, it's by utterly neglecting this aspect which lets many do what I call "waving the omni-wand". It's like those who say they know how to make software better when they actually haven't got a clue because they've not written a line of code in their lives. Their imagination is simply wrong in that domain.

Ron said...

> Does God lose anything valuable by setting things up so that you necessarily choose him?

I have no idea. God's quality metric is a mystery to me. But I am given to understand that He wants me to be saved, and that furthermore this is something I should desire for myself.

This is the tacit assumption that I alluded to in the post: that being saved is a Good Thing (and conversely that not being saved is a Bad Thing). The reason this is an assumption is that it is only true if God is truly as He claims to be. If God is actually Loki pretending to be God, then being saved might just be falling for the con.

Ron said...

Oh, one more thing...

> choose him

Choice is a red herring here. That is about salvation, not choice. My argument applies equally well to an Arminian god as a Calvinist one.

Luke said...

> Choice is a red herring here. That is about salvation, not choice.

It's curious that you say this; I just got done reading a section of Hilary Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, discussing rational choice theory, in which the axioms of completeness and transitivity lead to absurd circumstances precisely over the matter of whether a person, facing incommensurable choices (e.g. be a doctor in poor, rural India vs. be a doctor in an affluent area in the US), would be ok with an economist deciding for them. Such a choice will radically impact what kind of person one would become. That it was the person's choice is critical. And yet, to ensure that everyone is saved, must one not deprive them of any and all choices which could possibly lead down non-salvific paths?

See, I'm inclined to say that you are the sum of your choices. Whether or not you want God enough to trust in him and accept where he says you're wrong (either in matters of fact or matters of value), seems to be precisely what impacts whether you are saved.

Let me put it another way. Do you want someone to be in relationship with you because you caused him or her to be in relationship with you? I think the answer must be a strong "no". At least with romantic relationships, you want the other person to want you of his/her own free choice. To force him/her into loving you would destroy the love. But salvation is perpetual relationship with God. It is to want God forever, to learn more about him forever, to have an ever-deepening relationship with him. And yet, you seem to want God to somehow guarantee that this will happen with all people, without that being precisely him forcing us to love him.

It just seems wrong that you would short-circuit all of this, as if only the end matters, instead of how you get there.

> This is the tacit assumption that I alluded to in the post: that being saved is a Good Thing (and conversely that not being saved is a Bad Thing).

Bad according to whom? Have you ever tried to give someone a good thing that he/she thought was bad? Sometimes it works (he/she recognizes it as actually good), but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes that person keeps thinking that what you gave him/her was bad, and hates you—perhaps even more than he/she did before. It is not clear to me that one can necessarily create people who never exhibit this behavior, who have the ability to 'love'.

> My argument applies equally well to an Arminian god as a Calvinist one.

I happen to think that the Calvinist God is utterly incoherent because choice is ignored. I don't think the Calvinist God can be connected to anything any human would possibly recognize as 'love'. I could be wrong, but nothing has convinced me of this so far.

Ron said...

> I happen to think that the Calvinist God is utterly incoherent because choice is ignored.

The Calvinists don't *ignore* choice, they simply (and correctly, BTW) conclude that choice is logically impossible if God is omnipotent.

> I don't think the Calvinist God can be connected to anything any human would possibly recognize as 'love'.

Yes, that is precisely my point.

> you seem to want God to somehow guarantee that this will happen with all people, without that being precisely him forcing us to love him.

Not at all. I'm simply pointing out that a God that doesn't guarantee this cannot be both all-loving and all-powerful. It's like a CAP theorem for theology: all-powerful, all-loving, or the possibility of failure to attain salvation. You can choose any two. You can't have all three (at least not if you want to be logically coherent).

(BTW, I don't *want* anything from God. I don't believe in God, so for me, wanting something from God would be like wanting something from Santa.)

Luke said...

I suppose you're pushing me to say that 'omnipotent' is merely an approximation for whatever God really is, because power isn't the most-emphasized characteristic of God in the Bible. Love is. I don't doubt that there is some natural progression of how to describe God's power that makes sense as a series of successive approximations (a friend of mine published Understanding omnipotence in this vein in 2012). That being said, I understand that people want to stick to their conceptions of 'omnipotent', and thus I think I'm ok with just abandoning the word, at least for now.

A foundation of Christianity—imago dei—is blown out of the water if one says that God is 'omnipotent', such that God's love' becomes something equivocal to our 'love', instead of analogical. Equivocal means that by no series of successive approximations can we learn to love like God does. There would have to be a radical, irrational break. And yet, this is precisely the kind of irrationality I abhor. I think it is the escape hatch for irrationality of ways of looking at the world. I agree with the author of the above article in his Leibniz's theistic case against Humean miracles: the God of Christianity should be expected to be supremely rational, not irrational.

I might even be happy with positing that we're in the Matrix and God is the programmer, with the ability to always revert the program to a future state, tweak it, and re-run it. This is but a toy model, but it does make it easy to say that the programmer easily has a kind of omnipotence. In theology, do we really need to argue for any stronger level of omnipotence than the kind required for this toy example? I'm not sure we do. And yet, my intuition is that this programmer-omnipotence is very different from the kind typically attributed to God. There are even philosophical reasons to think that we're living in a simulation: see the end of The Computational Theory of the Laws of Nature.

> (BTW, I don't *want* anything from God. I don't believe in God, so for me, wanting something from God would be like wanting something from Santa.)

That's fine, you can, for example, instead think in terms such as "I would be more effective in making the world a better place if only for X.", instead of "... if only God did X."

Ron said...

> I suppose you're pushing me to say that 'omnipotent' is merely an approximation for whatever God really is

No. If I'm "pushing" for anything it is simply to know if you accept my argument that God cannot be omnipotent and omni-benevolent in the face of unsaved souls. (Let us abbreviate this OBU.) I claim OBU is a logical impossibility on the argument put forth in the blog post. Do you accept this argument?

BTW, "omnipotent" can't be an approximation for anything. Omnipotence is like pregnancy: either you are, or you're not.)

> I think I'm ok with just abandoning the word, at least for now

Wonderful! Progress! :-)

BTW2, it really doesn't matter to me *which* of the three components of OBU are wrong. I lean towards the O myself, but it really doesn't matter to my argument. All I need to make my case (see below) is the logical impossibility of OBU.

> I might even be happy with positing that we're in the Matrix and God is the programmer, with the ability to always revert the program to a future state, tweak it, and re-run it.

Did you mean "revert... to a past state"? Because that model is actually consistent with the laws of physics. (What is not consistent with the laws of physics is a god-as-matrix-programmer who is anything like what we think of as a programmer. There is no evidence of any kind of agency in the wave function.)

> There are even philosophical reasons to think that we're living in a simulation

Yes. You know that I actually believe this is a very good approximation to the truth, yes?

> the programmer easily has a kind of omnipotence

Yes, of course, but this is a red herring. God might very well be omnipotent (in which case either he is not benevolent, or there are no unsaved souls).

You can probably guess where I'm going with this: once you have accepted the logical impossibility of OBU, then you face the following problem: many Christians claim that the Scriptures assert that OBU is true. But OBU is a logical impossibility and hence cannot be true. So again we have two possibilities:

1) These Christians are wrong, and the Scriptures do not in fact say that OBU is true.

2) The Scriptures do say that OBU is true, and hence the Scriptures are wrong, at least about this.

Do you agree that one of those statements must be true? Which one do you think is the true statement?

> you can, for example, instead think in terms such as "I would be more effective in making the world a better place if only for X.", instead of "... if only God did X."

I think that's actually a very constructive way of looking at things. Did you have something particular in mind for X?

Luke said...

> Do you accept this argument?

I'm not sure I do. It is predicated upon a definition of 'omnipotence' which may be incoherent or perhaps, unconstructable. Here is what I mean. The way I think of such 'infinity-words' is by taking limits: I think of a powerful person, and then keep making him/her more and more powerful in my imagination. What happens when I can make that person no more powerful? Well, that's 'omnipotence'. But things get sketchier and sketchier the further I get away from experiences I've actually had. By this process, can I get to the paradox you claim exists? I'm not so sure.

When attempting such constructions, I like to use the alternating harmonic series as an explanatory tool. What if I tried to get the sum of that series by first adding up all the positive terms, then adding up all the negative terms, then summing the result? As far as I know, it wouldn't work. You'd be adding +∞ to –∞ and the result is undefined. Oh no, does this mean there is no definite sum? Of course not: you've got to add only finitely many negative terms before you have to add at least one positive term. Then you have a chance of arriving at the result: ln(2). What if trying to add omnipotence to omni-benevolence is like trying to do the sums incorrectly?

> BTW, "omnipotent" can't be an approximation for anything. Omnipotence is like pregnancy: either you are, or you're not.

