Episode 045: What if God Were Really Bad?

No audio link here.

Evil-Dicky P

The difference between Dr. Peoples when Prof. Law is present to defend himself and when Prof. Law is absent is remarkable. Given how Prof. Law’s paper is apparently such an abject philosophical disappointment, I look forward to Dr. Peoples preparing an academic paper in which he clearly sets out his objections to the evil-god challenge. About all I heard in the podcast was that “classical” theism presupposes God as being good and therefore the challenge never gets off the ground. I, like Prof. Law, am still waiting for Dr. Peoples to clearly set out the premises of his moral argument in support of the existence of a good god.

The Atheist Missionary:

“About all I heard in the podcast was that “classical” theism presupposes God as being good and therefore the challenge never gets off the ground.”

Wow. That’s absolutely shocking comprehension. Glenn didn’t even talk about what classical theism “presupposes.” He talked about what they believe, and noted that to understand the reasons for it you have to become familiar with a lot of background information.

And this (misunderstood) claim is the only thing you heard? That’s simply incredible. I heard a lot more.

* I heard Glenn explain that classical theism maintains that there is a unity of transcendentals, which means that without actually showing that its metaphysical outlook is false (and Glenn noted that Stephen didn’t do this), the evil god challenge is not a challenge.

* I heard Glenn refer to a moral argument for theism and I heard him describe Stephen’s response to it where he just appealed to the oft-trounced appeal to the Euthryphro dilemma, which (in addition to being oft-trounced) is not even an objection to the moral argument, but is an objection to divine command ethics, which is not the same thing at all.

* I heard Glenn describe Stephen’s summary and response to the “moral sense” argument, and I also heard Glenn utterly demolish this by explaining how badly Stephen misconstrued the moral sense, thereby revealing a major gap in Stephen’s understanding of the material he was discussing. Glenn explained how the combination of the moral argument and the moral sense argument actually does offer support for a good God over and evil god.

* I also heard Glenn summarize and respond to Stephen’s treatment of the whole area of historical apologetics, explaining that Stephen allows the evil god believers to use a kind of argument that Stephen himself elsewhere rejects as disingenuous.

* I also heard Glenn put his finger right on the button and identify the fact that Stephen evaded the hard philosophical work at every single step: He never explained why it’s absurd to allow the theodicies to stand. He never explained what’s actually wrong with the moral argument. He never explained what’s wrong with historical arguments. He never grappled with the issue of classical theology, and yet Stephen was so philosophically in the dark in this subject area that he repeatedly took himself to be specifically addressing “classical theism”!

So if the only thing you heard was ‘ “classical” theism presupposes God as being good and therefore the challenge never gets off the ground,’ then you just weren’t listening – or else most of what was said just went right over your head.

Interesting observation for me: When it comes to deciding that the reverse theodicies fail, Law relies exclusively on intuition and this crucial reaction is what grounds the entire evil God challenge, because based on this intuition-grounded claim he wonders why theists don’t take the same view of their own theodicies.

And yet in discussion with Dr Peoples, Law says that moral facts, being believed in only on the basis of intuition, therefore have a weak basis and could easily be jettisoned in order to escape the moral argument!

The evil god challenge has taken a bit of a whipping!

Commentator above said about me: “He never explained why it’s absurd to allow the theodicies to stand.” That’s right, I didn’t do that in the paper.

That’s because I didn’t think anyone would actually take the line that the reverse theodicies are entirely successful in dealing with the evidential problem of good. I just thought that move was too nutty and desperate even for most theists, to be honest.

However, surprisingly, that’s the line Glenn has taken, and I did deal with it at great length in a discussion on this blog. Indeed, Glenn proved himself unable to explain why his response was any more reaaonable than that of a Young Earth Creationist to the fossil record etc. (who use the same strategy of ad hocery and mystery mongering to deal with such counter evidence). None of that gets a mention here of course.

And, as I repeatedly pointed out in the radio interview with Glenn, if the theodicies fail, Glenn comes out as deeply irrational even if the first premise of his moral argument (that there’s no good without God) can be established (which it can’t). That’s also ignored here.

Basically, I have established Glennis deeply irrational. Though obviously he is never going to accept that.

