It seems to me that you might be assuming from the outset that her experience is ambiguous or unreal.
I am making no assumptions about the quality of the experience. It could be completely unambiguous and real-seeming. I am merely stating the fact that it is possible for the experience to be either true or false. Like Tiax says, it can be either an Alice experience or a Bob experience. And you don't know which one it is without thinking critically about it.
For if it was both unambiguous and real, it seems that it wouldn't be irrational to accept it without doubting it.
If by "real" you mean "true", you are again begging the question. How do you know it's real? You only know it's real-seeming. But unambiguous and real-seeming experiences may well be false. The movie Gravity is utterly immersive, but we know that nothing on screen actually happened. It would be irrational of you to believe what you see in Gravity, because you know that the things people see in movie theaters are generally not true. The medium is unreliable. So by the same token, you know that the things people interpret from religious experiences are generally not true - they have to be, because they are mutually incompatible - therefore it is irrational of you to uncritically accept your own religious experience.
This is the logic… consider a possible scenario (doesn't have to be actual). Alice does have a genuine experience of God which is clear enough such that doubting it is like doubting that killing innocent people for fun is wrong (something else quite possible to do). Would she, in that instance, need to, or be rationally obligated to try to figure out something is real that she has already seen is actually real?
There are a few problems with this. First, she hasn't "already seen [God] is actually real". That is impossible. Nobody ever apprehends objective reality directly. You, right now, are not seeing that these words on your screen are actually real. You are having an experience of seeing words, which you must then decide how to interpret. Now, we interpret our everyday sensory experiences as representative of objective reality because we have learned that they are generally reliable (except under specific circumstances, such as being in a movie theater). And we interpret other experiences, such as dreams, as subjective and untruthful because we have learned that they are unreliable. We have also learned that religious experiences are unreliable.
Now, it is possible that in fact she had this experience because God exists and he decided to give it to her. But it is also possible that she had this experience for some other reason. Even if we hypothesize that in this case the experience is truly from God, she is not privy to our hypothesizing; as far as she knows, it could be a true experience or a false one. We know that if she accepts the experience uncritically then it's the truth she'll be believing, because we have already decided in this scenario what the truth really is. She has no such assurance. If somebody asks her, "How do you know you're not worshiping a false idol?", she will have no answer - just as you don't. All she knows is that (a) she had a religious experience and (b) most if not all religious experiences are unreliable. It is irrational of her to believe her religious experience just as it would be irrational of her to believe a dream or a movie.
I am saying that I think it is possible for someone to have an experience that is clear enough that doubting it is irrational just as doubting one's existence as Descartes tried to only led to the collapse of his theories.
I'm afraid you are misinterpreting Descartes, and that he's emphatically not on your side here. In fact, my own argument is archetypical of the Cartesian method: doubt everything, even your direct experiences. Descartes does conclude that it's irrational to doubt your own existence, but he doesn't merely claim it's irrational or feel it's irrational. He has clear and specific logical reasons why it's irrational: To doubt the proposition "I exist" is to entertain the its negation "I do not exist". But "I do not exist" contradicts itself, because to truthfully say "I" there must exist an I, and a contradiction is necessarily false. Therefore, "I exist" is necessarily true.
In short, Descartes absolutely did question his existence, and was not satisfied until he found a sound justification for it. This is exactly what you're claiming you don't have to do. He did the work; you're trying to get out of it. An experience doesn't become "irrational to doubt" just because it feels really really clear to you - again, we sometimes have very clear experiences that are false, and this fact is the driving force behind Descartes' skepticism as well as mine. Our own existence is "irrational to doubt" because you we follow the logic of the argument that we must necessarily exist. To make your religious experience "irrational to doubt" by Descartes' standard, you must produce a similarly airtight deductive argument - it must be somehow self-contradictory for your experience to be false. If you cannot produce such an argument, you absolutely ought to doubt. (And we know for a fact that it is not self-contradictory for a religious experience to be false, because lots of religious experiences actually are.)
Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "get in their own way".
Fear, preoccupation with self, laziness, things that people do to present obstacles to their own attempts to succeed at something. Surely you must have some experience with this.
Suppose that Bob suffers from social anxiety, and therefore chooses to live alone and does not seek out relationships. Bob ends up lonely and sad. Now, it's not as if Bob pressed the "no friends" button that God had cruelly set up. The only reason Bob is alone is because of Bob's own internal feelings and choices. Is this an example of Bob "getting in his own way"?
I will preface this with a disclaimer that I have neither the degree certification, the knowledge, or the necessary hours of patient interaction necessary to deal with psychological issues.
That said, if Bob is sad because he's alone, and Bob does not seek out relationships, then yes, it does appear that Bob is indeed working against himself.
It sounds like what you're saying is that although suffering is bad, we need some of it because it seems to come as a package with other desirable things. I'm pretty sure we're on the same page on that. Am I reading you right?
No, you're most definitely not, because I'm disagreeing with the blanket statement that "Suffering is bad."
Fear, preoccupation with self, laziness, things that people do to present obstacles to their own attempts to succeed at something. Surely you must have some experience with this.
But the suffering here is caused by the failure to succeed at something. There is still an action (or a choice to take no action) which results in suffering.
I will preface this with a disclaimer that I have neither the degree certification, the knowledge, or the necessary hours of patient interaction necessary to deal with psychological issues.
That said, if Bob is sad because he's alone, and Bob does not seek out relationships, then yes, it does appear that Bob is indeed working against himself.
God could have designed the universe such that one does not need to seek out relationships in order to have them. God could have designed beings for whom loneliness is not suffering. God could have designed beings which cannot be lonely. God himself could have kept Bob company. There are any number of ways God could have structured the universe so that Bob's choices do not cause him to suffer.
No, you're most definitely not, because I'm disagreeing with the blanket statement that "Suffering is bad."
I see, so you feel that we don't even have to consider what the trade-off might be? Suffering, just by itself, may not be bad?
That doesn't really make sense to me. Certainly it would be bad for God to keep everything the same, but make you suffer twice as much, with no new consequences of that suffering, except that you feel worse?
But the suffering here is caused by the failure to succeed at something.
No, it isn't! The point is the person undertaking the action is not performing at his best because he is an obstacle to himself. Even if whatever the particular endeavor undertaken at the time is successful, or even if no endeavor is undertaken at all, he is still an obstacle to himself and thus suffering.
God could have designed the universe such that one does not need to seek out relationships in order to have them.
... What?
God could have designed beings for whom loneliness is not suffering. God could have designed beings which cannot be lonely.
Or Bob could actively go out into the world and meet people.
God himself could have kept Bob company.
God is omnipresent. God can't not keep Bob company.
There are any number of ways God could have structured the universe so that Bob's choices do not cause him to suffer.
The fact that you're acknowledging Bob's choices are the reasons why he's suffering demonstrates the inherent problem in what you're saying. Bob's suffering because of Bob. He can choose to remedy the problem, but he doesn't. Bob is responsible for his situation.
And yes, I readily acknowledge that Bob didn't choose to have social anxieties. However, Bob is choosing to not to confront his anxieties in order to get what he wants, or to make the effort to deal with his social anxieties in order to create functional relationships. Those are Bob's choices, and they are causing him detriment. Thus, Bob is harming himself.
Suffering, just by itself, may not be bad?
Yes.
You know, I did explain this in that long post you glossed over earlier.
That doesn't really make sense to me. Certainly it would be bad for God to keep everything the same, but make you suffer twice as much, with no new consequences of that suffering, except that you feel worse?
No, it isn't! The point is the person undertaking the action is not performing at his best because he is an obstacle to himself. Even if whatever the particular endeavor undertaken at the time is successful, or even if no endeavor is undertaken at all, he is still an obstacle to himself and thus suffering.
How can he be an obstacle to himself is there is no endeavor? What does it even mean to be an obstacle in that case? It seems to me that an obstacle has to impede progress towards something - an endeavor of some sort.
... What?
Or Bob could actively go out into the world and meet people.
God is omnipresent. God can't not keep Bob company.
The fact that you're acknowledging Bob's choices are the reasons why he's suffering demonstrates the inherent problem in what you're saying. Bob's suffering because of Bob. He can choose to remedy the problem, but he doesn't. Bob is responsible for his situation.
And yes, I readily acknowledge that Bob didn't choose to have social anxieties. However, Bob is choosing to not to confront his anxieties in order to get what he wants, or to make the effort to deal with his social anxieties in order to create functional relationships. Those are Bob's choices, and they are causing him detriment. Thus, Bob is harming himself.
The fact that Bob is making the choices is irrelevant. God doesn't have to present us with choices in which some options lead to unnecessary suffering. When deciding which universe to create, God can choose to create one in which a guy named Bob who will make choices that cause him great suffering will exist, or God can choose to create one in which that doesn't happen.
Yes.
You know, I did explain this in that long post you glossed over earlier.
I didn't gloss over it - I just didn't understand your point, and have been seeking clarification since.
Why am I suffering?
Because God arbitrarily chose to have you suffer more. Is this bad?
How can he be an obstacle to himself is there is no endeavor? What does it even mean to be an obstacle in that case? It seems to me that an obstacle has to impede progress towards something - an endeavor of some sort.
You're right, obstacle is not the right word. I would say encumbrance.
The fact that Bob is making the choices is irrelevant.
How could it possibly be irrelevant? If Bob is suffering due to a choice he made, and it was entirely within his power to not make that choice, then the only reason Bob is suffering is because he chooses to do so. Right? So where is the injustice here?
God doesn't have to present us with choices in which some options lead to unnecessary suffering.
