Best of all possible worlds and atheism

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I recently read a blog post on the matter, and I thought it was mildly interesting. I've seen this argument before, I've even made it, but I wanted to re-address it as I think WP is going through a religion phase:

1) The actual world was created by an omnipotent and perfectly good being.
2) An omnipotent being can actualize any possible world.
3) A perfectly good being always chooses the best outcome from among its choices.
Therefore,
4) The actual world is the best of all possible worlds.

Now, there are 4 different ways a person can react to the earlier argument:
1) They can deny the existence of a God, and perhaps even hold a version of this argument as a refutation of premise 1.
2) They can deny the ability of God to actualize any possible world.
3) They can deny the tendency of a perfectly good being to choose the best outcome.
4) They can hold that this is the best of all possible worlds.

Now, I don't believe that premise 4 is correct, but rather I think that a better world being logically possible is very basic. I think even a small child can understand why 4 seems unreasonable. However, I don't think that premises 2 or 3 are wrong. This means that I must reject premise 1. I think a lot of people will think similarly about the situation as well. However, I would ask if anybody has any thoughts on the situation.

You don't have to reject the whole premise, just remove the word omnipotent. To say that God is omnipotent is to say none of his creations have any will of their own. If you would consider the possibility of God creating beings that do have a will it is a whole new ballgame.

I'll go for option 1.

If god is all-powerful like most religions claim then god has the ability to at the very least create a better wold than this. If god is all-loving then god would pick the best outcome. I dont think this is the best of all possible worlds, I don't even think it's a good world.

Let's pretend this is true.



If premise 1 is true, then this one must be true.



This is the one that I have a problem with.

Does a perfectly good being have to choose the best outcome? Would it go against his nature to allow the existence of any possible world?

The fact that he allows sins to happen means that he allows things that are not good to happen (without this stopping him from being good).

So I'm going to reject this premise.

Any possible world with no sin in it is better than this actual world with sin in it.



Therefore, this conclusion is rejected.

@ MCalavera

So you want to live in a world where someone manipulates you like a puppet then you would be arguing God isn't good because he treats you like an object.

But I'd be a puppet. So I most likely wouldn't care.

Aggers -

Of course in your starter you must know 4) nao e [can't easily do a tilde] premise.

Whatever.

See my almost immediately previous response to [who?] the not evenhanded on Aspies guy.

Anyway - you maintain a small child can see this is not the boapw.

So I will respond with the small query:

How does that child - how do you - know the complete range of all possible worlds?

AND what is the absolute standard for worldly perfection?

Tell us, tell us all about it.

Actually, one can reject any of your premises.

I personally reject the second. It is too stringent, God can only actualize logically possible worlds. You are assuming that whatever world you have in mind is both better and logically possible. You are assuming that God could actualize any world that you can imagine, you can imagine all sorts of worlds that are subjectively better to you but may not be the actual best possible world. The reason this argument is considered rubbish in philosophy schools is because you are retreating to a logical premise that you cannot prove. You cannot prove that this is not the best possible world, since all it needs to be such, is for God to have a sufficiently good reason for creating it. Therefor, if God did create it, it naturally follows that he does. So your argument becomes about subjective probability.

Here is a list of things that you cannot prove in this article.

1) That God could not have a sufficient reason.
2) That there is a logical world that could have been actualized that would fulfill God's plan better than this one.
3) That program of salvation is not a total good.
4) That a program of salvation does not requires lots of evil caused by choice.
5) That human faculties are reliable enough to determine better.
6) That God's reasons should be clear to created beings

Basically the reason this argument gets zero play in the classroom is because it is essentially an abuse of the concept 'best of all possible worlds'. It is also an argument that, due to it's unproved and unprovable claims, is just considered a terrible argument. Since you are the on making it, the burden of proof is on you to settle my six points.

For example see the counter argument where the logic does not make such assumptions.

1) God created the world.
2) God can only actualize logically possible worlds.
i. There is evil in this world.
3) God must sufficient reason for creating this world.
4) Therefor from 1&2 God does have a sufficient reason.

See by turning the argument around, it can be shown that your argument does not logically work.

P.S. Don't ever put your conclusion outside of your premises, it's just bad form. Here is what your argument actually looks like.

1. God created the world
2. God can only actualize logically possible worlds
i. There is evil in this world
3. God must have a sufficient reason.
4. Therefor from 1&2 God must have a sufficient reason.
5. God cannot have a sufficient reason.
i. Children know God cannot have a sufficient reason.
6. God does not exist.

You see the burden of proof you have taken on for yourself in this argument?

All well and good if you want a tautological (and thus meaningless) definition of "good" which, rather than conforming to anything meaningful or comprehensible to humans, is simply defined as "that which God does."