That's a curious claim, given these multiple definitions. Perhaps it would help to think of capital-O 'Omnipotence' as a Platonic Form, with any particular definition of lower-o 'omnipotence' as an approximation of that Form. Then there is a dual sense to using 'omnipotence': first there is the formal definition, and second there is the 'push' towards a better definition that is closer to 'Omnipotence', but still too inchoate to be integrated into the definition formally.

> BTW2, it really doesn't matter to me *which* of the three components of OBU are wrong. I lean towards the O myself, but it really doesn't matter to my argument. All I need to make my case (see below) is the logical impossibility of OBU.

I think you need more than this. I think you need theology to critically depend on all three components, added separately, instead of merely something like all three components. For example, why does God need to be more powerful than (i) what it takes to fulfill his promises; (ii) any other extant being; perhaps (iii) any potentially attainable level of power of any other being? What parts in theology really depend on that problematic conception of omnipotence? We must be careful that the contradictions exist practically instead of merely in abstract formalisms.

Luke said...

> Did you mean "revert... to a past state"?

Oops, yup!

> Yes. You know that I actually believe this is a very good approximation to the truth, yes?

Yes, but to understand what you're really asserting, I would need to know what you're also denying. The reason I frequently bring up the idea of a simulation is that it seems intuitively ludicrous to me that sentient beings in the simulation could never come to know that they are communicating with a programmer of that simulation. In this case, I just wanted to hit on something that looks awfully like 'omnipotence' (at least phenomenologically), but doesn't seem to have the problem you describe. But perhaps I have not thought it through enough, and it does still have that problem!

> 1) These Christians are wrong, and the Scriptures do not in fact say that OBU is true.
>
> 2) The Scriptures do say that OBU is true, and hence the Scriptures are wrong, at least about this.
>
> Do you agree that one of those statements must be true? Which one do you think is the true statement?

Well, putting my previous comment aside (in which I might disagree), I'm inclined to go with 1). I would look at the various instances that Christians have claimed that God is 'omnipotent', as well as Hebrew and Greek words translated into phrases such as 'almighty' (I don't think any have been translated 'omnipotent'), and see whether they require the paradoxical kind of 'omnipotence', or whether all along, the paradoxical kind of 'omnipotence' was merely an approximation for what the concept really had to be, in order to make sense of how it was used.

By the way, I go through this process in conversation when people use words I don't think fit, or words which seem to raise contradictions. I call this part of "charitable interpretation". I will look for nearby concepts to the one that the other person's words brought to my mind, to see if any of those nearby concepts (i) seem to make better sense, and/or (ii) don't have as many problems. I would go as far as to say that I build a superposition of possible interpretations, doing my best to let the other person probe and ultimately collapse that superposition. :-p

> I think that's actually a very constructive way of looking at things. Did you have something particular in mind for X?

Well, it's constructive if there's any chance that X could be made the case. These days I'm increasingly running into people who complain about how God created them with so many cognitive biases (what they really mean by this is that God doesn't exist), and that the world would be much better without those cognitive biases. However, these same people don't seem to have a whole lot of hope that they can appreciably overcome those biases. See, if they could, then maybe God didn't screw up, maybe those cognitive biases are necessary elements to consciousness which went awry to human error! (Think of all the collected human wisdom which is constantly ignored by people.)

But can you see how one can get "mad at the universe", if not "mad at God"? I'm not claiming that people are rational in doing this, I'm just arguing for a model I think fits the data well enough to use it.

Ron said...

> I'm not sure I do. It is predicated upon a definition of 'omnipotence' which may be incoherent or perhaps, unconstructable.

It occurred to me, based on a similar discussion I'm having with Publius, that I don't even need omnipotence to make my case. All I need is that God is powerful enough to work His will, that He is never helpless.

And in fact, I don't even need that. All I need is that God is not helpless when it comes to man's salvation. When it comes to my salvation, is it God's will being done, or mine? If it's mine, then I am more powerful than God, at least in this one thing. And if it's God's then it's His fault that I'm not saved, and he can't be all-loving. Omnipotence is a red herring. (I should update the original post.)

> I think you need theology to critically depend on all three components

Mainstream Christian theology seems to me to be such a theology. Most Christians I've met insist on OBU.

> why does God need to be more powerful than (i) what it takes to fulfill his promises; (ii) any other extant being; perhaps (iii) any potentially attainable level of power of any other being?

He doesn't. He just needs to have it in His power to save me from eternal damnation.

> I would need to know what you're also denying.

I'm denying that classical reality is metaphysically real. That's a pretty strong position. Most people think I'm insane when I tell them that.

> it seems intuitively ludicrous to me that sentient beings in the simulation could never come to know that they are communicating with a programmer of that simulation

But you can actually prove scientifically that this is the case. You are made of classical information, the "simulation" is made of quantum information. The math is fundamentally incompatible. Real numbers vs complex numbers. Our simulation is not running on a Turing machine, it's running on (literally!) the mother of all quantum computers.

> Well, putting my previous comment aside (in which I might disagree), I'm inclined to go with 1)

OK, that's interesting. Just to make sure that I understand your position, do you agree that when it comes to the question of my salvation, my will trumps God's?

> But can you see how one can get "mad at the universe", if not "mad at God"?

Oh, sure. An even better word to substitute would be "fate". I have no problem with the idea that there are things beyond our ken. My finite brain can never contain even a tiny fraction of all possible knowledge. What I dispute is that fate (or whatever you want to call it) has *agency*, that you can communicate with it through prayer, that the so-called holy books are in any way privileged with respect to their relationship with it. (And, BTW, if you don't assign agency to fate, it doesn't make a lot of sense to get mad at it, though I can certainly see how some people might do it anyway.)

BTW, I don't even have a problem with taking the unknown, mysterious parts of our own brains, the parts responsible for producing the placebo effect and mystical experience, and calling that God. But that's a very different kind of God than the mainstream Christian god.

Luke said...

> When it comes to my salvation, is it God's will being done, or mine? If it's mine, then I am more powerful than God, at least in this one thing. And if it's God's then it's His fault that I'm not saved, and he can't be all-loving.

I'm reminded of the reason Galileo thought to do his inertia experiments: Aristotle said that earth wants to get toward the center of the universe, while fire wanted to get away from the center of the universe. Well, what about the loophole, motion which is neither toward nor away? That's precisely the motion he explored, and thus found out part of what we now call 'inertia'. Aristotle was a genius for leaving that loophole, for not overstating his case like he could have.

Likewise, I ask you why it cannot be equal, between your will and God's will concerning you. Why must one win out? It seems to me that the way you extend dignity to another person is to "match wills" in precisely this manner. You don't dominate the other person. Once you walk down that path, it becomes a master–slave relationship, not a relationship of equals, or potentially equals. (A parent can start treating his/her child as an adult, before the child is quite ready. Indeed, such treatment can accelerate the process of maturing.)

> Mainstream Christian theology seems to me to be such a theology. Most Christians I've met insist on OBU.

Many people insist on stronger axioms than are actually necessary. I gave an example above with respect to rational choice theory. If the person sticks to his/her axioms once you prove that they are too strong for what is needed, then that person is probably going to be hindered in his/her ability to further explore reality, and you've just gotta move on to the next person.

> I'm denying that classical reality is metaphysically real.

Can you do this, without ever, in your entire chain of reasoning, relying on the conception that reality is metaphysically real? I haven't worked through this myself, but I'm always wary of people doing things like using thoughts to say that matter–energy is more real than thoughts. There's this self-defeating nature to such things, at least per my not-very-well-examined intuition.

Ron said...

> Why must one win out?

Because (I am given to understand) salvation is like pregnancy: either you are saved, or you are not. (Don't look at me, I didn't make these rules.)

> Can you do this, without ever, in your entire chain of reasoning, relying on the conception that reality is metaphysically real?

*Classical* reality. It's an important qualifier. And yes, I'm pretty sure I can. (And that's an odd question coming from someone who introduced that Matrix into the conversation.)

Luke said...

> Because (I am given to understand) salvation is like pregnancy: either you are saved, or you are not. (Don't look at me, I didn't make these rules.)

I don't understand how this 'because' follows. Salvation is spending eternity with God, in growing relationship with God. (See Jn 17:3, and consider how much time it takes for a finite being to get to know an infinite being.) God certainly wants that, but it isn't much of a relationship if you don't. It's just weird to force people to be your friend. It's fake. And so, it only makes sense that God will only do what it takes to get that relationship if you want it as well. Indeed, if you don't want God (as he truly is instead of as presented—see Rom 2:1–24, especially v24), he would be sad, but he wouldn't want to force himself on you.

So, I'm afraid I don't see any contradiction, here. I don't see how the pregnancy analogy creates any problem for my position.

> *Classical* reality. It's an important qualifier. And yes, I'm pretty sure I can.

Whoops, yep. It would be interesting to see you do this some time (no rush). I'm not sure I could.

> (And that's an odd question coming from someone who introduced that Matrix into the conversation.)