But that's just it, ALL suffering is unnecessary. There is no such thing as "necessary" suffering. We even demonstrated that God could easily create a world with exactly zero suffering. There is no "necessary suffering."
When deciding which universe to create, God can choose to create one in which a guy named Bob who will make choices that cause him great suffering will exist, or God can choose to create one in which that doesn't happen.
Your aim is to demonstrate God is behaving unjustly, yes? That is the purpose to this conversation?
So connect the dots. Exactly how is God being unjust here?
If I am choosing to beat my fists bloody against a wall, I cannot blame the person who created the wall. Nor can I blame the wall. I am choosing to do the thing that brings me pain and physical harm. It is entirely within my power to not beat my fists against a wall, but I am choosing to. Thus, the fact that I am experience excruciating amounts of pain doing it is not anyone's fault but my own. Nor can I, in accordance with your logic, blame God for the brittleness of the bones in my hands, my pain receptors, or the fact that walls are so hard. God is not forcing me to beat my hands against a wall, I am choosing to do so, and the fault is my own.
Indeed, the excruciating pain I'm experiencing is actually a fantastic thing because it's an indicator that my body is damaged, and in most people, is usually an indicator to stop further damage. The fact that I'm knowingly choosing not to do that is no one's fault but my own.
Because God arbitrarily chose to have you suffer more. Is this bad?
Depends. If it's arbitrary, then probably, because as I said before, cruelty is wrong.
So let's say two people, Alice and Bob, have two competing religious experiences. Both feel that their experience is genuine and clear. Alice's is real, but Bob's is not. You say that it is irrational for Alice to doubt hers, but surely it cannot be irrational for Bob to doubt his. So what can Bob do? And how can one know if they've had an Alice experience or a Bob experience?
Tiax, it seems to me that this is your objection to my view… that it would entail that Bob ends up believing an experience is from God, but is actually not from God. He does this because my view of justification would intail that justified belief is held by people with false beliefs who have, as it were, no way out of this epistemic situation. And on your view, you would say, that Bob would not be so stuck in this epistemic situation.
However, I see a number of possible holes in this objection. I would point out two things.
1. Perhaps if Bob is a rational person, he won't actually end up in this situation… or at least stay in it. If the experience was not truly from God it wouldn't actually be strong enough to justify belief. It would be something like Bob has experienced in other times in his life when he was not in a place of faith in God and it seemed to have either no connection or little connection to things which the religious text he adheres to. If the experience was not truly from God, Bob would probably realize in other areas of his life that he is overly gullible and over-interprets experiences. In such a case, he will naturally slip into less confidence about his experience and will realize that this experience could be his own imagination. If Bob really believes that he has a clear experience of God and actually has not, then he must have significant other problems that would tip him off to this fact.
2. There are many difficult scenarios that life leaves us in and it doesn't follow that we need to change our rational way of living to avoid all possible error. We may find that there is no way to prove that the external world is not just our imagination. We could be in the matrix and not know it, we could be dreaming in a higher sort of dream and not know it.
Consider another possible scenario, and I wool dike an answer to this the same way you wanted me to answer your question…
Two people experience life… one (John) is delusional, and the other (Tracy) is not. John is in a coma but he still has brain activity. Imagine John experiences a whole life as it were a dream… during his time in a coma he imagines he has a girlfriend who turns into his wife, and he imagines raising a family. Now how is John supposed to know he is in a coma? With no amount of questioning himself could he expect to discover that his world is not real but he is in fact in a perpetual dream… However, does that mean that Tracy, the one who is not under a delusion, needs to question herself to make sure she is not also in a coma? She also could never find out the answer no matter how much questioning she did. Now, and this is the question I would like you to answer directly. What objective test can you give such that John and Tracy will be able to tell whether or not they are truly experiencing reality or are in a sort of a dream? Are you aware that on your own view that people cannot even know if anything they ever experience is real? They cannot have any objectively verifiable reason to think they do have children, a wife, a career, a home, anything at all. They have an experience of life but there is no reason to think it is any more real than a dream.
Personally, on my view, just because something cannot be proven or objectively verified, it doesn't make it irrational to trust it. It seems to me that on your view that if some experience cannot be objectively verified such that we have some objective test to verify it, then it is irrational to believe. Do you agree? If so, it seems that everything you ever do is irrational as it relies on an irrational belief that anything we experience is real. If not, you don't seem anymore to have a principle of which to condemn justified belief in God based on experience.
Please address point #1 as I see it as the strongest.
How could it possibly be irrelevant? If Bob is suffering due to a choice he made, and it was entirely within his power to not make that choice, then the only reason Bob is suffering is because he chooses to do so. Right? So where is the injustice here?
Because I am not accusing god of being morally responsible for that suffering. I'm saying that god has a higher hurdle than that. God knows what Bob will choose, and so god doesn't have to create the universe such that Bob will face that situation and make that choice. God could just as well create a universe in which Bob's set of options will be different, and Bob will choose something that results in less suffering.
Imagine that god had given us all a magical suffering gun, that we could shoot at other people to make them suffer. It's not god's fault if we decide to use it. We bear the moral responsibility if we shoot it. But god, being omnibenevolent, should still choose not to give it to us, because he knows that the universe in which the magical suffering gun doesn't exist is going to have way less suffering than the one in which it does.
Your aim is to demonstrate God is behaving unjustly, yes? That is the purpose to this conversation?
So connect the dots. Exactly how is God being unjust here?
No, that is not my aim.
If I am choosing to beat my fists bloody against a wall, I cannot blame the person who created the wall. Nor can I blame the wall. I am choosing to do the thing that brings me pain and physical harm. It is entirely within my power to not beat my fists against a wall, but I am choosing to. Thus, the fact that I am experience excruciating amounts of pain doing it is not anyone's fault but my own. Nor can I, in accordance with your logic, blame God for the brittleness of the bones in my hands, my pain receptors, or the fact that walls are so hard. God is not forcing me to beat my hands against a wall, I am choosing to do so, and the fault is my own.
The question is not whether god is to blame, or who is at fault. That has nothing to do with the argument I'm making. I am not trying to blame god for the choices of people. Instead I'm simply saying that god, if he is omnibenevolent, must choose the mots benevolent universe. Certainly a universe in which someone spends their life in absolute misery because they won't stop beating their hands against a wall is less benevolent than one in which that person gets to wear padded gloves. In the padded glove version, there is less suffering, and a benevolent being would prefer that option.
If you leave a heroin needle next to your druggie friend, you know what he's going to do. It's still ultimately his choice and his fault. But you still wouldn't do it, because you don't want bad things to happen to your friend, even if they're his own fault.
Indeed, the excruciating pain I'm experiencing is actually a fantastic thing because it's an indicator that my body is damaged, and in most people, is usually an indicator to stop further damage. The fact that I'm knowingly choosing not to do that is no one's fault but my own.
I'm confused. I thought there was no necessary suffering?
Depends. If it's arbitrary, then probably, because as I said before, cruelty is wrong.
Tiax, it seems to me that this is your objection to my view… that it would entail that Bob ends up believing an experience is from God, but is actually not from God. He does this because my view of justification would intail that justified belief is held by people with false beliefs who have, as it were, no way out of this epistemic situation. And on your view, you would say, that Bob would not be so stuck in this epistemic situation.
However, I see a number of possible holes in this objection. I would point out two things.
1. Perhaps if Bob is a rational person, he won't actually end up in this situation… or at least stay in it. If the experience was not truly from God it wouldn't actually be strong enough to justify belief. It would be something like Bob has experienced in other times in his life when he was not in a place of faith in God and it seemed to have either no connection or little connection to things which the religious text he adheres to. If the experience was not truly from God, Bob would probably realize in other areas of his life that he is overly gullible and over-interprets experiences. In such a case, he will naturally slip into less confidence about his experience and will realize that this experience could be his own imagination. If Bob really believes that he has a clear experience of God and actually has not, then he must have significant other problems that would tip him off to this fact.
In this instance, Bob is not following your method. He is doubting his experience. What you are proposing is exactly my method - that Bob should critically examine whether his experience is really a valid way of determining truth. He will then conclude that it must not be, because if it were, various other experiences would also be indicators of truth, when he knows them to not be. Remember, Bob is not allowed to doubt his experience. Please provide a method in which he does not do that.
2. There are many difficult scenarios that life leaves us in and it doesn't follow that we need to change our rational way of living to avoid all possible error. We may find that there is no way to prove that the external world is not just our imagination. We could be in the matrix and not know it, we could be dreaming in a higher sort of dream and not know it.
Consider another possible scenario, and I wool dike an answer to this the same way you wanted me to answer your question…
Two people experience life… one (John) is delusional, and the other (Tracy) is not. John is in a coma but he still has brain activity. Imagine John experiences a whole life as it were a dream… during his time in a coma he imagines he has a girlfriend who turns into his wife, and he imagines raising a family. Now how is John supposed to know he is in a coma? With no amount of questioning himself could he expect to discover that his world is not real but he is in fact in a perpetual dream… However, does that mean that Tracy, the one who is not under a delusion, needs to question herself to make sure she is not also in a coma? She also could never find out the answer no matter how much questioning she did. Now, and this is the question I would like you to answer directly. What objective test can you give such that John and Tracy will be able to tell whether or not they are truly experiencing reality or are in a sort of a dream? Are you aware that on your own view that people cannot even know if anything they ever experience is real? They cannot have any objectively verifiable reason to think they do have children, a wife, a career, a home, anything at all. They have an experience of life but there is no reason to think it is any more real than a dream.