PS my point about the moral argument and probabilities was basically right. If an argument is (i) deductively valid and (ii) has 5 non-redundant premises of prob 0.8 each, then the highest probability you can reasonably assign the conclusion given just those two facts alone is indeed 0.33. The highly technical stuff about upper bounds boiled down to the observation that given other factors it might be reasonable to assigna a higher probability to the conclusion. Well, sure. I knew that already. I am not sure Glenn was able to follow that discussion though (which involved a very knowledgable Tim).

PS I shan’t comment again here. Got a paper to write…

“Seriously again?” Yes. If you continue to misrepresent and distort what was said like this, expect me to show up and correct you.

The upshot was that Stephen’s assessment of the moral argument’s probabilistic strength was simply mistaken” Why? It wasn’t mistaken – it was entirely on target. It just needed phrasing a bit more accurately.

“,,,and he was merely gratuitously assuming that the only grounds for supposing that God is good is the moral argument”

Doh, I never thought of that. What I fool I have been. But what’s it got to do with my assessment of the strength of the moral argument?

“AND that the moral argument requires a long list of premises such that the final probability is low.”

The first premise requires significant support – various things need ruling out, as you acknowledged in your informal presentation of it. So there several suppressed premises. However, when I asked you to spell them out in a formal version so we could count them and assess their probability, you refused!

I’d call that running away…

On my observation that ad hocery and mystery mongering being what you, Young Earth Creationist and various nutters have in common re defensive strategy, I am of course entirely correct. You first misunderstood what ad hoc meant, then tried denying you were making ad hoc moves, then resorted to insisting it didn’t matter that you were, without ever providing a decent explanation of why (except to say your moral argument saves you, but – even with an established first premises – the moral argument does significantly raise the probability of God unless you have FIRST dealt with the PoE, for the reasons I explained. The first premise just combines with the PoE to deliver the conclusion there are no objective morsl values – which was only a somewhat suspect intuition in the first place).

You’re in an Intellectual black hole, Glenn. Just like many Young Earth Creationists, Christian Scientists, etc. – people who hold entirely different religious beliefs, yet are as convinced as you, and just as set on shoring up the belief of the faithful and gaining more True Believers, as you…

Does that thought never, ever, cross your mind?

patient not patine, whatever that is. must read things before hit “send”

‘You’re in an Intellectual black hole’

I hear that from my professors everyday… It builds confidence.

Stephen, you’re familiar with the main theodicies suggested by orthodox Christian theists. Why don’t you accept them? (Perhaps they are developed in a fairly ad hoc fashion; perhaps their cousins, defences, make—quite justified, in my opinion—appeals to mystery; but what does any of that have to do with the usefulness of theodicies or defences?)

Heh. I’m a fan of many-world theodicies.

For f*ck’s sake Glenn. You just selectively quoted only part of what I said. Here’s the full quote:

“It seems, given what Tim has said, that the highest probability we are licensed to place on the conclusion of an argument, by virtue of its being valid and having five non-redundant premises of probability of 0.8 each, is 0.32768.”

Read it carefully. Notice the part you selectively edited out and think about what it means.

0.32… is the highest probability we are licensed to place on the conclusion given no more than that an argument that has (i) deductive validity and (ii) 5 non-redundant premises of prob 0.8 each.

The “lower bounds” point is that the conclusion may yet have a higher probability for other reasons (e.g. other strong arguments for same conclusion, probabilistic relations between premises, etc.) as we agreed ages ago. That’s irrelevant to the question of what is the highest probability we are licensed to place on the conclusion given just (i) and (ii).

“Saying that it tells us the “highest” probability that we can assign to the conclusion on the basis of the argument is clearly not right, because that implies that the probability might in fact be lower. ”

Ah I see your confusion, Glenn. Actually, saying 0.32… is the highest probability that can reasonably be assigned to the conclusion given just (i) and (ii) does NOT imply the probability of the conclusion may be lower, given just (i) and (ii), does it?

True, the probability of the conclusion, all things considered, might indeed yet turn out to be lower than 0.32… (but that would indeed require that the probability of one of the premises is then also lower than 0.8).

It seems to me that that’s the crux of it: Stephen called the lowest the highest, when it isn’t, and I couldn’t find the justification for it. I’ve only looked at all these comments (and the history) today and that’s how it comes across.