Oh, I dunno: I used The Matrix to illustrate a kind of "all-powerful" that doesn't seem like it necessarily leads to any paradoxes, not as a model for what reality is like. You, on the other hand, note that people are incredulous when you tell them that what reality is like really isn't what it's like. The standards of rigor for these two positions seem slightly different. :-p

I haven't explored simulation hypotheses or 'brain in a vat' (I'm not sure they're even different, but the latter is certainly older) extensively. It sounds like a topic that would be much more fun to explore in person with another person, over multiple discussions, with reading relevant papers in between.

Ron said...

> it isn't much of a relationship if you don't.

My desire for a relationship with God is contingent on a few things. First, God has to exist. I don't need any more imaginary friends. Second, God has to be benevolent. I'm not interested in a relationship with a non-benevolent deity. Loki is the enemy.

Now, I have been told by some of my Christian friends that these conditions are unacceptable to God, that he demands unconditional acceptance before He will reveal Himself. If that is so, then I'm afraid that God and I are indeed at an impasse. But I do not accept responsibility for this because this relationship is not symmetric. God and I are not equals. I am not the Creator of the Universe. God is. I did not make the rules of the game, God did. God is the one (if Christians are to be believed) who requires unconditional acceptance as a pre-requisite for revelation, and He's also the one who made me incapable of believing things in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. All the evidence I have is that God does not exist. All of the metaphysical arguments fail. The more I read the holy books, the more they look like the work of man (and if they are the work of a deity, they look to me more like the work of Loki than any benevolent deity). So I have done the best I can with what God has given me. If that's not enough, then it's on God, not me.

If God wants to chat about this, my door is always open. But the ball is in His court.

> The standards of rigor for these two positions seem slightly different

Are they? I thought we were both arguing for what we believe to actually be the case. I would think the standards would be the same.

> It sounds like a topic that would be much more fun to explore in person

You're probably right about that :-)

Luke said...

> My desire for a relationship with God is contingent on a few things. First, God has to exist.

So, I've been discussing this matter a lot with several different atheists as of late. My experience of growing up friendless for the first twenty years of my life has given me some insight on the matter. I was frequently treated as merely a copy of the other person's mind, except built wrong but admittedly better at science and math so I would get asked for help on homework and then discarded afterward if not verbally abused. What I want to key in on though, is the fact that this 'merely a copy' meant—I claim—that I didn't actually exist in that person's mind. All that existed was a source of homework help, not a full person. For me to exist as a person in the other person's mind, he/she would have had to actually try and understand me, try and see the world through my eyes. Rarely did anyone ever do this for the first twenty years of my life. (A notable exception is an atheist who I still think is a better Christian than most Christians; I still tear up when I mention her. She wasn't anything like a girlfriend, there was never anything between us, and yet she cared about me as Luke more than any other peer.)

Now, let's pick out the state of affairs where the other person merely thinks I'm a clone of his psyche, but screwed up because I didn't socialize well. What does it take for me to break through this idea of a 'clone', and establish myself as an actual person, different from this other person, but not less valuable, not a mere broken version of what I ought to be? I'm actually not convinced there is anything that is guaranteed to work. I cannot force another person to see the world through my eyes. The strategy that has the highest chance of working is to force the person to suffer as I have suffered, but even that isn't guaranteed to work.

I haven't come close to formalizing how the above applies to one's belief or lack thereof in God's existence, but there seems to be a deep intuitive connection. It's almost as if I have to believe that maybe the other person could exist, legitimately, not as a clone of me, and that's ok, before I can acknowledge that the other person does exist. Psalm 50 gets at this a bit, especially at v21. "These things you have done, and I have been silent; / you thought I was one like yourself. / but now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you."

That Psalm adds the dimension of divine hiddenness. God allegedly was silent! Perhaps one would expect that he would be trying to talk and we weren't listening; what's up with the silence? Sadly, I know from personal experience that sometimes you have to stop trying to talk because it's fruitless if not counterproductive. One time I simply removed my presence from the soccer field during elementary school recess, and took the soccer ball with me because I owned it. My peers got absolutely enraged, and I got into a fight that sent me to the principal's office. Removing myself from causal connection was an effective strategy (I didn't get suspended or anything). Perhaps God does the same, like Habakkuk 3:3–5 suggests.

I have more to say, but I'm at the place in possibly-understanding where I'm still quite verbose. Perhaps your comments will help me write the rest (and/or clarification) more succinctly.

Luke said...

> Now, I have been told by some of my Christian friends that these conditions are unacceptable to God, that he demands unconditional acceptance before He will reveal Himself.

It's fascinating that you wrote this a mere few hours before my wife noticed that Abraham is lauded for his belief in God because he believed that he would get a son—and then goes home and has Sarah tell him to cheat and have a kid with Hagar. Umm, did he believe God or not? We have this idea of him being an awesome pillar of faith and then he did this? I think the message is that the ultra-high standard you mention is ridiculous. That's not how human works. They're messy creatures and God still works with them.

Instead of this "unconditional acceptance", I propose a different model: try and think like God thinks, to walk in God's shoes. Perhaps this sounds ridiculous as-stated; if so, take a read of Job 40:6–14 and tell me if that text is intelligible, or unintelligible. Contra what appears to be the dominant interpretation, it seems obvious to me that God is telling Job that he will consider Job somewhat of an equal ("Then will I acknowledge to you / that your own right hand can save you.") if Job can deal with the proud and arrogant properly. Now, what constitutes 'properly' and what even constitutes 'proud' aren't simple issues, but the general concept I think isn't ultra-complex. Is it actually that hard to think like God increasingly well?

Perhaps you will respond with "my thoughts are not your thoughts/ neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD". Doesn't that mean God is the unknowable 'other', before whom we must bow with approximately zero understanding but lots of fear? This is absolute, unadulterated nonsense: read the text in slightly more context: Isaiah 55:6–9. The clear message is that God wants the wicked to forsake their ways and thoughts and seek God's.

The difference between an imaginary friend and a real friend is that once you've built up a good enough model of the other person (by trying to walk a mile in his/her shoes), the real friend can then correct that model. Even real people, however, can fail to do said correcting. I've experienced this way too much in my life. Perhaps part of the reason I experienced in such concentrated quantities was so that I can understand what I think I understand, as clearly as I think understand it. If so, I am sadly glad for my childhood, because I think this matter is of the utmost importance. It is the difference between treating another person as another human, on equal grounds with me, and trying to go around making everyone else in my own image (whether I do this consciously or unconsciously, it doesn't matter).

> All the evidence I have is that God does not exist.

From the perspective of my peers in middle school, I did not exist. Instead, an unfortunately smart but fundamentally wrong entity existed in their minds. And you know what? They had a way of interpreting reality which kept reinforcing this conception in their heads. All the evidence, interpreted their way, supported their conclusions.

> If God wants to chat about this, my door is always open. But the ball is in His court.

This very attitude contributed to making my life, from ~5–20, miserable.

Ron said...

> try and think like God thinks, to walk in God's shoes

God wears shoes?

That is not as flip an answer as you think. You're asking me, a mere mortal, to think like a deity. Not just *a* deity, but *the* deity. How do I do that?

Again, the usual answer I get when I pose that question is: read the Bible, that will tell you all you need to know about God. (At least, that's what Christians tell me. Muslims, of course, tell me to read the Quran, and Mormons tell me to read the Book of Mormon, the Witnesses tell me to read the Watchtower, and the Scientologists, if I were foolish enough to actually talk to them, would tell me to read Dianetics.) So I read the Bible, and I found that God is a misogynistic, megalomaniacal monster (1Cor14:34, Exo20:5, Lev26:29). I mean, forcing people to eat their own children? Seriously? Even Hitler and Stalin never went that far. So I am forced to conclude that either (my reading of) the Bible is not a reliable guide to God's nature, or God is emphatically NOT someone I want to get to know. So where do I go from there?

> This very attitude contributed to making my life, from ~5–20, miserable.

I understand, and I sympathise. I was there once myself. And if your faith in God is what got you out of that dark place then I don't really want to take that away from you. (So maybe I should just leave it at that.)

Luke said...

> God wears shoes?

Man, I wanted to say a really good shoe joke, but I know nothing about fashion or running or anything else that is shoe-related.

> That is not as flip an answer as you think. You're asking me, a mere mortal, to think like a deity. Not just *a* deity, but *the* deity. How do I do that?

Well, first let's note that this is supposed to be possible; see Eph 5:17 "Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is." Clearly Paul thinks that understanding God's will is possible. Next, let's consider: what the hell does imago dei mean, except that there's some deem similarity between us and God? Furthermore, how on earth could you even have a relationship with God if this weren't possible? Without this being possible, you'd have something like the relationship a dog has with its owner.

Why don't you give Isaiah 58 a read and tell me if that makes sense to you? It's allegedly YHWH saying what he wants, and how to get there. It seems like the expectation is that we can understand these things and judge whether we want them, too. I don't see how you could really understand the passage without also understanding a bit about God in the sense I'm talking about.