Personally, on my view, just because something cannot be proven or objectively verified, it doesn't make it irrational to trust it. It seems to me that on your view that if some experience cannot be objectively verified such that we have some objective test to verify it, then it is irrational to believe. Do you agree? If so, it seems that everything you ever do is irrational as it relies on an irrational belief that anything we experience is real. If not, you don't seem anymore to have a principle of which to condemn justified belief in God based on experience.
Please address point #1 as I see it as the strongest.
I am not sure I understand the analogy here. In the case of a profound religious experience, we were being asked to evaluate the strength of that experience as evidence for another proposition - that god exists. In this instance, I'm not sure what the corresponding experience and proposition is. If the corresponding experience is "the totality of all your experiences" and the proposition is "you are living in a perfectly realistic dream", then there is not much of question. We have only ever experienced one giant piece of evidence, and we have nothing to compare it to. John and Tracy should therefore both believe that they have no meaningful evidence one way or the other. Neither John nor Tracy is justified in believing they have any evidence which demonstrates that they are or are not in a dream.
Because I am not accusing god of being morally responsible for that suffering. I'm saying that god has a higher hurdle than that. God knows what Bob will choose, and so god doesn't have to create the universe such that Bob will face that situation and make that choice. God could just as well create a universe in which Bob's set of options will be different, and Bob will choose something that results in less suffering.
Ok, yes. Your point?
Imagine that god had given us all a magical suffering gun, that we could shoot at other people to make them suffer.
We have those. They're called actual guns.
It's not god's fault if we decide to use it. We bear the moral responsibility if we shoot it. But god, being omnibenevolent, should still choose not to give it to us, because he knows that the universe in which the magical suffering gun doesn't exist is going to have way less suffering than the one in which it does.
Why stop there? God could prevent us from making anyone cause any suffering to anyone else for any reason. Goodness knows we have more ways of doing it than imaginary weaponry.
I'm not disagreeing that there's any instance of suffering that God could make not happen. As I said before, God can create a zero suffering universe.
No, that is not my aim.
What is your aim?
The question is not whether god is to blame, or who is at fault. That has nothing to do with the argument I'm making. I am not trying to blame god for the choices of people. Instead I'm simply saying that god, if he is omnibenevolent, must choose the mots benevolent universe. Certainly a universe in which someone spends their life in absolute misery because they won't stop beating their hands against a wall is less benevolent than one in which that person gets to wear padded gloves.
Except I could choose to wear such gloves. I'm not doing so.
In the padded glove version, there is less suffering, and a benevolent being would prefer that option.
I'm sure he would prefer it, but I don't see the fact that such an option is not what comes to pass as a strike against the benevolent being.
If you leave a heroin needle next to your druggie friend, you know what he's going to do. It's still ultimately his choice and his fault. But you still wouldn't do it, because you don't want bad things to happen to your friend, even if they're his own fault.
That's not analogous. In the heroin needle example, you are going out of your way to cause your friend harm.
I'm confused. I thought there was no necessary suffering?
There isn't.
What does it depend on?
It depends on what "God increases your suffering" means exactly. How and in what way has my suffering increased?
If God is being openly cruel, then that clearly indicates that he's not being benevolent, yes.
But simply increasing suffering doesn't necessarily indicate cruelty. Suffering is not an inherently bad, or even inherently undesirable, thing, which is why I completely disagree with the metric you're attempting to use. Again, you have to look at WHY the person is suffering.
My point is: Benevolence is the care for the well-being of others. Suffering is not a state of well-being. God has the power to select from many universes to create. If he is omnibenevolent, he should select the one with the most well-being. I am willing to entertain the notion that in some cases a small amount of suffering may lead to a greater amount of well-being, and therefore the optimal universe may have more than zero suffering. However, it should not the be case that any suffering can be removed from the universe without greater negative consequence.
Why stop there? God could prevent us from making anyone cause any suffering to anyone else for any reason. Goodness knows we have more ways of doing it than imaginary weaponry.
I'm not disagreeing that there's any instance of suffering that God could make not happen. As I said before, God can create a zero suffering universe.
Yes, but a zero suffering universe may also turn out to be a zero good universe, in which nothing actually happens. An empty universe is certainly a zero suffering universe, but it would be worse than a universe in which lots of beings experience a high degree of well-being.
What is your aim?
My aim is to argue that the universe we observe seems very unlikely to be the single universe, out of all possible universes, that an omnibenevolent being would most like to create.
Except I could choose to wear such gloves. I'm not doing so.
I don't see how this is any sort of rebuttal. God selected to create a universe in which you will not choose to wear the gloves.
I'm sure he would prefer it, but I don't see the fact that such an option is not what comes to pass as a strike against the benevolent being.
If he would prefer it, then he would have created it. Note that I am not suggesting that god needs to take away free will and make our choices for us. However, he does not need to present us with choices in which one option will result in great suffering, especially when he knows that we will pick that option.
Yes. That would be a cruel, or at least misguided, thing to do.
And yet, god does exactly that. He selects to create a universe in which we are presented with many opportunities to inflict suffering on ourselves and others, and furthermore populates that universe with beings who he knows will select to do just that.
There isn't.
But you suggest that the suffering of hitting your fist against a wall is actually a necessary benefit, because it will allow you to stop doing it.
[quote]Depends. If it's arbitrary, then probably, because as I said before, cruelty is wrong.
It depends on what "God increases your suffering" means exactly. How and in what way has my suffering increased?
If God is being openly cruel, then that clearly indicates that he's not being benevolent, yes.
But simply increasing suffering doesn't necessarily indicate cruelty. Suffering is not an inherently bad, or even inherently undesirable, thing, which is why I completely disagree with the metric you're attempting to use. Again, you have to look at WHY the person is suffering.
In this hypothetical, god selects a manner in which you are already suffering and makes that suffering more intense. He has no particular motivation for doing so - the choice is entirely arbitrary. He does not do it because you will receive some greater reward or benefit as a result, nor does he do it because he enjoys seeing suffer. There are no external consequences to this additional suffering.
Is this an action that is compatible with an omnibenevolent god?
However, it should not the be case that any suffering can be removed from the universe without greater negative consequence.
And I don't buy that.
Yes, but a zero suffering universe may also turn out to be a zero good universe, in which nothing actually happens. An empty universe is certainly a zero suffering universe, but it would be worse than a universe in which lots of beings experience a high degree of well-being.
On what measure is it worse?
And to clarify, I agree it's worse, but WHY is it worse?
I don't see how this is any sort of rebuttal. God selected to create a universe in which you will not choose to wear the gloves.
And I don't see how that is any sort of rebuttal.
*I* selected to create a universe in which I would not wear the gloves, because I had a choice, and I chose to not wear them. Thus, I am responsible for my own suffering.
If he would prefer it, then he would have created it.
That doesn't logically follow.
Note that I am not suggesting that god needs to take away free will and make our choices for us.
That actually sounds exactly like what you're saying he should be doing.
However, he does not need to present us with choices in which one option will result in great suffering, especially when he knows that we will pick that option.
Except that totally contradicts your own logic. By your logic, God should not allow any choice besides that which is the most optimal. If God allows any other choice, that is by your argument wrong, because it allows unnecessary suffering. So by your own reasoning, God must remove all choices save the most optimal one.
And yet, god does exactly that.
No he doesn't. There is literally no reason for that heroin needle to be there other than you deliberately creating a situation in which harm would be dealt to your friend in a cruel hypothetical. You were acting out of cruelty and nothing else.
He selects to create a universe in which we are presented with many opportunities to inflict suffering on ourselves and others, and furthermore populates that universe with beings who he knows will select to do just that.
Yes, he does. So?
But you suggest that the suffering of hitting your fist against a wall is actually a necessary benefit, because it will allow you to stop doing it.
What? When did I use the word "necessary" in that paragraph?
In this hypothetical, god selects a manner in which you are already suffering and makes that suffering more intense.
What is that method of suffering? How am I suffering, and what do you mean when you say God is amplifying it?
Again, Tiax, you are focusing merely on suffering, which is where you're getting lost. You have to pay attention to why people suffer.
He has no particular motivation for doing so - the choice is entirely arbitrary. He does not do it because you will receive some greater reward or benefit as a result, nor does he do it because he enjoys seeing suffer. There are no external consequences to this additional suffering.
That's really random and very un-God-like, but it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Is this an action that is compatible with an omnibenevolent god?
It's certainly unlike God because it's capricious and indifferent, and a capricious, indifferent God is different from an omnibenevolent one, yes.
But again, what is incompatible is the capriciousness, not necessarily the act itself. If God deliberately increased the amount of suffering I am feeling, and did so purposefully, not just arbitrarily, I would not argue that inherently in and of itself means he is not omnibenevolent. It would depend on what sort of suffering, exactly, we are talking about.
Just to avoid the clutter, I'm not going to go sentence-by-sentence. If you feel I've skipped something important, let me know.
You say that you disagree that suffering is not a state of well-being. Well-being is defined as "the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy." A person who is suffering is not these things. This seems pretty cut and dry to me. Can you give an example of someone who is suffering but is in a state of well-being?
I don't understand why you feel that "if he preferred it, he would have created it" does not logically follow. What reason could god have for not creating it that does not imply he prefers an alternative? Why would god act against his own wishes?
On the question of free will, god is quite welcome to allow us any number of options that may lead to different outcomes, so long as some of those outcomes are not worthless suffering. Even if all options lead to the same amount of well-being, that does not constitute a removal of free will. All of my options lead to the same amount of omnipotence for me (not omnipotent) but that fact does not mean I lack free will.