Put it like this, Glenn. Given just (i) and (ii), we can reasonably assign no higher or lower probability to the conclusion than 0.32, though of course the probability of the conclusion may yet turn out to be much higher, or, indeed, lower (though the latter would requires the rejection of (ii))

“And no, I didn’t selectively quote you, because the fact that your statement was conditional is not the part that I was correcting you on. I was pointing out why “highest” should be replaced with “lowest.””

But that “lowest” is the right word to use only follows if my claim is understood non-conditionally! That’s exactly my point.

“The point is that given i) and ii) (correcting it to a two premise argument), we can’t deny that the probability of the conclusion is higher, but we can definitely rule out that it’s lower.”

Yes, indeed, we can’t deny that the all-things-considered probability of the conclusion might be higher. I have said that many, many times. That’s obvious. My point is WE ARE NOT JUSTIFIED IN GIVING THE CONCLUSION A HIGHER PROBABILITY THAN 0.32.. ON THE BASIS OF JUST (I) AND (II) ABOVE. That’s my point.

Given just (i) and (ii) above, the HIGHEST probability we’re justified in assigning the conclusion of that hypothetical argument is 0.32…

Stephen, are you willing to say with equal force and repetition:

“Given just (i) and (ii) above, the LOWEST probability we’re justified in assigning the conclusion of that hypothetical argument is 0.32…”

(recognising that you’re talking about five premises and I’m talking about two, so the figure would be 0.64)

If not, why not? It looks to me like this choice has been simply made because of partisanship.

And my last comment on this – I see that you keep talking about assigning *a* probability based on this two premise argument (although you’re talking about a five premise argument). Something I’ve said already is that on the basis of this argument we’re actually not justified in assigning a specific probability at all. We’re only justified in establishing a boundary – a lowest bound. If we’re being careful and not overstepping what we’re justified in saying, the MOST we can say is “whatever the actual probability is, it can only be this much or higher.”

We are doing things wrongheadedly if we end up saying: “On the basis of this argument, the probability is no HIGHER than….”

Also, re you also willing to concede that the all-things-considered probability of the conclusion may be lower than 0.32 (though of course that would also require downward revision of the probability of at least one premise).

Glenn, you say:

“Not the same.

You included “higher” as well as lower in that statement.”

Are you serious? Suppose I say I love cheese and I love chocolate, and someone says, but do you like cheese? I say: yes, I just said so. Would I be right? If the reply came; No you said you love cheese AND you love chocolate, surely we could only reasonably conclude that we were dealing with either an idiot, or an intellectual trickster and charlatan.

“Once more: we are not justified in assigning any probability here.”

In which case I am indeed correct. We are not justified in assigning a probability higher than 0.32…

No Thomas I’m not claiming that.

Indeed they can read, Glenn.

BTW I didn’t choose 5 premises because your argument had five steps. I just picked five because your argument had four, and as you said about them: “Now obviously a number of these premises need to be defended” That’s to say, a number of premises look suspect and require supporting argument, i.e. more premises…

“I’m dabbling in things way out of my depth here, so maybe I’m wrong. Probability isn’t my strong point…”

Neither is theology?

Stephen, when I say of my premises that they “need to be defended,” I never meant that they “look suspect.” I just meant that they are not already accepted by everyone. Just saying.

Thomas,

Your example about sums up this odd little dispute:

You’re right that, given the assumptions you make, the lower-bound of the probability of the conclusion is simply the product of each probability. So, if you told me you had an argument that moves the bounds of a probability from 0-1 to 0.495-1 should I be impressed? I don’t really see why.

Of course we have other reasons to think that Socrates was ‘imperfect’, and this argument is certainly not the best one you could come up with to arive at that conclusion. But the fact other arguments provide better support for a conclusion can hardly be used to assess how strong a given argument is!

I agree with you that background information is important, and what we really ought to be doing is using Bayes Factors to measure the strength of a new argument – unfortunately that lands us in subjective terroritory and I doubt anyone would agree on just what the background is.

“To reiterate, my argument is a two premise argument with a conclusion.”