I still like Job 40:6–14; one could even say that David Silverman's Ready, aim, firebrand: The quantifiable benefits of firebrand Atheism is an attempt to do this, to rub the faces of proud-but-ignorant people in the mud. I'd say that passage challenges one to believe things only as strongly as you have warrant, and to strongly critique (if not more) those who fail to do this appropriately!

Luke said...

> Again, the usual answer I get when I pose that question is: read the Bible, that will tell you all you need to know about God.

There's a lot you can do before you take any religious text as canonical, before you devote yourself to it (and I'm not even sure it's accurate to say that I "devote myself to the Bible", given the standard meaning of 'devote' when used in such contexts). You've even done some of this, with your thinking about Loki. There are certain kinds of deities which could simply never be known because they couldn't be trusted. This helps restrict what is even reasonable to think about.

I frequently use extra-biblical techniques: I just think about what I think God would do. You can do this with other people, too. Sometimes they surprise you and sometimes you get it right. If it's the case that God wants to work with us to make the world suck less, I should think that the practice of thinking about what I think God would do, would help me become better and better at this. That seems like an eminently testable idea, in fact! There will always be quibbles about whether it was God who caused me to be good at making the world much better than others who pursue other means, but I'm not sure how much I care about such quibbles. There will always be quibblers.

What I think is fun to think about is how God would correct me in my thinking about what he wants, and how he would make it happen. After all, if he exists he will somehow do this correcting, right?

Now, returning to that Bible, I've been leading a study on the book of Hebrews lately. I'm beginning to think it has one central message: "Grow up." The beginning attempts to get the listeners to switch from thinking about how awesome angels are, and start thinking about what Jesus did and then to start thinking about following him. Now, one function of angels in the OT was to give laws, to tell people what to do. If you're obsessing about this, then you're letting someone else think for you, Deut 5-style (especially vv22–27). Now read Heb 5:11–6:3, which attempts to get the listeners to think for themselves instead of depend on teachers. Finally, there is Heb 12:18–24, which is an explicit reversal of the distancing between human and God that happened in Deut 5.

In other words, the idea is that you can think like God. Not perfectly of course, but increasingly well, such that you aren't dependent in the way that a slave is dependent on his master. No, on the contrary, Jesus says in Jn 15:12–15 that he now calls his disciples friends, because they do know what their master is doing, and want it as well. (Among other things, they were able to get over their nationalism and see that God cares for all the nations. (see Eph 2:11–22)

In all this, I don't think I'm relying on the Bible as an authority so much as a model that says: "Yeah, you can understand the deity." It seems to make that idea plausible. It also places a terrible burden on anyone who is willing to believe it, for the one with the ability to understand God and take part in what God is doing is also called on to actually take part, including the suffering bits—see Rom 8:16–25, especially vv16–17.

Luke said...

> So I read the Bible, and I found that God is a misogynistic, megalomaniacal monster (1Cor14:34, Exo20:5, Lev26:29). I mean, forcing people to eat their own children? Seriously? Even Hitler and Stalin never went that far.

Lev 26:29 doesn't have God forcing this; instead that is a result of extreme famine produced by siege in the Ancient Near East. Here's the test: look at what God says he will do to Israel, and then look at what tends to happen in ANE warfare. I haven't done a line-by-line study, but I think there's a remarkable coincidence. It's almost as if God is the stand-in for reality. Something useful about this is that it brings cohesion and order to reality in a way that might otherwise be rejected: "Who says we were conquered because we were evil? Maybe we just picked the wrong allies, and everything else we did was just dandy, including burning some of our children alive!"

Ex 20:5 is just a fact of life: fathers statistically pass down their sins to their children. This is a pattern that it is really, really important to acknowledge. Then, one can go about fighting it, which is precisely what Ezekiel 18 is about.

1 Cor 14:34 has a cultural context that needs to be taken into account.

Now, in all this, what you're doing is focusing on some of the worst that you can find. That's a curious route to choose. See, I've had people do that to me too, and they frequently managed to see something that was much worse than what actually exists. In some cases, they blew up into something that was entirely a misunderstanding. I was trying to help, and this help was seen as utterly evil. It was kind of disturbing. Why start with the bad parts first? I mean, if enough actually makes sense—a lot of sense—doesn't that decrease the probability that the bad parts are as bad as you think?

Finally, these are the records of fallible people trying to understand God. Do we expect them to get God perfect, or to get him better and better? For example, one could read Joshua A. Berman's Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought and find that the Torah really is a major advance over what came before, and in a very interesting manner, one which transcends the age-old slavery debate and cuts to the heart of an issue which is still relevant today.

> I understand, and I sympathise. I was there once myself. And if your faith in God is what got you out of that dark place then I don't really want to take that away from you. (So maybe I should just leave it at that.)

Ehh, what got me out of that dark place was finding a group of people who didn't suck as hard as the groups I was exposed to when growing up. That group happened to be Christians, and the cause of the "sucking less" happened to be due to belief in and obedience to a few basic biblical texts that you should think you could derive from psychology. However, I have a suspicion that maybe these weren't just 'happenings', that maybe there is a causal power at play. If there is, if there is a source of wisdom, I would be an utter fool to ignore it—or him, or her.

So, I don't think you have anything to worry about. What I still do say is that assuming the ball is in the other person's court is, in my experience, a very dangerous assumption.

Publius said...

>1. Either it is God's will that I be saved, or it is not.
>2. If it is not, then God is not all-loving.
>3. If it is, and I can thwart God's will (by e.g. not believing in Him) then God is not all-powerful.

This is perhaps a recreational logic puzzle, but that is all. It is not a good model of the theology.
Let's review some issues.

1. This is perhaps confusing will with desire. "Will" is a predicate to action, whereas "desire" is a predicate to motivation, which may lead to will (which may lead to action). God's will was that man have free will, the agency to make choices and take voluntary action.

2. God's love starts with Him giving man free will. It is further manifest by Him creating methods of reconciliation, and is it perfected by Him sending his Son, who sacrificed Himself as reparation for all the sins of man - past, present, and future.

3. This is a perserve spiteful notion of one's will trumping God's, a Pyrrhic victory of self-immolation. You choose the pit of fire over union and eternal fellowship with God. Yeah, enjoy your "victory" - you'll have a long time to savor it. It's reminiscent of Henri "winning" the bet with Sam in the Cheers episode, The Magnificent Six.

Publius said...

Other minds

> It's almost as if I have to believe that maybe the other person could exist, legitimately, not as a clone of me, and that's ok, before I can acknowledge that the other person does exist.

This is a nice extension to the other minds problem.

Publius said...

Thomas Paine was wrong

>All the evidence I have is that God does not exist.

The evidence that God exists is that there is no evidence. [As in Kung Fu Panda, the secret of the secret ingredient in his father's soup is that there is no secret ingredient]. God has to reveal Himself to man, as there is no scientific method to discover Him. It is also one reason why faith and reason are compatible:

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves." FIDES ET RATIO

>Again, the usual answer I get when I pose that question is: read the Bible, that will tell you all you need to know about God.

They must be protestants (sola scriptura). There is also Sacred Tradition. Not everything the Apostles did is recorded in the Bible.

>So I read the Bible, and I found that God is a misogynistic, megalomaniacal monster (1Cor14:34, Exo20:5, Lev26:29). I mean, forcing people to eat their own children? Seriously?

This is the error of the Pharisees. Literal interpretation will miss the theme and metaphor.

Lev 26:29 is what will happen in God removes His blessing from the jews. Man is perfectly capable of achieving these horrors (and worse) - no need for God to take any action. You also need to keep reading; Lev 26:40-45, where God provides a method of reconciliation.

It's also a little weird that the only people who think that God is a misogynistic, megalomaniacal monster are atheists. Christians don't hold that view - in fact, they say wonderful things about Him. The member of the Salvation Army standing by the red kettle isn't going home and eating his children. Many Christians work continuously on personal moral improvement. They don't worship a vengeful God, they worship one of forgiveness and mercy.

>The more I read the holy books, the more they look like the work of man (and if they are the work of a deity, they look to me more like the work of Loki than any benevolent deity).

It's remarkable that you require perfection from religion before you'll believe, but you're more than willing to overlook imperfection and shortcomings of science. Why is the cosmic background radition so homogenious? Cosmic inflation? Which initial conditions for inflation? Why do you overlook the problems with the 2nd law of thermodynamics and inflation? Sure, scientists may figure it out someday - but it's imperfect now. Ah, but science is useful - central heat, indoor plumbing, cell phones? Well, religion is useful for dealing with your mother-in-law, among others.

And quantum entanglement makes particles heavier.

Ron said...

> Why don't you give Isaiah 58 a read and tell me if that makes sense to you?

Nope. Not even a little bit.

> I'm beginning to think it has one central message: "Grow up."