When god elects to create a universe full of suffering-causing options, and populates it with beings who he knows will choose those options, he is choosing to create a universe with much less well-being than alternatives. This is by definition not omnibenevolent.
You feel, however, that there are instances where god can choose to increase the amount of suffering you are feeling and still be omnibenevolent. Can you give an example of that?
You say that you disagree that suffering is not a state of well-being. Well-being is defined as "the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy." A person who is suffering is not these things. This seems pretty cut and dry to me.
Either your definition is faulty, or you have established "well-being" as something not inherently desirable over suffering, and thus the answer is no, a benevolent being would not necessarily wish this over suffering for a person.
It really boils down to how you define "happiness." That is to say if we define "happiness" as contentment, or happiness as something akin to Eudaimonia.
The primary problem I have is in lumping comfort with happiness. They do not mean the same thing, and often times one can be unhappy because of a preoccupation with comfort.
Can you give an example of someone who is suffering but is in a state of well-being?
Sure, a person who just achieved great victory despite extreme physical or mental exertion.
Or how about the person who endures great suffering for a cause he believes in? He may be in great pain, or have suffered great injury, but he does not resent his suffering, but still look upon his suffering as a source of pride.
Or how about the people who voluntarily choose to give up their well-being and enter danger in order to promote the well-being of others? Or people who willingly sacrifice their well-being for a cause that they believe in?
I don't understand why you feel that "if he preferred it, he would have created it" does not logically follow.
Those two phrases do not mean the same thing. Preferring something is not the same thing as creating something. Ergo, one does not equate to the other unless you demonstrate why one necessarily follows from the other.
What reason could god have for not creating it that does not imply he prefers an alternative? Why would god act against his own wishes?
God may prioritize allowing us to choose our own choices over stopping us from choosing destructive ones.
On the question of free will, god is quite welcome to allow us any number of options that may lead to different outcomes, so long as some of those outcomes are not worthless suffering. Even if all options lead to the same amount of well-being, that does not constitute a removal of free will. All of my options lead to the same amount of omnipotence for me (not omnipotent) but that fact does not mean I lack free will.
Well first of all, that contradicts what you have been saying. There must necessarily be one choice that leads to the most good, and therefore God, according to your logic, must needs make it so we choose that one, as any other choice would be less good and therefore not optimally good, which would invalidate God's omnibenevolence. Ergo, God allowing choice is not omnibenevolent.
But secondly, WHY must God not allow worthless suffering? You have not demonstrated this.
When god elects to create a universe full of suffering-causing options, and populates it with beings who he knows will choose those options, he is choosing to create a universe with much less well-being than alternatives. This is by definition not omnibenevolent.
And you have yet to actually demonstrate this.
You seem to keep repeating variations on a theme of "God allows there to be more suffering than there needs to be" as though it is somehow some "Eureka!" moment instead of just a repetition on something we've already established. As I've said before, I don't believe any suffering is necessary, and I believe all suffering is preventable. So yes, I'm completely comfortable with saying that God allows people to suffer. That's kind of the point of Christianity. Nor do I view this as in any way in conflict with God's omnibenevolence.
You feel, however, that there are instances where god can choose to increase the amount of suffering you are feeling and still be omnibenevolent. Can you give an example of that?
Certainly. I believe that suffering is caused by our attachments to that which is temporary. As such, I believe our attachments to people are sources of suffering. When we become attached to someone, we are opening ourselves up for suffering.
In fact, do you know the etymology behind the word "compassion?" It comes from Latin. "Com-" means together. "Pati" means to suffer. To feel compassion means to suffer with another person.
Yet I do not believe that the amount of concern, or compassion, or passion I feel for someone is something I wish to diminish. God could make me find someone to care about, or increase my caring for a person I already care about to a greater degree, and that will increase my suffering.
Of course, again, in this scenario we see the same problem as in anything you've posted on the subject: you're looking at this purely in terms of how much suffering there is or isn't, as opposed to what suffering is, why it exists, or what it means. As such, yes, in this scenario I would hesitate to call God benevolent because if God is just acting out of a desire to "cause someone more suffering," like he's someone with a Suffer-O-Meter turning the numbers up or down, then what he's doing in that sense is not benevolent. It's God acting peculiar as he often seems to do in Tiax hypotheticals.
But if God is being benevolent, and suffering results, that does not diminish his benevolence. God can be benevolent and still cause suffering. God can be benevolent because he causes suffering. Thus, "total amount of suffering in the universe" is not a valid metric for God's benevolence. It's not totally irrelevant, because again, if God were demonstrated to be openly cruel, that would disprove God's omnibenevolence outright, but I disagree with this idea that God cannot set up a world with unnecessary suffering. There is no necessary suffering. That doesn't mean suffering is undesirable.
Either your definition is faulty, or you have established "well-being" as something not inherently desirable over suffering, and thus the answer is no, a benevolent being would not necessarily wish this over suffering for a person.
It really boils down to how you define "happiness." That is to say if we define "happiness" as contentment, or happiness as something akin to Eudaimonia.
The primary problem I have is in lumping comfort with happiness. They do not mean the same thing, and often times one can be unhappy because of a preoccupation with comfort.
I mean...this is just the dictionary definition of well-being. Would you prefer to give your own definition of benevolence, so that we're on the same page?
Sure, a person who just achieved great victory despite extreme physical or mental exertion.
Or how about the person who endures great suffering for a cause he believes in? He may be in great pain, or have suffered great injury, but he does not resent his suffering, but still look upon his suffering as a source of pride.
Or how about the people who voluntarily choose to give up their well-being and enter danger in order to promote the well-being of others? Or people who willingly sacrifice their well-being for a cause that they believe in?
In all of these examples, the person's suffering is being offset by a gain in some other area of well-being. Can you provide an example in which the suffering itself is the state of well-being?
Those two phrases do not mean the same thing. Preferring something is not the same thing as creating something. Ergo, one does not equate to the other unless you demonstrate why one necessarily follows from the other.
God has the power to create anything he desires. He will therefore choose to create his preferred option, because that is what preference means.
God may prioritize allowing us to choose our own choices over stopping us from choosing destructive ones.
This is not the choice god is presented with it. God can allow us to make choices without having some of those options be destructive.
Well first of all, that contradicts what you have been saying. There must necessarily be one choice that leads to the most good, and therefore God, according to your logic, must needs make it so we choose that one, as any other choice would be less good and therefore not optimally good, which would invalidate God's omnibenevolence. Ergo, God allowing choice is not omnibenevolent.
Why can two options not result in the same amount of good?
But secondly, WHY must God not allow worthless suffering? You have not demonstrated this.
I've clearly answered this many times.
And you have yet to actually demonstrate this.
You seem to keep repeating variations on a theme of "God allows there to be more suffering than there needs to be" as though it is somehow some "Eureka!" moment instead of just a repetition on something we've already established. As I've said before, I don't believe any suffering is necessary, and I believe all suffering is preventable. So yes, I'm completely comfortable with saying that God allows people to suffer. That's kind of the point of Christianity. Nor do I view this as in any way in conflict with God's omnibenevolence.
I keep repeating variations of a theme because I'm trying to explain myself, and you keep throwing up objections that don't contradict my point, which leads me to believe you have not grasped it, and therefore I try to explain it again in a different way.
Certainly. I believe that suffering is caused by our attachments to that which is temporary. As such, I believe our attachments to people are sources of suffering. When we become attached to someone, we are opening ourselves up for suffering.
In fact, do you know the etymology behind the word "compassion?" It comes from Latin. "Com-" means together. "Pati" means to suffer. To feel compassion means to suffer with another person.
Yet I do not believe that the amount of concern, or compassion, or passion I feel for someone is something I wish to diminish. God could make me find someone to care about, or increase my caring for a person I already care about to a greater degree, and that will increase my suffering.
Does god have the power to make attachments not cause suffering? Can god increase attachment without increasing suffering? Can god increase suffering without increasing attachment?
Of course, again, in this scenario we see the same problem as in anything you've posted on the subject: you're looking at this purely in terms of how much suffering there is or isn't, as opposed to what suffering is, why it exists, or what it means. As such, yes, in this scenario I would hesitate to call God benevolent because if God is just acting out of a desire to "cause someone more suffering," like he's someone with a Suffer-O-Meter turning the numbers up or down, then what he's doing in that sense is not benevolent. It's God acting peculiar as he often seems to do in Tiax hypotheticals.
But if God is being benevolent, and suffering results, that does not diminish his benevolence. God can be benevolent and still cause suffering. God can be benevolent because he causes suffering. Thus, "total amount of suffering in the universe" is not a valid metric for God's benevolence. It's not totally irrelevant, because again, if God were demonstrated to be openly cruel, that would disprove God's omnibenevolence outright, but I disagree with this idea that God cannot set up a world with unnecessary suffering. There is no necessary suffering. That doesn't mean suffering is undesirable.
I still don't think I'm making myself clear. You keep characterizing my point as looking at the total amount of suffering, which isn't it. I've said this many times, and in pretty plain language. I don't understand why you still think that's my point.
Let's consider the idea of desirability of suffering. Can there be undesirable suffering? What determines whether suffering is desirable or undesirable?
2. There are many difficult scenarios that life leaves us in and it doesn't follow that we need to change our rational way of living to avoid all possible error. We may find that there is no way to prove that the external world is not just our imagination. We could be in the matrix and not know it, we could be dreaming in a higher sort of dream and not know it.