In that ridiculously simple form it’s useless (though it’s a good rhetorical device that goes down well with the faithful). It only has power once you begin to build a case for the premise that if there is no god, there are no moral facts, and that takes more premises. You had a stab here

http://www.beretta-online.com/wordpress/2011/the-conditional-premise-of-the-moral-argument/

with three additional premises, but that additional argument led only to the weaker:

“Therefore, if there are moral facts, the most plausible way to think of their basis is in terms of a supernatural person who brings moral facts about.”

And in any case you yourself acknowledged some of these additional premises in turn needed defending. E.g. “The basis of moral facts is not natural”? Why I accept that? Yet more premises are required for support.

Over here

http://www.beretta-online.com/wordpress/2011/the-conditional-premise-of-the-moral-argument/

is your attempt to argue for your conditional premise. You produce a rambling 5,000 word essay with rather hedged conclusions: “Firstly, the nature of moral facts compared to the nature of natural facts in general suggests important differences that make moral facts difficult to portray as simply features of the natural world. Secondly, the attempts by atheist philosophers to provide a natural foundation for moral facts does not look promising at all, contributing to the suspicion that if atheism’s best cannot provide such a foundation, it may simply not be there”

Notice that even after your extended 5k word essay you are still hedging with “suggests” “does not look promising” etc. Also notice that the arguments vaguely suggested in this 5k word essay are clearly arguments involving several premises. However, it is not clear what those premises are, or exactly how the arguments run. I asked you to set the premises out clearly and you did indeed refuse.

So, your moral argument is a two premise argument? Yeh right. So is this:

There are no moral facts if there’s a God.
There are moral facts.
There is no God.

Once you introduce the additional premises required to support your conditional premise, it’s clear your argument is going to involve several more premises. Even if there are just five basic premises with a pretty high probability of 0.8 each (and this assumption involves me being pretty generous), we won’t be justified in assigning a higher probability to the conclusion that 0.32… knowing just that (i) the argument is valid and (ii) there are 5 non-redundant premises with prob 0.8 each.

You want me to show patience and bipartisanship? Are you exhibiting patience and bipartisanship when you still:

Fail to acknowledge I was RIGHT to say that fact that a hypothetical moral argument has five non-redundant premises of of five premises, does not justify us in assigning a higher probability to its conclusion than 0.32… to its conclusion (whether or not we’re justified in assigning any probability at all to that conclusion on just that basis [though of course we are: a conditional one])

Fail to acknowledge that I was RIGHT to say that such an argument is, as it stands, pretty weak.

Fail to acknowledge that I was RIGHT when I said I had made this point prior to your saying I hadn’t.

Fail to acknowledge that your way of avoiding that last point was to say that asserting A and B isn’t the same as asserting A – either an idiotic comment or downright dishonest intellectual trickery/smokescreen from you.

Fail to acknowledge that your conditional premise DOES indeed require supporting premises.

Fail to acknowledge I was RIGHT to say you were refusing to unpack what those supporting premises were…

Fail to acknowledge that the “upper bounds” point was almost entirely smokescreen, given I was never denying that the conclusion of such a hypothetical moral argument might be higher given factors other than that it has five non-redundant premises of prob 0.8 each.

I have at least been gracious enough to admit that my original way of raising my worry was not good, and needed tightening up, which the whole upper bounds worry did allow me to do (largely thanks to the patience of Tim, not at all to you).

You have not been gracious enough to admit one single error. You have, at every single step, dug in, using ploys and arguments that in some cases it’s hard to believe that even you didn’t know they were just smokescreen moves.

Exposing all these errors has taken me getting on for a hundred hours of slow, painstaking analysis, over several moths of interaction with you.

So forgive me if I decline any lectures in patience and bipartisanship from you.

I am not sure what you do is what Jesus would do.

The jury is still out on whether or not Glenns made any important errors. Dr Law, it is plain to this reader, at least, that you are in a bad way and being very unprofessional about it. You chose to put these long hours and months into this. I think it has been an interesting exchange when you haven’t been completely childish, and I want to thank you for that. Through your Exchange with Glenn, you two have provided access to important avenues of knowledge to laypeople like myself who are very interested and can benefit from this stuff. Stop whining, sir.