I supose if god wanted the bible to be the truth, it could be done so. If he wanted "to make the fool the wise" (in this worlds eyes) he certainly could do that one

wich is why I try to stay to as close to him as i can

Anyways, to the OP: it is not a death blow to Christian theism, and certainly not to theism in general. One could take the Calvinist stance that this actually is the best of all possible worlds, although this usually requires taking a very odd notion of "good." Alternately, open theism has no requirement of omnipotence in God- in fact, since the open theistic God is not omniscient (in the sense that He does have foreknowledge) then omnipotence as you are probably defining it is impossible. Or, one could even reject the assumption of "perfectly good."

So im confused. does god get tired? or was that a mis translation?
The way i've seen it (in america) is if your name is "god" you are everywhere, and know everything before it happend, never getting tired. etc..

Okay - my eyes are not what they were. I can NOT find anything in the thread suggesting God gets tired. Where, please?.

Oh FFS.
God is tired and rests
Ex 31:17

A child doesn't have to know the complete range of all possible worlds to know that there is a better world. Rather, "better" is a term of ranking, and "best" is a term for "better than all others". So, basically, if any individual justifiably believes that the world would be better if any fact about it were different, *literally* any fact were different, then this is not the best of all possible worlds. I think a simple child can imagine a world better than this world, and I think almost literally anybody you might talk to has a vague idea without much reflection of things that would make this world better.

I mean, Philologos, you might as well put forward the same objection to a criticism that the US does not have the best political system. How would the arguer know the full-range of political systems? How would the arguer know all of the variables involved in the political system that we have? How would the arguer know all of the counter-factuals regarding the outcomes of the US political system under various circumstances? In short, I don't think that the kind of skepticism you promote is special, but rather I am skeptical to it on the grounds that I don't think that the existence of God is that special of a case of our counter-factual reasoning.


The question is irrelevant. Unless you want to be a complete moral skeptic, an idea incompatible with most forms of theism, standards are possible. Even further, to present skepticism towards the idea that "X is the best of all possible worlds" one only has to show the claim absurd, not provide a standard, and a clear way to do that is to show that it is not a sensible idea given background moral intuitions, as well as proposed moral ideas.


Yes, I made that clear:
Now, there are 4 different ways a person can react to the earlier argument:
"1) They can deny the existence of a God, and perhaps even hold a version of this argument as a refutation of premise 1.
2) They can deny the ability of God to actualize any possible world.
3) They can deny the tendency of a perfectly good being to choose the best outcome.
4) They can hold that this is the best of all possible worlds. "


Well, first of all, the actual argument I was analyzing was a PhD student's restatement of Liebniz's argument for this being the best of all possible worlds.

Second, I am not sure that what I presented was actually rubbish. If premise 1 is significantly less believable than premises 2 and 3, and if 4 is not believable, then rejecting premise 1 is rational. As it stands, the PhD student stated: "Most people have found the conclusion of this argument incredible, and sought ways to escape it. ", meaning that my rejection of the conclusion is not so rubbish-y, and my move of rejecting premise 1 is not a silly one.


Doesn't this just push back the entire process a step? After all, the skepticism that this is the best of all possible worlds is grounded in an apparent lack of good reasons for this world over other conceived possibilities. I find your restatement very irrelevant, and the only reason I can see to propose it is to have a vaguer statement about the matter that is harder to intuitively evaluate. That being stated, we can restate what you offered as this:
For this to be the best of all possible worlds, God has to have a sufficiently good reason for every detail on his creation, given that he can actualize any logical possible world. This means that there is a sufficiently good reason for every bad thing, which leads us to the outright doubtful claim that every single bad thing we experience is actually a secret good, whether it is genocide, rape, murder, or just stubbing your toe.

Now, the only rebuttal I can see is "transworld depravity", but the problem I see with it is in "what constitutes a world", as if libertarian free will is the justification and that in order for a world to be different, it just cannot be the same as other possible worlds, then God has infinite worlds as there are infinite variables that God could possibly adjust, more worlds than human actions, and each world will have people(based upon libertarian free will, which is acausal) making different decisions, because the worlds will be different, and libertarian free will is non-causal, but rather random. For this reason, I don't think Molinist transworld depravity would work as an explanation due to transworld manipulability, a point made by philosopher Dean Zimmerman.

And because of that, and the fact that I don't think that there is reason to believe that every bad thing is actually secretly for the best, a fact that I think most of us would agree with when thinking about the horrors of the world, then I don't think the position plausible. Even further, let's just break it down, let's just say that we are optimists and think that the probability of a given bad thing being for a greater good is 99.9%. Well, in order to be 99% certain that there is an unjustified evil, we just have to have 4603 evils in the world.
Math:
.01=.999^x
ln(.01) = Xln(.999)
ln(.01)/ln(.999) = x
-4.605/-.001=x (rounding my log numbers, just to illustrate, I used unrounded numbers for the calculation)
460

The issue is that there are more murders in a YEAR in the US than this number really justifies us to accept. In fact, there are 3.5 times more murders in that nation than this rough calculation allows us to accept. Now, this is just playing with numbers at this level, but the fact that even when trying to be favorable, we end up with a result this low leaves us to say that it is pretty obvious that this idea of the best of all possible worlds is not to be accepted. I don't think it really matters how you flesh this out, the problems are grossly significant.