Consider another possible scenario, and I wool dike an answer to this the same way you wanted me to answer your question…
Two people experience life… one (John) is delusional, and the other (Tracy) is not. John is in a coma but he still has brain activity. Imagine John experiences a whole life as it were a dream… during his time in a coma he imagines he has a girlfriend who turns into his wife, and he imagines raising a family. Now how is John supposed to know he is in a coma? With no amount of questioning himself could he expect to discover that his world is not real but he is in fact in a perpetual dream… However, does that mean that Tracy, the one who is not under a delusion, needs to question herself to make sure she is not also in a coma? She also could never find out the answer no matter how much questioning she did. Now, and this is the question I would like you to answer directly. What objective test can you give such that John and Tracy will be able to tell whether or not they are truly experiencing reality or are in a sort of a dream? Are you aware that on your own view that people cannot even know if anything they ever experience is real? They cannot have any objectively verifiable reason to think they do have children, a wife, a career, a home, anything at all. They have an experience of life but there is no reason to think it is any more real than a dream.
Personally, on my view, just because something cannot be proven or objectively verified, it doesn't make it irrational to trust it. It seems to me that on your view that if some experience cannot be objectively verified such that we have some objective test to verify it, then it is irrational to believe. Do you agree? If so, it seems that everything you ever do is irrational as it relies on an irrational belief that anything we experience is real. If not, you don't seem anymore to have a principle of which to condemn justified belief in God based on experience.
No experience is completely reliable - as you point out, the possibility that we are in a perfectly realistic dream always exists. However, this does not mean that all experiences are equally unreliable. I have already contrasted the reliability of religious experiences with that of everyday sensory experiences. Several times, in fact:
I anticipated and addressed this objection: "All experiences are ultimately subjective; that's not the problem per se. We build our picture of objective reality by seeing if other people all report the same experience under the same circumstances. Everybody who looks at the sun says that it's bright, and everybody who stands in the sun reports that it feels warmer than the shade, so we may conclude that the sun is objectively bright and hot. But when we examine reports of spiritual experiences, we find no such consensus."
Now, we interpret our everyday sensory experiences as representative of objective reality because we have learned that they are generally reliable (except under specific circumstances, such as being in a movie theater). And we interpret other experiences, such as dreams, as subjective and untruthful because we have learned that they are unreliable. We have also learned that religious experiences are unreliable.
Finally, your argument is counterproductive to your goal. You want to prove that your belief in your religious experience is rational, but if we accept your argument, you've proven that it's irrational to believe any experience, religious experiences included. All you say in defense of your belief is "Personally, on my view, just because something cannot be proven or objectively verified, it doesn't make it irrational to trust it", but you say nothing to persuade us that this is the case, and quite a bit to persuade us that it is not the case. You've basically echoed Descartes' skeptical argument, which has been a serious obstacle in Western epistemology for almost five hundred years (and the Chinese have been aware of it for much longer). "In my personal opinion, this isn't the way it works" will not go down in history as the great rebuttal to the Cartesian problem. Philosophy demands a little bit more.
In this instance, Bob is not following your method. He is doubting his experience. What you are proposing is exactly my method - that Bob should critically examine whether his experience is really a valid way of determining truth. He will then conclude that it must not be, because if it were, various other experiences would also be indicators of truth, when he knows them to not be. Remember, Bob is not allowed to doubt his experience. Please provide a method in which he does not do that.
I didn't say Bob should not doubt his experience. I said that if someone had a true experience of God that was clear, it would be irrational to think one can have an objective test to find out whether or not it was from God, and to doubt what is already been made evident to the person would be irrational and might be not trusting to God.
However this is not the scenario you proposed. You said that there was a person who did not have an experience from God but believed he did. And my response was that Bob won't need to question his experience simply because it is a religious one. The foundation of confidence in his experience would be shaken because Bob would discover he tends to believe things for bad reasons by his life regardless of his faith. He would not embark on questioning his experience in God first. He would realize he believes things for faulty reasons and therefore his grounds for believing based on this experience would be undercut.
I am not sure I understand the analogy here. In the case of a profound religious experience, we were being asked to evaluate the strength of that experience as evidence for another proposition - that god exists. In this instance, I'm not sure what the corresponding experience and proposition is. If the corresponding experience is "the totality of all your experiences" and the proposition is "you are living in a perfectly realistic dream", then there is not much of question. We have only ever experienced one giant piece of evidence, and we have nothing to compare it to. John and Tracy should therefore both believe that they have no meaningful evidence one way or the other. Neither John nor Tracy is justified in believing they have any evidence which demonstrates that they are or are not in a dream.
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So then, is John irrational to believe that anything he ever does is real? John, then, is not even rational to believe that Barack Obama is the President of the United States, that he has a wife, that he had potatoes for breakfast this morning. Consider another example… say we assume the world is real or say we even assume this is some kind of a dream. Think of what you had to eat for breakfast this morning. Now, all you have of this morning is a memory of eating breakfast. For all you know the world popped into existence five minutes ago with the appearance of age and memories of things that never happened. Another possibility is that highly advanced aliens implanted some false memories into your brain.
Given this possibility, are you rational to believe that you ate cereal (or whatever you had) for breakfast this morning? Perhaps the past popped into existence five minutes ago or aliens implanted a false memory in your brain? It seems obvious that you are. However, there is actually no objective test by which you can determine that these things happened. There actually isn't any evidence either. The memory of breakfast would appear the same whether or not the world popped into being just now with an appearance of age, or whether aliens implanted a memory in your brain.
It seems like this principle (that we must have objective tests to apply to beliefs based on experience) would entail that we are not rational to accept the most simple and obviously rational thing such as that you ate cereal for breakfast this morning.I gave the example because it doesn't question the whole of our existence (something you objected to with the dream example), but only one part… your eating breakfast this morning.
I am actually not saying we know with certainty that the world is real or that you did eat cereal this morning. What I am saying is that we are rationally justified in acting as if this world is real… even if we cannot prove we are not dreaming… even if we don't know that we are not dreaming. Likewise, say that with religious experience we don't know with certainty that it is real. Perhaps, like our not being in a dream, we are incapable of knowing that we are not under a delusion. However, that doesn't mean, just as with believing you ate cereal this morning, we aren't rationally justified in taking the experience as if it were real. So it seems that to condemn belief based solely on religious experience because it cannot be objectively verified would also condemn even the most fundamental beliefs of all of our life. Even if those beliefs are such as, "we have had this experience, we cannot know it is real, but we take it as real, and act like it is." This is what you seem to think we do with our most important beliefs such as that there is a past… and you are rationally justified to do so. And if you accept this I see no more rational basis to condemn a religious belief that is also founded on experience.
Someone else gave me a long response for my second to last post and I am going to reply to them next.
I didn't say Bob should not doubt his experience. I said that if someone had a true experience of God that was clear, it would be irrational to think one can have an objective test to find out whether or not it was from God, and to doubt what is already been made evident to the person would be irrational and might be not trusting to God.
However this is not the scenario you proposed. You said that there was a person who did not have an experience from God but believed he did. And my response was that Bob won't need to question his experience simply because it is a religious one. The foundation of confidence in his experience would be shaken because Bob would discover he tends to believe things for bad reasons by his life regardless of his faith. He would not embark on questioning his experience in God first. He would realize he believes things for faulty reasons and therefore his grounds for believing based on this experience would be undercut.
This is putting the cart before the horse. Before examining his experience, Bob does not know whether it was genuine or not. Nor does Alice. They must therefore be able to apply the same method of examination.
So then, is John irrational to believe that anything he ever does is real? John, then, is not even rational to believe that Barack Obama is the President of the United States, that he has a wife, that he had potatoes for breakfast this morning. Consider another example… say we assume the world is real or say we even assume this is some kind of a dream. Think of what you had to eat for breakfast this morning. Now, all you have of this morning is a memory of eating breakfast. For all you know the world popped into existence five minutes ago with the appearance of age and memories of things that never happened. Another possibility is that highly advanced aliens implanted some false memories into your brain.
John is irrational to believe that he has absolute proof of these things.
Given this possibility, are you rational to believe that you ate cereal (or whatever you had) for breakfast this morning? Perhaps the past popped into existence five minutes ago or aliens implanted a false memory in your brain? It seems obvious that you are. However, there is actually no objective test by which you can determine that these things happened. There actually isn't any evidence either. The memory of breakfast would appear the same whether or not the world popped into being just now with an appearance of age, or whether aliens implanted a memory in your brain.
It seems like this principle (that we must have objective tests to apply to beliefs based on experience) would entail that we are not rational to accept the most simple and obviously rational thing such as that you ate cereal for breakfast this morning. I gave the example because it doesn't question the whole of our existence (something you objected to with the dream example), but only one part… your eating breakfast this morning.
So this is perhaps a better example. We are now asked "does my memory of what I ate for breakfast this morning count as strong evidence about the events of this morning?". The answer is yes - whenever I have memories of eating cereal, I find that I have an empty cereal bowl in the sink, I find that I am not hungry, I find that I have a little less cereal in the box than I had the day before. Further, other peoples' memories of the morning match mine. If I eat breakfast with someone, with both remember that I had the same thing. So, we should conclude that memories of what I ate for breakfast are very reliable evidence.
But what about the possibility that all memories are fake? Well, now we're back to square one. That doesn't just undermine the "what I ate for breakfast" memory, it undermines all possible forms of evidence. We therefore must have at least a low level of doubt about any conclusion we draw.
Compare this, however, to the case in which only some memories of breakfast are false. Some people have legitimate memories of breakfast, some people have false memories of breakfast. In this world, should people trust their memories of breakfast? Clearly not. They must find other methods to confirm what they had for breakfast.