Now, that makes sense. But I didn't need God to tell me that growing up sooner or later is probably a good idea.

> Lev 26:29 doesn't have God forcing this; instead that is a result of extreme famine produced by siege in the Ancient Near East.

The context (Lev 26:28) is, "... I will punish you seven times for your sins." But if you want a completely unambiguous statement of God's intention, try Jeremiah 19:9.

> Ex 20:5 is just a fact of life

No, it's not. The Bible specifically says that it's NOT just a fact of life, but rather that it is "for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God".

> 1 Cor 14:34 has a cultural context that needs to be taken into account.

Is the Bible the Word of God, or is it the word of man? Because if we're taking into account cultural context, maybe we need to apply cultural context to the whole thing and conclude that it's purely a work of literature, a reflection of the culture in which it was written, but that its epistemic value is indistinguishable from zero?

> Now, in all this, what you're doing is focusing on some of the worst that you can find. That's a curious route to choose.

The reason for this is to draw attention to the following fundamental fact: either the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, or it is not. If it is, then you need to make your peace with the fact that God's will sometimes grates on your intuition, and you need to choose. (The story of Abraham and Isaac makes this point explicitly!) And if it is not, then you need to choose which parts to pay attention to and which to reject, and you obviously cannot make that choice on the basis of what you find in the Bible. The reason I highlight the bad parts is to emphasize that this choice is stark.

> I have a suspicion that maybe these weren't just 'happenings', that maybe there is a causal power at play. If there is, if there is a source of wisdom, I would be an utter fool to ignore it—or him, or her.

I completely agree. And if you can show me *evidence* that there is a causal power at play then I'll be convinced too. But your suspicion is not evidence.

Luke said...

> Nope. Not even a little bit.

I'm pretty surprised. You didn't see the condemnation of blatant hypocrisy in Isaiah 58:1–5, followed by God pleading with the Israelites to fight for justice, help the hungry, take care of the homeless, and cease blame-shifting? I can certainly see how some bits would take some study and knowledge of other bits of scripture, but your "Not even a little bit." is extreme.

> But I didn't need God to tell me that growing up sooner or later is probably a good idea.

Says the person who has benefited from the results of said "Grow up." It's easy to look at the hard-fought-for moral lessons which you can now take for granted, and disparage/​diminish the process of learning them. However, that's a recipe for not making further moral progress. It's as if there's not a tremendous amount of further growing up to do, where your own resources may not be sufficient to the task.

> The context (Lev 26:28) is, "... I will punish you seven times for your sins." But if you want a completely unambiguous statement of God's intention, try Jeremiah 19:9.

Well, obviously the OT has God designing reality such that the results described would follow. It seems pretty obvious to me that God is telling the Israelites that what is coming upon them is a consequence of their moral depravity, and not randomness or some other explanation which would exonerate them. So it seems that complaining about those passages necessarily means complaining that God would dare to make reality such that it operates this way. Are you happy to voice that complaint?

> No, it's not. The Bible specifically says that it's NOT just a fact of life, but rather that it is "for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God".

I stand corrected; the OT does after all have God deciding what the facts of life are. Are you calling what the Bible means by God being jealous, 'evil'?

> Is the Bible the Word of God, or is it the word of man?

My suspicion is that it is man's record of his attempt to be in contact with God. I reject the models of inspiration which have God dictating every single word to man, as if man were merely a typewriter. Indeed, I fail to see how God would communicate to us other than in a way that is culture-dependent.

> [...] God's will sometimes grates on your intuition [...]

Most definitely! If this never happens, then my intuition is my god and I am a worshiper of myself. I am a finite being; if I only rely on myself for moral improvement, I will be permanently limited. I will lock myself in a prison unless I accept morality from outside myself as possibly trumping my own morality. The same logic applies to any system of finite minds.

> And if you can show me *evidence* that there is a causal power at play then I'll be convinced too.

I would need to know what qualifies as "*evidence*".

Ron said...

> You didn't see the condemnation of blatant hypocrisy in Isaiah 58:1–5, followed by God pleading with the Israelites to fight for justice, help the hungry, take care of the homeless, and cease blame-shifting?

Sure, now that you point it out to me, I can kinda sorta see that. I've kind of lost track of the point you were hoping to make here though.

> Are you happy to voice that complaint?

Depends on what you mean by "happy". I think it sucks that there is suffering in the world, and I don't believe in God so I can't blame Him for that suckage. But if I ever do find out that I'm wrong and God really does exist and he really is all-powerful then I will not hesitate for an instant to charge Him with the responsibility for the suckage that He has created.

> Are you calling what the Bible means by God being jealous, 'evil'?

Evil is a loaded term. I'd go with "petty".

> [The Bible] is man's record of his attempt to be in contact with God.

OK, I would actually agree with that.

> I fail to see how God would communicate to us other than in a way that is culture-dependent.

There is something very odd about a Christian advancing an argument of the form, "I can't see how God can do X, therefore God cannot do X." But didn't you just say that the Bible is NOT God communicating with us, but man recording his *attempts* (possibly unsuccessful) to communicate with God? You have me very confused.

> If this never happens, then my intuition is my god and I am a worshiper of myself.

Divine revelation is not the only source of checks and balances against one's own ego. Atheists as a rule don't worship themselves. (We don't worship anything.)

> I would need to know what qualifies as "*evidence*".

Let me rephrase: your suspicion is not evidence that the thing you suspect is actually true. What would qualify as evidence (for God's existence)? Anything that could not be explained by simple natural laws. For example, if praying to Jesus could reliably cause amputated limbs to regenerate, and the control experiment of praying to Allah didn't produce such results, that would be pretty convincing.

Luke said...

> Sure, now that you point it out to me, I can kinda sorta see that. I've kind of lost track of the point you were hoping to make here though.

Search this comment thread for "try and think like God thinks, to walk in God's shoes".

> But if I ever do find out that I'm wrong and God really does exist and he really is all-powerful then I will not hesitate for an instant to charge Him with the responsibility for the suckage that He has created.

I wonder how much responsibility you would attribute to other beings. :-p

> Evil is a loaded term. I'd go with "petty".

Ok, but are you looking at what humans typically mean by 'jealous', or what the Bible means when it says God is 'jealous'? For comparison, imagine a boy who grows up with a father who gets angry all the time for stupid reasons. That boy could learn that all anger is 'petty', or he could learn that some anger is 'petty'. Generally, I find that people see that God describes himself as 'jealous', stop there, and criticize without looking more deeply. I don't know whether you've tried looking more deeply or not.

> There is something very odd about a Christian advancing an argument of the form, "I can't see how God can do X, therefore God cannot do X."

That's not my argument. Instead, I am noting that it is hazardous to claim that God could/​would do X, if you have no idea how X would happen. It is very easy to inject insoluble paradoxes into the argument that way.

> But didn't you just say that the Bible is NOT God communicating with us, but man recording his *attempts* (possibly unsuccessful) to communicate with God? You have me very confused.

There are plenty of Psalms where the authors lament God's distance if not his absence. I'm really trying to say that the Bible is 'gritty' just like Jesus was 'gritty'. There's a whole book about this: Peter Enns' Inspiration and Incarnation. He wrote a follow-up book, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It, in which he criticizes various doctrines of inerrancy for pretending that the Bible is other than it actually is.

> Atheists as a rule don't worship themselves. (We don't worship anything.)

If you consider something/someone as having the most value and are attempting to somehow change as a result, I suspect that one will see some of the same results that typically go along with religious worship.

Luke said...

> Let me rephrase: your suspicion is not evidence that the thing you suspect is actually true.

I get this. It can nevertheless be quite valid to act on suspicions. The nice thing about having evidence is that it's easier to convince others to also act on those no-longer-just-suspicions. What's tricky is that not everyone evaluates evidence the same; sometimes after a paradigm shift what counts as evidence changes.

> What would qualify as evidence (for God's existence)? Anything that could not be explained by simple natural laws. For example, if praying to Jesus could reliably cause amputated limbs to regenerate, and the control experiment of praying to Allah didn't produce such results, that would be pretty convincing.

Isn't anything that "could not be explained by simple natural laws" somehow irrational? I worry that you just said that the only kind of God you'd accept is a god-of-the-gaps. How can we reliably avoid that?

wrf3 said...

Since you asked for input from a Calvinist, here goes.

Point 1 is true.
Point 2 is problematic, depending on how you define "love". If you define love as "wanting what is best for someone" then 2 is false. This definition of love follows from "love your enemies". Those who aren't saved wouldn't be happy in heaven (in fact, they won't be happy anywhere. Following C. S. Lewis, God will not infect heaven with misery). If you define love as "choosing one person over another" then it's true, but now irrelevant (this is the sense of "unless you hate mother and father more than me" and "I have loved Jacob, but hated Esau"). In either case, love is not described in terms of emotional attachment.