John, philosophy gave birth to science. Philosophy of religion is fascinating and will provide something of use to mankind if it enables people to identify snake oil salesmen who purport to possess metaphysical certainty (ie. “there is life after death and this is how to achieve it”).

If there is an ugly step-child, it’s theology and it’s parents are ignorance and fear.

Stephen, I don’t even know why you’re talking about a five premise moral argument at all (if not because you mistakenly thought the “five step” argument had five premises)). That’s what I’ve just explained to you in comment #25 – the same one where I suggested that you weren’t patiently reading me. I use no such argument. How apropos!

Fail to acknowledge that I was RIGHT to say that such an argument is, as it stands, pretty weak.

Asking me to admit – on pain of being partisan – that my argument “is pretty weak” is about as gratuitous as things get! How is that not like asking you to admit that the Evil God challenge is not a challenge at all? Or if this isn’t my argument that you’re referring to – who cares?

You can claim that I never unpacked my defence of the conditional premise of the moral argument, in spite of complaining about how long that defence is (!!!), but just insisting that I am in the wrong unless I crumble and acknowledge that I didn’t do it… How can you not see that this is a partisan approach? We disagree on this. It’s not that I have simply refused to give up ground that I know full well I should have.

Look, I’ll stop there. I don’t want to go on about it and sound like a nag (although you may well think I already have, and do). Your list of things that I won’t “acknowledge” is just a list of things over which we actually disagree. With respect, this is partisanship – not viewing the way the discussion went (or the way the arguments ended up succeeding or failing) in a fair way, the very thing that I was referring to. It amounts to just demanding that I acknowledge that I am wrong, and you are right.

Now, how about that thing that, as far as I can tell, you haven’t acknowledged: Your worry about the probability of my conclusion was not mistaken because you failed to “tighten” up the way you expressed it. It was absolutely mistaken in the type of claim that you thought was justified. Let me remind you:

In case it’s not clear, I am pointing out that a deductively valid moral argument based on even say five basic premises with an 80% probability of truth each, produces a conclusion that has 68% probability of being false. Much more likely to be false than true!

This was not a “tightening” issue, Stephen. You’ve never acknowledged this, but I think you know that this was flatly wrong. As a philosophy lecturer, you would be right to but a big red X next to a student’s answer that went like this and to tell the student that they just haven’t understood the way deduction and probability work together. You did not understand how probability worked here. I told you, you denied it. Tim explained it to you, you accepted it (apparently) without saying “Oh, so I guess my claim was dead wrong then, and Glenn was correct.” You claimed that your multiplication trick shows that the conclusion has a 68% probability of being false. And now, if I may be so bold, you’re still riding the wave of confidence that you got from saying this, even though it’s just wrong and you’ve had to stop saying it. Now it looks like you’re trying to avoid admitting a failure to understand, saying oh well it was close, you just worded it poorly. No. granted, you’re sorted that out now, but if you want to run through a list of who won’t admit that they were wrong…

And now I think you’re in the position of having to acknowledge that theodicies aren’t ad hoc (as per my last blog entry). Those two planks upon which you were resting your whole argument, in the end. Gone. What’s left? Not a lot, as I see things.

Glenn, reading through this exchange (in several threads) and observing Stephen running out of room on his ever-shrinking island (or iceberg as you put it – perfect analogy!) reminds me yet again: Sometimes the best way of refuting someone is to just let them speak.

The remarkable thing here is that Stephen is the professional philosopher who (possibly!) regards you as just a hack with a blog. And yet here it looks the other way around!

That is a shameful response.

Glenn you say: “Stephen, I don’t even know why you’re talking about a five premise moral argument at all (if not because you mistakenly thought the “five step” argument had five premises)). “

It’s a HYPOTHETICAL argument Glenn, not necessarily your argument. Do you remember me saying this clearly at, for example, comment 39 (first lot comments) above, where I say:

“ps I am talking about a hypothetical argument about which we know no more than (i) and (i). I don’t claim it’s your moral argument.”
So I WAS right!

P.S. Nathan you say I am not being clear enough. Is this clear enough, now? Is it clear enough now that Glenn has just misrepresented me by insisting that the points I was asking were about his argument (whatever it is), not just some hypothetical argument? Ask yourself, Nathan, whether we might reasonably suppose that Glenn actually KNOWS he just misrepresented me in order to get himself out of jail. If he does know, his behaviour is shameful. If he doesn’t know, he’s being pretty thick.