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I am actually not saying we know with certainty that the world is real or that you did eat cereal this morning. What I am saying is that we are rationally justified in acting as if this world is real… even if we cannot prove we are not dreaming… even if we don't know that we are not dreaming. Likewise, say that with religious experience we don't know with certainty that it is real. Perhaps, like our not being in a dream, we are incapable of knowing that we are not under a delusion. However, that doesn't mean, just as with believing you ate cereal this morning, we aren't rationally justified in taking the experience as if it were real. So it seems that to condemn belief based solely on religious experience because it cannot be objectively verified would also condemn even the most fundamental beliefs of all of our life. Even if those beliefs are such as, "we have had this experience, we cannot know it is real, but we take it as real, and act like it is." This is what you seem to think we do with our most important beliefs such as that there is a past… and you are rationally justified to do so. And if you accept this I see no more rational basis to condemn a religious belief that is also founded on experience.
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There are a couple of differences here:
-Whether we are in a dream or in a fabricated memory is completely unknowable. The world will look exactly the same in either case. In the case of god, we have before us a claimed piece of evidence which would not exist if god did not exist.
-Regardless of whether we are in a dream or in a fabricated memory, we will act the same. The world will appear exactly the same, all of our actions will have exactly the same result, so there is no reason to worry about whether we are in these scenarios. We are quite free to say that we have absolutely no idea whether we are in a dream, and carry on with our lives exactly the same as the person who says that they are certain we are not in a dream. So, we are only rationally justified in deciding we are living in reality because it makes no difference and there is no way we could tell anyway.
I know I'm jumping into this thread a little under read and uninformed, but one thing that's always irked me about arguments for a deity is the logic gap of "If God can be assumed, or at least not disproved, then my interpretation of that deity is true."
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If by "real" you mean "true", you are again begging the question. How do you know it's real? You only know it's real-seeming. But unambiguous and real-seeming experiences may well be false. The movie Gravity is utterly immersive, but we know that nothing on screen actually happened. It would be irrational of you to believe what you see in Gravity, because you know that the things people see in movie theaters are generally not true. The medium is unreliable. So by the same token, you know that the things people interpret from religious experiences are generally not true - they have to be, because they are mutually incompatible - therefore it is irrational of you to uncritically accept your own religious experience.
There are a few problems with this. First, she hasn't "already seen [God] is actually real". That is impossible. Nobody ever apprehends objective reality directly. You, right now, are not seeing that these words on your screen are actually real. You are having an experience of seeing words, which you must then decide how to interpret. Now, we interpret our everyday sensory experiences as representative of objective reality because we have learned that they are generally reliable (except under specific circumstances, such as being in a movie theater). And we interpret other experiences, such as dreams, as subjective and untruthful because we have learned that they are unreliable. We have also learned that religious experiences are unreliable.
Now, it is possible that in fact she had this experience because God exists and he decided to give it to her. But it is also possible that she had this experience for some other reason. Even if we hypothesize that in this case the experience is truly from God, she is not privy to our hypothesizing; as far as she knows, it could be a true experience or a false one. We know that if she accepts the experience uncritically then it's the truth she'll be believing, because we have already decided in this scenario what the truth really is. She has no such assurance. If somebody asks her, "How do you know you're not worshiping a false idol?", she will have no answer - just as you don't. All she knows is that (a) she had a religious experience and (b) most if not all religious experiences are unreliable. It is irrational of her to believe her religious experience just as it would be irrational of her to believe a dream or a movie.
Yes. I thought it might be helpful to remind you that there's nothing necessarily un-Christian about rejecting demands to take things on faith.
I'm afraid you are misinterpreting Descartes, and that he's emphatically not on your side here. In fact, my own argument is archetypical of the Cartesian method: doubt everything, even your direct experiences. Descartes does conclude that it's irrational to doubt your own existence, but he doesn't merely claim it's irrational or feel it's irrational. He has clear and specific logical reasons why it's irrational: To doubt the proposition "I exist" is to entertain the its negation "I do not exist". But "I do not exist" contradicts itself, because to truthfully say "I" there must exist an I, and a contradiction is necessarily false. Therefore, "I exist" is necessarily true.
In short, Descartes absolutely did question his existence, and was not satisfied until he found a sound justification for it. This is exactly what you're claiming you don't have to do. He did the work; you're trying to get out of it. An experience doesn't become "irrational to doubt" just because it feels really really clear to you - again, we sometimes have very clear experiences that are false, and this fact is the driving force behind Descartes' skepticism as well as mine. Our own existence is "irrational to doubt" because you we follow the logic of the argument that we must necessarily exist. To make your religious experience "irrational to doubt" by Descartes' standard, you must produce a similarly airtight deductive argument - it must be somehow self-contradictory for your experience to be false. If you cannot produce such an argument, you absolutely ought to doubt. (And we know for a fact that it is not self-contradictory for a religious experience to be false, because lots of religious experiences actually are.)
You are the one who defined questioning your experience as "doubt" and called it sinful.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I will preface this with a disclaimer that I have neither the degree certification, the knowledge, or the necessary hours of patient interaction necessary to deal with psychological issues.
That said, if Bob is sad because he's alone, and Bob does not seek out relationships, then yes, it does appear that Bob is indeed working against himself.
No, you're most definitely not, because I'm disagreeing with the blanket statement that "Suffering is bad."
But the suffering here is caused by the failure to succeed at something. There is still an action (or a choice to take no action) which results in suffering.
God could have designed the universe such that one does not need to seek out relationships in order to have them. God could have designed beings for whom loneliness is not suffering. God could have designed beings which cannot be lonely. God himself could have kept Bob company. There are any number of ways God could have structured the universe so that Bob's choices do not cause him to suffer.
I see, so you feel that we don't even have to consider what the trade-off might be? Suffering, just by itself, may not be bad?
That doesn't really make sense to me. Certainly it would be bad for God to keep everything the same, but make you suffer twice as much, with no new consequences of that suffering, except that you feel worse?
... What?
Or Bob could actively go out into the world and meet people.
God is omnipresent. God can't not keep Bob company.
The fact that you're acknowledging Bob's choices are the reasons why he's suffering demonstrates the inherent problem in what you're saying. Bob's suffering because of Bob. He can choose to remedy the problem, but he doesn't. Bob is responsible for his situation.
And yes, I readily acknowledge that Bob didn't choose to have social anxieties. However, Bob is choosing to not to confront his anxieties in order to get what he wants, or to make the effort to deal with his social anxieties in order to create functional relationships. Those are Bob's choices, and they are causing him detriment. Thus, Bob is harming himself.
Yes.
You know, I did explain this in that long post you glossed over earlier.
Why am I suffering?
How can he be an obstacle to himself is there is no endeavor? What does it even mean to be an obstacle in that case? It seems to me that an obstacle has to impede progress towards something - an endeavor of some sort.
The fact that Bob is making the choices is irrelevant. God doesn't have to present us with choices in which some options lead to unnecessary suffering. When deciding which universe to create, God can choose to create one in which a guy named Bob who will make choices that cause him great suffering will exist, or God can choose to create one in which that doesn't happen.
I didn't gloss over it - I just didn't understand your point, and have been seeking clarification since.
Because God arbitrarily chose to have you suffer more. Is this bad?
How could it possibly be irrelevant? If Bob is suffering due to a choice he made, and it was entirely within his power to not make that choice, then the only reason Bob is suffering is because he chooses to do so. Right? So where is the injustice here?
But that's just it, ALL suffering is unnecessary. There is no such thing as "necessary" suffering. We even demonstrated that God could easily create a world with exactly zero suffering. There is no "necessary suffering."
Your aim is to demonstrate God is behaving unjustly, yes? That is the purpose to this conversation?
So connect the dots. Exactly how is God being unjust here?
If I am choosing to beat my fists bloody against a wall, I cannot blame the person who created the wall. Nor can I blame the wall. I am choosing to do the thing that brings me pain and physical harm. It is entirely within my power to not beat my fists against a wall, but I am choosing to. Thus, the fact that I am experience excruciating amounts of pain doing it is not anyone's fault but my own. Nor can I, in accordance with your logic, blame God for the brittleness of the bones in my hands, my pain receptors, or the fact that walls are so hard. God is not forcing me to beat my hands against a wall, I am choosing to do so, and the fault is my own.
Indeed, the excruciating pain I'm experiencing is actually a fantastic thing because it's an indicator that my body is damaged, and in most people, is usually an indicator to stop further damage. The fact that I'm knowingly choosing not to do that is no one's fault but my own.
Depends. If it's arbitrary, then probably, because as I said before, cruelty is wrong.
Tiax, it seems to me that this is your objection to my view… that it would entail that Bob ends up believing an experience is from God, but is actually not from God. He does this because my view of justification would intail that justified belief is held by people with false beliefs who have, as it were, no way out of this epistemic situation. And on your view, you would say, that Bob would not be so stuck in this epistemic situation.
However, I see a number of possible holes in this objection. I would point out two things.
1. Perhaps if Bob is a rational person, he won't actually end up in this situation… or at least stay in it. If the experience was not truly from God it wouldn't actually be strong enough to justify belief. It would be something like Bob has experienced in other times in his life when he was not in a place of faith in God and it seemed to have either no connection or little connection to things which the religious text he adheres to. If the experience was not truly from God, Bob would probably realize in other areas of his life that he is overly gullible and over-interprets experiences. In such a case, he will naturally slip into less confidence about his experience and will realize that this experience could be his own imagination. If Bob really believes that he has a clear experience of God and actually has not, then he must have significant other problems that would tip him off to this fact.