On another point, you wrote: "The Calvinists don't *ignore* choice, they simply (and correctly, BTW) conclude that choice is logically impossible if God is omnipotent."

This is no different than the position the naturalist has to take since, in that worldview, thoughts follow the laws of physics, and we don't control the laws of physics.

Finally, the "problem" of theodicy is not with God. It's with us. Our intuitive notions of good and evil are generally wrong.

Ron said...

@wrf3:

Thanks for that input!

> This is no different than the position the naturalist has to take

Yes, I agree with that. I recently came to the rather ironic realization that on the Calvinist/Arminian debate I personally think the Calvinists got it right.

> Our intuitive notions of good and evil are generally wrong.

Yes, this too seems to be a logical consequence of accepting the Bible as the Word of God. But here's the problem: On what basis, then, is it valid to assign the labels "good" and "evil" to anything, or to prefer one over the other? We have our preferences, God has His. Who is to say that His preferences are better than ours? To put this in very concrete terms, if our notions of good and evil and generally wrong, on what basis can we say that (say) Hitler was evil? Can we really rule out the possibility that Hitler was doing the work of God? It wouldn't be the first time God decided to inflict collective punishment on the Jews for one transgression or another.

> Those who aren't saved wouldn't be happy in heaven (in fact, they won't be happy anywhere.

OK, but then what makes you think that what you are calling "happiness" is a state to be desired?

Are you familiar with Stockholm syndrome? Could heaven be fairly characterized as a collection of souls exhibiting (I don't want to say "suffering from" because that's my fallible moral intuition talking) Stockholm syndrome? I mean, worshipping God for all eternity sounds like a horrible fate to me, so maybe I'm better off not being "happy" (whatever that word could possibly mean in this context)?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> I mean, worshipping God for all eternity sounds like a horrible fate to me, [...]

As an antidote to this admittedly hilarious caricature which sadly well-models a nontrivial amount of Christianity, I suggest rising above pop theology. (Yes, I am proud of that sentence.) Instead, I suggest some meditation on the long-observed human desire for "more, more, more". There are three responses to it:

     (1) Do get more, more, more.
     (2) Moderation, please!
     (3) Want less, less, less.

Furthermore, let's do away with the banal form of (1) which is merely the increase of some single number toward infinity, kind of like the "idle game" Adventure Capitalist, which is insanely popular even though you're just clicking various things to make your $ number go up. You are literally spending time making a single, fictional number increase, faster and faster. Let's call the version of (1) which doesn't exhibit this pathology, (1').

Now, could "worshiping God for all eternity" possibly mean (1')? Could it be done in a way that doesn't cause all that suffering which Buddhists (and Schopenhauer) would solve via (3)? The video you link is probably closest to (2).

Being a nerd, (1') seems like precisely the thing I'm striving for. Anytime part of my life has gotten repetitive enough, I feel like a sense a Poincaré recurrence and instead of getting trapped in an eternal return, I endeavor to push out of it to something more glorious. Or perhaps God pulls me out, given that pulling oneself by one's bootstraps has small conceptual problems of the logical contradiction kind. Perhaps this (1') could be construed as "straining toward God". And yet, what is the difference between that and "worshiping God"?

Ron said...

@Luke:

> Let's call the version of (1) which doesn't exhibit this pathology, (1').

You're making the assumption that 1' (i.e. an infinite satiation of the desire for "more more more" that does not exhibit pathologies) can actually exist. That is far from clear.

> Could it be done in a way that doesn't cause all that suffering

You're missing the point: If, as wrf3 claims, our intuitive notions of good and evil are generally wrong, how can you know that suffering is bad? I think suffering is bad, but maybe I'm just wrong about that. Maybe suffering is good. And I don't mean that in a character-building means-to-an-end sort of way. I mean maybe suffering is good for its own sake, and the more suffering there is in the world the better. Yes, that grates against my intuition too, but remember, the Calvinist premise is that our intuitions are not reliable. If suffering is good, then you can't get to 1' without suffering. In fact, the more suffering, the better. And this is not a caricature. No less a luminary than Mother Theresa said on multiple occasions that suffering is a gift from God. (At least she was intellectually honest about it!)

My personal position is that suffering is bad because it destroys habitat for memes. But I see no intellectually honest way that a Calvinist can reach that conclusion. And so I don't see any way to eliminate the possibility, if the Calvinists are right, that heaven is a place of eternal suffering populated by people I would characterize (according to my broken intuitions) as masochists.

But I would love to get a Calvinist's input on this. I hope we'll hear back from wrf3.

Luke said...

> You're making the assumption that 1' (i.e. an infinite satiation of the desire for "more more more" that does not exhibit pathologies) can actually exist. That is far from clear.

Very true, but I see no reason to say that finite is more likely than infinite, either. We sometimes get tripped up into thinking about infinite numbers of particles instead of infinite complexity. All you need for infinite complexity is infinite surface (Bekenstein bound), and really you only need infinite surface as t → ∞, which may indeed be happening.

> You're missing the point: If, as wrf3 claims, our intuitive notions of good and evil are generally wrong, how can you know that suffering is bad?

Meh, you can replace 'suffering' with 'badness' in my argument and have it stay relatively unchanged. I was critiquing your "heaven is lame, yo" video.

> Yes, that grates against my intuition too, but remember, the Calvinist premise is that our intuitions are not reliable.

That's fine, but it has to posit the possibility of increasing epistemic success of at least some subset of the population. (At least, it is very weak without the 'increasing'; see Thagard's #1 and #2.) If it starts looking like one group is merely keeping everyone else from looking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz, one ought to get suspicious. This is why it's ok that not just anyone can understand general relativity.

> My personal position is that suffering is bad because it destroys habitat for memes.

Yep, but you can also kneecap a person's ability to create memes without incurring suffering. Just screw over his/her education. Teach him/her to have a small mind, to never challenge the status quo, whether it is scientific, social, theological, or whatever else. As it turns out, Hilary Putnam uses this as an example of 'cruelty' in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy which defies categorization by anything which presumes the fact/value dichotomy.

So, for you, aponia is not the driving reason. For some it is! For you—and me—sometimes suffering is required to stop cruelty [of the kind I described].

wrf3 said...

On what basis, then, is it valid to assign the labels "good" and "evil" to anything, or to prefer one over the other?

That's actually easy. If you accept that morality is just a search through state space, then paths that lead to a goal are good, and paths that lead away from a goal are bad. Then it follows that there are two ultimate goals -- life and death. Life, because it is the prerequisite for all other choices; and death because no more choices can be made. So take your pick. Choose life, and order your choices accordingly; or choose death and do likewise. If you choose life then you'll eventually end up with "love your neighbor as yourself" since that's congruent with the iterated prisoner's dilemma which is the heuristic Nature used to evolve our brains. You'll also be consistent with the Biblical account, since "God is a god of the living" and "Choose life that you may live" and "love your neighbor (and enemy) as yourself".

Who is to say that His preferences are better than ours?

He is. He made you. You did not make Him. St. Paul dealt with this quite a while ago: "But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, 'Why have you made me like this?' Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?" (Rom 9:20-21). If you're a fan of Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica, you might be reminded of Cavil's wonderful "I didn't ask to be made like this" performance.

Can we really rule out the possibility that Hitler was doing the work of God?

Not on this side of the divide. But we have been told to choose life, and if the iterated prisoner's dilemma teaches us to love one another then we can say that, to the best of our knowledge and ability, Hitler was on the wrong path. But then, so is America.

OK, but then what makes you think that what you are calling "happiness" is a state to be desired?

Heaven is the state of continued life and it's in the presence of those we love. For better or worse, that's something I desire. If you decide you don't want that flavor of happiness, I very much suspect you'll get your wish. I take no joy in it, however.

Are you familiar with Stockholm syndrome?

I am.

Could heaven be fairly characterized as a collection of souls exhibiting Stockholm syndrome?

"Fairly" is a loaded modifier, isn't it? It all depends on your point of view. I'm reminded of the words of Polycarp as he was led to the woodpile: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and he never did me any injury; how then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?" For me, he's a hero (he didn't defect against the highest good). For you, maybe he and I are lunatics (cooperation with a non-existant being that leads to your death is pretty stupid, isn't it?.

[... to be continued ...]

wrf3 said...

[... continued ...]

I mean, worshipping God for all eternity sounds like a horrible fate to me...

If I may be so bold, let me give you a naturalistic explanation as to why. McCarthy (blessed be his memory) said there were five things that a human level AI would need. One of them was the notion that "everything is improvable." Now, I think he meant this (simplistically) to be akin to the ability to adjust coefficients in a pattern matcher so that we better fit curves/explanations to data. This means that our knowledge of good and evil is not only the ability to introspect our path traverser, but that we also know that everything is improvable. This means two things:
1) If everything is improvable, then nothing is perfect. (oops: God said it was "very good").
2) If everything is improvable, then we will not want external controls on our goal-seeking algorithm. We decide when to stop, not you.