I am not sure I have to prove that God could not have a sufficient reason. If it seems clear that this is not the best of all possible worlds, then the burden of proof is upon the person contesting this idea.


Well, if God's goal is a world in which the people are the most satisfied, and where they know him as they best can, then I think it obvious that there is a better possible world. For instance, heaven has greater satisfaction and knowledge of God than earth. For this reason, if I use heaven as a model of a better logical world. (or Eden for that matter) then it is instead the responsibility of the theist to show that life on earth, or the fall, are logically necessary.


Unless "total good" is a special term that I have not heard before, the question isn't relevant. It does not add more depth to 1 or 2 as far as I see.


91, I strongly don't believe in libertarian free will, and believe that considerations against libertarian free will are rationally coercive. As such, the free will defense is dead to me. Even further, I don't actually hold that philosophically free will does what proponents hold that it can, at all, but rather I think that it is just an "elan vital" to fill the gaps, but that it logically has no weight. I have not seen much to convince me otherwise on the matter. As such, I regard this consideration both disproven on psychological grounds, and deeply implausible on philosophical grounds.


I'll just be up-front and label this ad-hoc skepticism. Counter-factual claims and the evaluation of counter-factuals are so common in our experience and we claim knowledge on them so often, that to claim that we don't have the ability to evaluate counter-factual claims in a situation just because it involves God is absurd. It is not reasonable skepticism, but rather it is ad hoc skepticism. In order for me to take this seriously, you have to advocate biting the bullet and denying mankind the ability to call claims about counter-factuals knowledge.(at least a large set of them, as just saying "the world is chaotic" still will engage thinking on business, politics, economics, and so many other systems of thinking that it still is not plausible)


Not sure this is really that relevant. After all, there is no difference between a reason that I don't know, and a reason that does not exist, and I don't see an existing plausible reason that well for every detail.


This is a paraphrasing of Liebniz and it was done by a PhD student in philosophy. This wasn't even an atheist philosopher, but rather a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers. You are wielding a rhetorical hammer about nothing. You also haven't shown that this is an abuse of the concept of the "best of all possible worlds".

All I did was that I analyzed the premises, and picked what I thought of my 4 options.


Oh, please! It is not as Mackies' logical problem of evil was considered "a terrible argument" and all I am doing here is something so much more conservative that you are just spouting BS. While we can say that Mackie's argument of a logical problem failed, it was not felled by a plausible rationale, but rather by an ad hoc possibility. I don't even go as far as Mackie and you are acting as if I am citing the impossibility of interaction argument between material and immaterial entities.


Here's what I've stated on the matter.

"Now, I don't believe that premise 4 is correct, but rather I think that a better world being logically possible is very basic. I think even a small child can understand why 4 seems unreasonable. However, I don't think that premises 2 or 3 are wrong. This means that I must reject premise 1."

This does not entail any burden of proof for me, as I started *off* by calling ~4 obviously true, so I don't have any burden at all. That being said, your concerns aren't that compelling.


This is a horrible counter-argument.

For one, if you are trying to argue this as a disproof of the idea that God does not exist because he did not create the best of all possible worlds, then this is not even an argument, but rather a massive case of begging the question.

Secondly, this is just poorly constructed. 2 is not a relevant premise. 3 is never referenced in the conclusion, even though the conclusion is really just 1 & 3.

Thirdly, I find it absurd that you consider my claim that this is not the best of all possible worlds to be so absurd so as to not be worth mentioning, but you find the invocation of a timeless, omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good being as created the world as so straight-forward that it merits no mention.


This argument still has the same flaw as the one preceding it. 2 is irrelevant. 3 is actually what is used.

5 i is misstated, as I stated that it can be known from the level of reasoning of a child that God does not have a sufficient reason. That being said, if you think there is a sufficient reason for all of the evils, please let me know.

Well, right, and the odd notion of good is just being ignored. I don't find it relevant, as most Christians do believe that the term "good" has to have some substance to it.

Open theism works better, however, if we hold that scientific knowledge is relevant in addressing theological claims, then open theism must be rejected. Open theism disagrees with the B theory of time, which is justified by Einstein's theory of relativity. Open theism also disagrees with our knowledge of the psychology of decision-making, particularly that of the Libet experiment, but also a lot of other details.