2. There are many difficult scenarios that life leaves us in and it doesn't follow that we need to change our rational way of living to avoid all possible error. We may find that there is no way to prove that the external world is not just our imagination. We could be in the matrix and not know it, we could be dreaming in a higher sort of dream and not know it.
Consider another possible scenario, and I wool dike an answer to this the same way you wanted me to answer your question…
Two people experience life… one (John) is delusional, and the other (Tracy) is not. John is in a coma but he still has brain activity. Imagine John experiences a whole life as it were a dream… during his time in a coma he imagines he has a girlfriend who turns into his wife, and he imagines raising a family. Now how is John supposed to know he is in a coma? With no amount of questioning himself could he expect to discover that his world is not real but he is in fact in a perpetual dream… However, does that mean that Tracy, the one who is not under a delusion, needs to question herself to make sure she is not also in a coma? She also could never find out the answer no matter how much questioning she did. Now, and this is the question I would like you to answer directly. What objective test can you give such that John and Tracy will be able to tell whether or not they are truly experiencing reality or are in a sort of a dream? Are you aware that on your own view that people cannot even know if anything they ever experience is real? They cannot have any objectively verifiable reason to think they do have children, a wife, a career, a home, anything at all. They have an experience of life but there is no reason to think it is any more real than a dream.
Personally, on my view, just because something cannot be proven or objectively verified, it doesn't make it irrational to trust it. It seems to me that on your view that if some experience cannot be objectively verified such that we have some objective test to verify it, then it is irrational to believe. Do you agree? If so, it seems that everything you ever do is irrational as it relies on an irrational belief that anything we experience is real. If not, you don't seem anymore to have a principle of which to condemn justified belief in God based on experience.
Please address point #1 as I see it as the strongest.
Because I am not accusing god of being morally responsible for that suffering. I'm saying that god has a higher hurdle than that. God knows what Bob will choose, and so god doesn't have to create the universe such that Bob will face that situation and make that choice. God could just as well create a universe in which Bob's set of options will be different, and Bob will choose something that results in less suffering.
Imagine that god had given us all a magical suffering gun, that we could shoot at other people to make them suffer. It's not god's fault if we decide to use it. We bear the moral responsibility if we shoot it. But god, being omnibenevolent, should still choose not to give it to us, because he knows that the universe in which the magical suffering gun doesn't exist is going to have way less suffering than the one in which it does.
No, that is not my aim.
The question is not whether god is to blame, or who is at fault. That has nothing to do with the argument I'm making. I am not trying to blame god for the choices of people. Instead I'm simply saying that god, if he is omnibenevolent, must choose the mots benevolent universe. Certainly a universe in which someone spends their life in absolute misery because they won't stop beating their hands against a wall is less benevolent than one in which that person gets to wear padded gloves. In the padded glove version, there is less suffering, and a benevolent being would prefer that option.
If you leave a heroin needle next to your druggie friend, you know what he's going to do. It's still ultimately his choice and his fault. But you still wouldn't do it, because you don't want bad things to happen to your friend, even if they're his own fault.
I'm confused. I thought there was no necessary suffering?
What does it depend on?
In this instance, Bob is not following your method. He is doubting his experience. What you are proposing is exactly my method - that Bob should critically examine whether his experience is really a valid way of determining truth. He will then conclude that it must not be, because if it were, various other experiences would also be indicators of truth, when he knows them to not be. Remember, Bob is not allowed to doubt his experience. Please provide a method in which he does not do that.
I am not sure I understand the analogy here. In the case of a profound religious experience, we were being asked to evaluate the strength of that experience as evidence for another proposition - that god exists. In this instance, I'm not sure what the corresponding experience and proposition is. If the corresponding experience is "the totality of all your experiences" and the proposition is "you are living in a perfectly realistic dream", then there is not much of question. We have only ever experienced one giant piece of evidence, and we have nothing to compare it to. John and Tracy should therefore both believe that they have no meaningful evidence one way or the other. Neither John nor Tracy is justified in believing they have any evidence which demonstrates that they are or are not in a dream.
We have those. They're called actual guns.
Why stop there? God could prevent us from making anyone cause any suffering to anyone else for any reason. Goodness knows we have more ways of doing it than imaginary weaponry.
I'm not disagreeing that there's any instance of suffering that God could make not happen. As I said before, God can create a zero suffering universe.
What is your aim?
Except I could choose to wear such gloves. I'm not doing so.
I'm sure he would prefer it, but I don't see the fact that such an option is not what comes to pass as a strike against the benevolent being.
That's not analogous. In the heroin needle example, you are going out of your way to cause your friend harm.
There isn't.
It depends on what "God increases your suffering" means exactly. How and in what way has my suffering increased?
If God is being openly cruel, then that clearly indicates that he's not being benevolent, yes.
But simply increasing suffering doesn't necessarily indicate cruelty. Suffering is not an inherently bad, or even inherently undesirable, thing, which is why I completely disagree with the metric you're attempting to use. Again, you have to look at WHY the person is suffering.
My point is: Benevolence is the care for the well-being of others. Suffering is not a state of well-being. God has the power to select from many universes to create. If he is omnibenevolent, he should select the one with the most well-being. I am willing to entertain the notion that in some cases a small amount of suffering may lead to a greater amount of well-being, and therefore the optimal universe may have more than zero suffering. However, it should not the be case that any suffering can be removed from the universe without greater negative consequence.
Yes, but a zero suffering universe may also turn out to be a zero good universe, in which nothing actually happens. An empty universe is certainly a zero suffering universe, but it would be worse than a universe in which lots of beings experience a high degree of well-being.
My aim is to argue that the universe we observe seems very unlikely to be the single universe, out of all possible universes, that an omnibenevolent being would most like to create.
I don't see how this is any sort of rebuttal. God selected to create a universe in which you will not choose to wear the gloves.
If he would prefer it, then he would have created it. Note that I am not suggesting that god needs to take away free will and make our choices for us. However, he does not need to present us with choices in which one option will result in great suffering, especially when he knows that we will pick that option.
And yet, god does exactly that. He selects to create a universe in which we are presented with many opportunities to inflict suffering on ourselves and others, and furthermore populates that universe with beings who he knows will select to do just that.
But you suggest that the suffering of hitting your fist against a wall is actually a necessary benefit, because it will allow you to stop doing it.
In this hypothetical, god selects a manner in which you are already suffering and makes that suffering more intense. He has no particular motivation for doing so - the choice is entirely arbitrary. He does not do it because you will receive some greater reward or benefit as a result, nor does he do it because he enjoys seeing suffer. There are no external consequences to this additional suffering.
Is this an action that is compatible with an omnibenevolent god?
I don't believe that's necessarily true.
And I don't buy that.
On what measure is it worse?
And to clarify, I agree it's worse, but WHY is it worse?
And I don't see how that is any sort of rebuttal.
*I* selected to create a universe in which I would not wear the gloves, because I had a choice, and I chose to not wear them. Thus, I am responsible for my own suffering.
That doesn't logically follow.
That actually sounds exactly like what you're saying he should be doing.
Except that totally contradicts your own logic. By your logic, God should not allow any choice besides that which is the most optimal. If God allows any other choice, that is by your argument wrong, because it allows unnecessary suffering. So by your own reasoning, God must remove all choices save the most optimal one.
No he doesn't. There is literally no reason for that heroin needle to be there other than you deliberately creating a situation in which harm would be dealt to your friend in a cruel hypothetical. You were acting out of cruelty and nothing else.
Yes, he does. So?
What? When did I use the word "necessary" in that paragraph?
What is that method of suffering? How am I suffering, and what do you mean when you say God is amplifying it?
Again, Tiax, you are focusing merely on suffering, which is where you're getting lost. You have to pay attention to why people suffer.
That's really random and very un-God-like, but it's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's certainly unlike God because it's capricious and indifferent, and a capricious, indifferent God is different from an omnibenevolent one, yes.
But again, what is incompatible is the capriciousness, not necessarily the act itself. If God deliberately increased the amount of suffering I am feeling, and did so purposefully, not just arbitrarily, I would not argue that inherently in and of itself means he is not omnibenevolent. It would depend on what sort of suffering, exactly, we are talking about.
You say that you disagree that suffering is not a state of well-being. Well-being is defined as "the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy." A person who is suffering is not these things. This seems pretty cut and dry to me. Can you give an example of someone who is suffering but is in a state of well-being?
I don't understand why you feel that "if he preferred it, he would have created it" does not logically follow. What reason could god have for not creating it that does not imply he prefers an alternative? Why would god act against his own wishes?
On the question of free will, god is quite welcome to allow us any number of options that may lead to different outcomes, so long as some of those outcomes are not worthless suffering. Even if all options lead to the same amount of well-being, that does not constitute a removal of free will. All of my options lead to the same amount of omnipotence for me (not omnipotent) but that fact does not mean I lack free will.
When god elects to create a universe full of suffering-causing options, and populates it with beings who he knows will choose those options, he is choosing to create a universe with much less well-being than alternatives. This is by definition not omnibenevolent.
You feel, however, that there are instances where god can choose to increase the amount of suffering you are feeling and still be omnibenevolent. Can you give an example of that?
It really boils down to how you define "happiness." That is to say if we define "happiness" as contentment, or happiness as something akin to Eudaimonia.
The primary problem I have is in lumping comfort with happiness. They do not mean the same thing, and often times one can be unhappy because of a preoccupation with comfort.