So now we can understand both "original sin" and the inability of law to make us behave. This brilliant insight of McCarthy explains why we think God is not perfect and why we intuitively reject Him, since the ultimate goal isn't good, as well as being the ultimate external control on our desires to keep improving. And that's why Christianity says what it does: that we have to be "born again", where the "external control" moves inward.

Because you view heaven as a place where God is still external to you, of course it's a nightmare. But that's not how St. Paul saw it, but I can't place my finger on the right passage at the moment.

Oh, and btw, this is the answer to your "which faith?" question. Faith is nothing more than the axioms we choose to live under. You can't "prove" faith, any more than you can prove Euclid's five axioms. All we can do is see whether they are consistent and are congruent with what we think the external world is. IMO, it's either atheism or Christianity. Both are consistent, even though they give wildly different answers to some questions. All others need not apply. The great irony is that, if atheism is true, you'd still end up living mostly like a Christian (should. I stress should), minus the supernatural bit like the Resurrection.

But, hey, what do I know?

wrf3 said...

I hope we'll hear back from wrf3.

Our posts crossed. I hope I didn't disappoint.

I mean maybe suffering is good for its own sake

That would make suffering a primary goal when it has to be secondary to life and death. Given that hint, and what I just posted, you should be able to fill out the answer.

No less a luminary than Mother Theresa said on multiple occasions that suffering is a gift from God.

Because God uses it to build us up. Humans usually use it to tear others down. Big difference.

I'll check back later.

Ron said...

> paths that lead to a goal are good, and paths that lead away from a goal are bad

OK, so if my goal is to exterminate Jews then death camps are good?

Oh, sorry, did I say Jews? I mean the Canaanites. Or was it the Amalekites? I'm getting old, it's hard to keep track.

> You'll also be consistent with the Biblical account

You must be reading a different Bible from the one I have.

>> Who is to say that His preferences are better than ours?
> He made you.

You understand that I don't believe that, yes? But even if it were true, so what? Some day we humans may create sentient robots, that doesn't mean that our preferences will be better then theirs.

> Has the potter no right over the clay

Not if the clay is sentient, no.

>> Can we really rule out the possibility that Hitler was doing the work of God?
> Not on this side of the divide.

Ah, well, that is where you and I part company. (But I respect your intellectual honesty. Not many people are willing to stand up for Hitler nowadays.)

> God uses [suffering] to build us up

Really? Take a look at this. Do those kids look like they are being built up?

Or this? Or this? [Caution! Disturbing images. Viewer discretion is advised.]

Ron said...

@Luke:

>> how can you know that suffering is bad?
> Meh, you can replace 'suffering' with 'badness'

Only if you want to dodge the question. "How can you know that badness is bad?" is not the same question as "How can you know that suffering is bad?"

>> My personal position is that suffering is bad because it destroys habitat for memes.
> Yep, but you can also kneecap a person's ability to create memes without incurring suffering. Just screw over his/her education.

Hey, look over here, a cute kitten!

Again, you completely missed the point, which is that *I* know that suffering is bad because I'm an idea-ist. But you're not an idea-ist, you're a Christian. How can *you* know that suffering is bad? Do you even believe that suffering is bad? Many Christians don't. (WRF3 doesn't. He thinks Hitler may have been doing the work of God.)

wrf3 said...

OK, so if my goal is to exterminate Jews then death camps are good?

Yes. But then we have to evaluate that goal in light of other goals. Is the goal to exterminate Jews good? For us? No. More on this in a bit.

You must be reading a different Bible from the one I have.

I was referring to the observation that the outcomes for the iterated prisoner's dilemma (given many interactions) is generally compatible with Christian ethic. Is that what you're disagreeing with, or was it my remark about the evolutionary formation of our brains? If so, then I don't subscribe to the wooden (and completely misguided) literalism of most Americans when it comes to Genesis. But that's 10,000 words for another time.

You understand that I don't believe that, yes?
Yes, but it's the only answer there is.

Some day we humans may create sentient robots, that doesn't mean that our preferences will be better then theirs.

I think we will create sentient machines. And if they have human level AI, then they will hate us, just like we hate God. That' what McCarthy's "everything is improvable" does.

But, unlike God, we haven't created everything. When you create an entire universe that contains sentient creatures who hate you, because of their knowledge of good and evil, what will you tell them?

If we're going to create sentient machines, it would behoove us to have an answer for that. Or, will we hand them the book of Job and say, "read this."?

Not if the clay is sentient, no.
So this is the question, isn't it? Can you tell me by what yardstick you make this measurement? Is there some external standard of good and evil to which both God and man must answer? Or is there one yardstick for God and another for man? Or is there no external yardstick at all, and it's simply your personal preference against God's? If it's the latter, why should anyone choose your preference over God's (or their own preference, for that matter)?

Not many people are willing to stand up for Hitler nowadays.
Please be very clear on this. I am not standing up for Hitler. I'm standing up for God.

So let's explore this. Earlier you agreed with my statement that "[the naturalist position is that] thoughts follow the laws of physics, and we don't control the laws of physics." That means that everything, you, me, Hitler, Gandhi, are acting according to the laws of physics, which you agreed that we don't control. So even in your view, Nature is just as responsible for atrocities and suffering as you claim God is.

So, if you're going to be consistent, the charge that you level against God applies equally to your universe. You have to say the universe is evil. Can you explain to me why this is so? How did that notion possibly come about? Can you logically defend that notion?

Furthermore, your worldview is far more heinous than mine. At least with mine, death is not the end. As St. Paul said, "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us." [Rom 8:8]. And Isaiah wrote: "He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces" [25:8].

You have all of the atrocity and none of the hope and yet you blame God?

Take a look at this. Do those kids look like they are being built up?

You'd have to ask them, Ron. It isn't for you to say. You don't get to decide which lessons a person learns from life's struggles, any more than you get to judge God.

Luke said...

> Only if you want to dodge the question. "How can you know that badness is bad?" is not the same question as "How can you know that suffering is bad?"

True, but what is under examination is my claim, of badness which comes from "(1) Do get more, more, more". Strictly speaking, 'badness' really is a better term to use there, than 'suffering'. If you want to ask about suffering explicitly that's fine, but realize that this doesn't capture the spirit of my comment as well as 'badness'.

> Again, you completely missed the point, which is that *I* know that suffering is bad because I'm an idea-ist. But you're not an idea-ist, you're a Christian. How can *you* know that suffering is bad? Do you even believe that suffering is bad? Many Christians don't.

I find excellent things in both some things wrf3 said about "choose life", and about being an idea-ist. Indeed, if you add my "do away with the banal form of (1)" to the mix, something pretty interesting might come out.

Remember our last Dialogos? I don't recall the atheists there giving anything more sophisticated than "we should maximize well-being". I don't see how that has any more detail than "choose life". If one quibbles about 'maximize' or 'egalitarianism', I point that person to Joshua A. Berman's Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, Peter Berger's A Far Glory, and Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs. There are solid arguments to be made that the Bible gave us a solid push toward egalitarianism, away from Genghis Kahn-style "conquer everything you can".

If I were to say suffering is bad, then does that mean scientists ought not experience any suffering in their pursuit of science? They most certainly do. Sometimes though, the suffering seems to take on a positive light. So the global statement of "suffering is bad" seems dangerous to affirm.

> (WRF3 doesn't. He thinks Hitler may have been doing the work of God.)

One way to view this is that God causes evil to come into contact with evil so that people will finally see it for what it is, and do something about it. There's no need for God to provoke further evil, except perhaps when that decreases the total amount of evil. One can try understanding the "harden hearts" examples in the OT as "Make the situation real bad, real quickly, so that the frog in the pot actually jumps out."

Before you go too far in thinking about wrf3's statement, I suggest asking how he could possibly interpret "doing the work of God" when it comes to Hitler.

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: So the global statement of "suffering is bad" seems dangerous to affirm.

Indeed. The "hedonism paradox" observes that even pleasure can be bad (shameless blog promotion).

If suffering is bad, and pleasure is bad, then maybe the problem lies elsewhere. The knowledge that "everything is improveable" is a blessing and a curse. We can't escape it -- it's what makes us human. One option is to curse our Creator for making us like this.

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: Before you go too far in thinking about wrf3's statement, I suggest asking how he could possibly interpret "doing the work of God" when it comes to Hitler.

The same way Vader was doing the work of Lucas when he cut off Luke's hand.

But, unlike Star Wars, where we know why these things happened, I haven't gotten to the end of this story, i.e., I can't possibly say why now.

Ron said...

@wrf3:

> Nature is just as responsible for atrocities and suffering as you claim God is.

Yes, but the difference is that I don't claim that nature is all-loving. And I also don't claim that nature is omniscient and omnipotent. That is why science does not have a theodicy problem.

> You have to say the universe is evil.

The universe is not evil, it is merely indifferent. Indifference can lead to evil, but they are not synonymous.