Sure, a person who just achieved great victory despite extreme physical or mental exertion.
Or how about the person who endures great suffering for a cause he believes in? He may be in great pain, or have suffered great injury, but he does not resent his suffering, but still look upon his suffering as a source of pride.
Or how about the people who voluntarily choose to give up their well-being and enter danger in order to promote the well-being of others? Or people who willingly sacrifice their well-being for a cause that they believe in?
Those two phrases do not mean the same thing. Preferring something is not the same thing as creating something. Ergo, one does not equate to the other unless you demonstrate why one necessarily follows from the other.
God may prioritize allowing us to choose our own choices over stopping us from choosing destructive ones.
Well first of all, that contradicts what you have been saying. There must necessarily be one choice that leads to the most good, and therefore God, according to your logic, must needs make it so we choose that one, as any other choice would be less good and therefore not optimally good, which would invalidate God's omnibenevolence. Ergo, God allowing choice is not omnibenevolent.
But secondly, WHY must God not allow worthless suffering? You have not demonstrated this.
And you have yet to actually demonstrate this.
You seem to keep repeating variations on a theme of "God allows there to be more suffering than there needs to be" as though it is somehow some "Eureka!" moment instead of just a repetition on something we've already established. As I've said before, I don't believe any suffering is necessary, and I believe all suffering is preventable. So yes, I'm completely comfortable with saying that God allows people to suffer. That's kind of the point of Christianity. Nor do I view this as in any way in conflict with God's omnibenevolence.
Certainly. I believe that suffering is caused by our attachments to that which is temporary. As such, I believe our attachments to people are sources of suffering. When we become attached to someone, we are opening ourselves up for suffering.
In fact, do you know the etymology behind the word "compassion?" It comes from Latin. "Com-" means together. "Pati" means to suffer. To feel compassion means to suffer with another person.
Yet I do not believe that the amount of concern, or compassion, or passion I feel for someone is something I wish to diminish. God could make me find someone to care about, or increase my caring for a person I already care about to a greater degree, and that will increase my suffering.
Of course, again, in this scenario we see the same problem as in anything you've posted on the subject: you're looking at this purely in terms of how much suffering there is or isn't, as opposed to what suffering is, why it exists, or what it means. As such, yes, in this scenario I would hesitate to call God benevolent because if God is just acting out of a desire to "cause someone more suffering," like he's someone with a Suffer-O-Meter turning the numbers up or down, then what he's doing in that sense is not benevolent. It's God acting peculiar as he often seems to do in Tiax hypotheticals.
But if God is being benevolent, and suffering results, that does not diminish his benevolence. God can be benevolent and still cause suffering. God can be benevolent because he causes suffering. Thus, "total amount of suffering in the universe" is not a valid metric for God's benevolence. It's not totally irrelevant, because again, if God were demonstrated to be openly cruel, that would disprove God's omnibenevolence outright, but I disagree with this idea that God cannot set up a world with unnecessary suffering. There is no necessary suffering. That doesn't mean suffering is undesirable.
I mean...this is just the dictionary definition of well-being. Would you prefer to give your own definition of benevolence, so that we're on the same page?
In all of these examples, the person's suffering is being offset by a gain in some other area of well-being. Can you provide an example in which the suffering itself is the state of well-being?
God has the power to create anything he desires. He will therefore choose to create his preferred option, because that is what preference means.
This is not the choice god is presented with it. God can allow us to make choices without having some of those options be destructive.
Why can two options not result in the same amount of good?
I've clearly answered this many times.
I keep repeating variations of a theme because I'm trying to explain myself, and you keep throwing up objections that don't contradict my point, which leads me to believe you have not grasped it, and therefore I try to explain it again in a different way.
Does god have the power to make attachments not cause suffering? Can god increase attachment without increasing suffering? Can god increase suffering without increasing attachment?
I still don't think I'm making myself clear. You keep characterizing my point as looking at the total amount of suffering, which isn't it. I've said this many times, and in pretty plain language. I don't understand why you still think that's my point.
Let's consider the idea of desirability of suffering. Can there be undesirable suffering? What determines whether suffering is desirable or undesirable?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I didn't say Bob should not doubt his experience. I said that if someone had a true experience of God that was clear, it would be irrational to think one can have an objective test to find out whether or not it was from God, and to doubt what is already been made evident to the person would be irrational and might be not trusting to God.
However this is not the scenario you proposed. You said that there was a person who did not have an experience from God but believed he did. And my response was that Bob won't need to question his experience simply because it is a religious one. The foundation of confidence in his experience would be shaken because Bob would discover he tends to believe things for bad reasons by his life regardless of his faith. He would not embark on questioning his experience in God first. He would realize he believes things for faulty reasons and therefore his grounds for believing based on this experience would be undercut.
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So then, is John irrational to believe that anything he ever does is real? John, then, is not even rational to believe that Barack Obama is the President of the United States, that he has a wife, that he had potatoes for breakfast this morning. Consider another example… say we assume the world is real or say we even assume this is some kind of a dream. Think of what you had to eat for breakfast this morning. Now, all you have of this morning is a memory of eating breakfast. For all you know the world popped into existence five minutes ago with the appearance of age and memories of things that never happened. Another possibility is that highly advanced aliens implanted some false memories into your brain.
Given this possibility, are you rational to believe that you ate cereal (or whatever you had) for breakfast this morning? Perhaps the past popped into existence five minutes ago or aliens implanted a false memory in your brain? It seems obvious that you are. However, there is actually no objective test by which you can determine that these things happened. There actually isn't any evidence either. The memory of breakfast would appear the same whether or not the world popped into being just now with an appearance of age, or whether aliens implanted a memory in your brain.
It seems like this principle (that we must have objective tests to apply to beliefs based on experience) would entail that we are not rational to accept the most simple and obviously rational thing such as that you ate cereal for breakfast this morning. I gave the example because it doesn't question the whole of our existence (something you objected to with the dream example), but only one part… your eating breakfast this morning.
I am actually not saying we know with certainty that the world is real or that you did eat cereal this morning. What I am saying is that we are rationally justified in acting as if this world is real… even if we cannot prove we are not dreaming… even if we don't know that we are not dreaming. Likewise, say that with religious experience we don't know with certainty that it is real. Perhaps, like our not being in a dream, we are incapable of knowing that we are not under a delusion. However, that doesn't mean, just as with believing you ate cereal this morning, we aren't rationally justified in taking the experience as if it were real. So it seems that to condemn belief based solely on religious experience because it cannot be objectively verified would also condemn even the most fundamental beliefs of all of our life. Even if those beliefs are such as, "we have had this experience, we cannot know it is real, but we take it as real, and act like it is." This is what you seem to think we do with our most important beliefs such as that there is a past… and you are rationally justified to do so. And if you accept this I see no more rational basis to condemn a religious belief that is also founded on experience.
Someone else gave me a long response for my second to last post and I am going to reply to them next.
Best wishes,
- Jeff
This is putting the cart before the horse. Before examining his experience, Bob does not know whether it was genuine or not. Nor does Alice. They must therefore be able to apply the same method of examination.
John is irrational to believe that he has absolute proof of these things.
So this is perhaps a better example. We are now asked "does my memory of what I ate for breakfast this morning count as strong evidence about the events of this morning?". The answer is yes - whenever I have memories of eating cereal, I find that I have an empty cereal bowl in the sink, I find that I am not hungry, I find that I have a little less cereal in the box than I had the day before. Further, other peoples' memories of the morning match mine. If I eat breakfast with someone, with both remember that I had the same thing. So, we should conclude that memories of what I ate for breakfast are very reliable evidence.
But what about the possibility that all memories are fake? Well, now we're back to square one. That doesn't just undermine the "what I ate for breakfast" memory, it undermines all possible forms of evidence. We therefore must have at least a low level of doubt about any conclusion we draw.
Compare this, however, to the case in which only some memories of breakfast are false. Some people have legitimate memories of breakfast, some people have false memories of breakfast. In this world, should people trust their memories of breakfast? Clearly not. They must find other methods to confirm what they had for breakfast.
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I am actually not saying we know with certainty that the world is real or that you did eat cereal this morning. What I am saying is that we are rationally justified in acting as if this world is real… even if we cannot prove we are not dreaming… even if we don't know that we are not dreaming. Likewise, say that with religious experience we don't know with certainty that it is real. Perhaps, like our not being in a dream, we are incapable of knowing that we are not under a delusion. However, that doesn't mean, just as with believing you ate cereal this morning, we aren't rationally justified in taking the experience as if it were real. So it seems that to condemn belief based solely on religious experience because it cannot be objectively verified would also condemn even the most fundamental beliefs of all of our life. Even if those beliefs are such as, "we have had this experience, we cannot know it is real, but we take it as real, and act like it is." This is what you seem to think we do with our most important beliefs such as that there is a past… and you are rationally justified to do so. And if you accept this I see no more rational basis to condemn a religious belief that is also founded on experience.
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There are a couple of differences here:
-Whether we are in a dream or in a fabricated memory is completely unknowable. The world will look exactly the same in either case. In the case of god, we have before us a claimed piece of evidence which would not exist if god did not exist.
-Regardless of whether we are in a dream or in a fabricated memory, we will act the same. The world will appear exactly the same, all of our actions will have exactly the same result, so there is no reason to worry about whether we are in these scenarios. We are quite free to say that we have absolutely no idea whether we are in a dream, and carry on with our lives exactly the same as the person who says that they are certain we are not in a dream. So, we are only rationally justified in deciding we are living in reality because it makes no difference and there is no way we could tell anyway.