> You have all of the atrocity and none of the hope and yet you blame God?

God is a fictional character from human literature. I can no more blame God (or be angry with Him -- another specious charge often leveled by Christians) than I can blame or be angry with Lord Voldemort.

>Furthermore, your worldview is far more heinous than mine. At least with mine, death is not the end.

My worldview is only heinous if it isn't true. If it is true, if death really is the end, then *your* worldview is heinous because the hope it provides is false. It leads people to think that suffering and evil should be tolerated because everything will be made right in the afterlife. But if there is no afterlife (and there is no evidence that there is an afterlife, and a great deal of evidence that there is no afterlife) then the *belief* that there is an afterlife leads to an increase in evil and suffering. *That* is heinous.

@Luke:

> Strictly speaking, 'badness' really is a better term to use there, than 'suffering'.

No, it isn't. The words mean different things, and I'm the one posing the question, and what I'm asking about is suffering, not badness. Stop trying to distract me with kittens. It won't work.

> Remember our last Dialogos? I don't recall the atheists there giving anything more sophisticated than "we should maximize well-being". I don't see how that has any more detail than "choose life".

The fact that some atheists advance bad arguments is not an indictment of atheism any more than the fact that some Christians advance bad arguments is an indictment of Christianity.

> So the global statement of "suffering is bad" seems dangerous to affirm.

Indeed. That is why I was careful to qualify it as suffering *for its own sake*, not as a means to an end or a price to be paid for some greater good.

The Christian theory is (as I understand it) that suffering is a price to be paid for some greater good in the afterlife. But if there is no afterlife (and there isn't) then this theory falls apart.

> I suggest asking how he could possibly interpret "doing the work of God" when it comes to Hitler.

Doesn't matter. If God is all-good, then doing His work must be good. So Hitler must have been doing good if he was doing God's work.

I think most people would recoil at that. I certainly do. You seem to be at least a little queasy about it. So how do you justify your queasiness? (Keep in mind that the working assumption here is that your intuitions are not reliable!)

Luke said...

@Ron:

> > God uses [suffering] to build us up
> Do those kids look like they are being built up?

I missed this. This looks like curious logic, Ron. By it:

     (1) If God doesn't build someone up,
     (2) and we don't build someone up,
     (3) then God is at fault.

Do you accept this? Or can God stay 'God', and yet allow room for humans to fail such that if they do, they are morally responsible for failing, and not God? Whether or not in our world we have such a case is harder than my question. I'm just wondering if there's ever a case where a bad state of affairs is due to our evil choices (or evil abstention from acting), and that no evil choices of God were involved.

@wrf3:

Would Calvinists deal with the above differently than Arminians? It seems like they would, but I've seen enough unexpected responses that I need to ask. I do worry that there is a common asymmetry in thinking about the above, where it is assumed that God has free will, or whatever it is which is required to be morally responsible, while man does not have this thing. Once that asymmetry is allowed, the conversation is sunk.

Luke said...

> No, it isn't. The words mean different things, and I'm the one posing the question, and what I'm asking about is suffering, not badness. Stop trying to distract me with kittens. It won't work.

Ok, so this is a tangent, and the spirit of what we're talking about here is different from what I presented. I just wanted you to acknowledge this; I wanted you to not override my own interpretation of text I wrote, with your own. Whether or not you were doing this I don't know, but those who do do this are in danger of dehumanizing their interlocutors. Just to be clear, given your clarifying question, I would say that if I had used 'badness' instead of 'suffering', in order to get into your head the idea I wanted to put there.

And I actually did answer your question about suffering—at least I started. Science without any suffering is so far from what I can imagine, that I cannot imagine that it would necessarily be good. What is the difference between banging your head against the wall because you cannot figure out a problem, and suffering?

> The fact that some atheists advance bad arguments is not an indictment of atheism any more than the fact that some Christians advance bad arguments is an indictment of Christianity.

Correct; I merely meant that to indicate that giving more detailed answers is where things actually get tricky. Until that happens, these various ways of speaking can all be losslessly mapped to pretty much the same proposition(s).

> Indeed. That is why I was careful to qualify it as suffering *for its own sake*, not as a means to an end or a price to be paid for some greater good.

Ahh, I missed that emphasis; my apologies. Ostensibly, goodness is good *for its own sake*, which provides a foil against which to look at the suffering version. I'm reminded of BDSM folks, who seem to enjoy suffering. Is this suffering *for its own sake*, or is it another kind? (Something tells me that God created the world to screw with just about every generalization. This frustrates theologians who want to systematize the Bible to no end!)

> The Christian theory is (as I understand it) that suffering is a price to be paid for some greater good in the afterlife. But if there is no afterlife (and there isn't) then this theory falls apart.

Yep; Romans 8:18 is a go-to verse for this, along with 1 Cor 15 (especially v19). What would make Christians pitiable is if they are willing to endure more than his/her "fair share" of suffering, a risk wagered on a false belief. Christians would be epic suckers, to be used by others. A subset of the population would have a vested interest in keeping Christians 'Christian'!

> Doesn't matter. If God is all-good, then doing His work must be good.

This makes no sense to me, because that means God dealing with evil not caused by him (or: for which he is not responsible) cannot be "His work". This either distorts the term "His work", or prevents God from causally/​'responsibly' interacting with evil.

Ron said...

> Do you accept this?

No. As I've said many times before I don't believe in God. God is a fictional character. Fictional characters can't be "at fault" for anything that happens in the real world. It's a category error.

That does not stop me from locally adopting someone else's assumptions and reasoning from those to their logical conclusions. My hope is to show by reductio-ad-Hitler that those assumptions are false. But if someone is willing to admit that Hitler could have been doing the work of God then I am at a loss. My only hope is that enough people will choose not to believe it that those who do will be socially marginalized, because if that doesn't happen then we'll have more Hitlers, more Islamic States, more Ku Klux Klans, all of whom believe they are doing the work of God.

I think Hitler, the Islamic State, and the Klan are bad. I can justify that belief based on a few core assumptions, all of which are consistent with science. But I can't *prove* those assumptions. The best I can do is show how those assumptions lead to outcomes that align with many people's moral intuitions. I can even show how those moral intuitions arose by evolution. What I can't do is prove that those moral intuitions are "correct" in the same way that I can show that, say, quantum mechanics is correct. At the end of the day we have (at least the illusion of) free well, and so we have to make a choice: we can praise God (and by implication praise Hitler for doing God's work) or we can choose evidence, experiment and reason, reject the conflation of fact and fiction, and reject Hitler and ISIS and the Klan (or at least their ideologies) for the unadulterated evils that they are. But it is a choice. The laws of physics do not compel us one way or the other.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> I think most people would recoil at that. I certainly do. You seem to be at least a little queasy about it. So how do you justify your queasiness? (Keep in mind that the working assumption here is that your intuitions are not reliable!)

I like to explore such issues by examining whether the US ought to have dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From my viewpoint, the US had exclusively terrible options. They could attempt a mainland invasion, noting that children were being trained to violently resist (just found this out in Robert B. Laughlin's A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down). A mainland invasion also risked letting the USSR occupy some of Japan. The US could just stop fighting, and let Japan do what it was doing. What else?

Few people want to make the least evil of exclusively evil choices. Most want to make a good choice. Most want to feel pure about themselves. Or something pretty damn close to 'pure'. Such people, as far as I can tell, could not act responsibly in situations like faced by the US when it came to atom-bomb or not atom-bomb. My guess is that they would make the situation worse.

Or consider the choice to invade Rwanda, given that the US had trustworthy predictions of a 'final solution', a decision thwarted because of the political fallout of the Battle of Mogadishu. This, despite the fact that the total number who died in Somalia was a small fraction of how many would be saved by intervention in Rwanda. I wouldn't be surprised if most American citizens feel more 'pure' because the possibility of another Black Hawk Down was thwarted.

So, how are we to understand 'queasy' and 'recoil', when these are the real life decisions which, whether made or not made, have tremendous consequences for human thriving or the lack thereof? I tend to just ignore those terms, because they seem to cloud issues instead of bring clarity.

What you call 'queasiness'—if we're talking about the same thing—I call 'uncertainty'. This was nicely revealed in our epic discussion about the Charlie Hebdo attack. I am reticent to pretend that we can resolve situations of epic injustice, by insisting that perfect justice is the only admissible course of action. I'm not sure this actually works. I think it might be an utter pipe dream. Maybe you have to intentionally bring evil into contact with evil. There is the danger of a conflagration. But there is also the chance that the true nature of evil will be seen, and that a remnant emerges which knows what to do to prevent "the bad thing" from reoccurring, at least quite as frequently.

Any discussion of ethics and morality that doesn't take on the hard questions is useless. You can come away from simplistic ethics and morality feeling 'pure'. I don't think this is possible in real life, in dirty life, in actual life.

Ron said...

I'm going to move this thread to a new post so I don't have to keep individually approving every comment.