Glenn. Please NOW acknowledge that such a HYPOTHETICAL argument is indeed pretty weak!

Glenn, you say: “You can claim that I never unpacked my defence of the conditional premise of the moral argument, in spite of complaining about how long that defence is (!!!),”

Misrepresentation. I complained that you never set out the supporting argument clearly in such a way that we could identify exactly what the premises were and how many there are. I was RIGHT to say you refused to do that. You ran away.

Glenn you then say” “Now, how about that thing that, as far as I can tell, you haven’t acknowledged: Your worry about the probability of my conclusion was not mistaken because you failed to “tighten” up the way you expressed it. It was absolutely mistaken in the type of claim that you thought was justified. Let me remind you:
In case it’s not clear, I am pointing out that a deductively valid moral argument based on even say five basic premises with an 80% probability of truth each, produces a conclusion that has 68% probability of being false. Much more likely to be false than true! This was not a “tightening” issue, Stephen. You’ve never acknowledged this, but I think you know that this was flatly wrong.”

Yes, this is indeed flatly wrong, Glenn, if the probability is supposed to be that finally assigned to the conclusion all things considered. Happy to admit that. and in fact I admitted it ages ago. Several times. But OF COURSE I never meant the all things considered probability of the conclusion, as I have explained a million times.. So what WAS I getting at? I was getting at the point that given no more than that an argument has 5 true premises of prob 0.8 each is 0.32, we are not justified in assigning a higher prob to the conclusion than 0.32… That’s true! Isn’t it! Why not admit it? And it’s true that claim that has a 0.32 probability of being true has a 0.68 probability of being false.

Hope this is all clear enough for you now, Nathan.

PS in comment 36 where I say “Is it clear enough now that Glenn has just misrepresented me by insisting that the points I was asking were about his argument (whatever it is)” “asking” should be “making”.

Stephen,
Doesn’t your criticism prove to much: It seems to suggest that any argument which has (a) three or more premises (b) the premises are not known with certainty and (c) require additional defence is going to be a weak argument.

That would seem to rule out almost any argument offered for any substantive philosophical conclusion. How many arguments meet conditions (a) (b) and (c), most i would think.

Consider the following.

[1] If God does not exist gratuitous evil does not exist
[2] Gratious evil exists
Therefore
[3] God does not exist.

Now [2] is obviously going to require some defending, one is going to have to challenge numerous premises of numerous theodicies, one is also going to have to challenge various forms of sceptical theism responses provided by various thinkers and so on. In doing so your going to need to offer a whole lot of other arguments.

Now lets assume you offer five other arguments, let’s assume they have premises which are 80% certain. Then, by your own reasoning the problem of evil fails. Yet you defend the problem of evil in your writings.
Or consider

[1] If there is compelling reason for thinking God exists then there is a compelling reason for thinking and evil God exists
[2] There is no compelling reason for thinking an evil God exists
Therefore
[3] There is no compelling reason for thinking God exists

Now none of these premises, is certain lets assume [1] and [2] have a probability of 80%, premise [1] however needs defending, that involves looking at all the different arguments and reasons given for thinking God exists, different cosmological, teleological, moral arguments, ontological arguments, arguments from experience and so on, so presumably there will be half a dozen or so arguments to support [1], lets say each of these has a premise with a probability of 80% then when they are multiplied the evil God challenge becomes really weak.

TAM, we already know how to spot a snake oil salesman. When a claim is made, ask for the evidence. If the response is anything but “here’s the evidence”, including the very popular “I don’t have any evidence, but I do have this really great argument”, you have yourself a salesman.

Stephen, Glenn “finally realizes” that he needs to cut his premises down from five in order to escape trouble?

Stephen, you can’t mean that. This claim on my part that I am using three premises is not a back-track. Cast your mind back to when I first alerted you to that blog post on the simple explanation of the moral argument. I pointed out to you then that while as written there were five steps, in fact it is reducible to two premises and a conclusion. In fact, what you’ve quoted is me reminding you that it only required two premises – reminding you that I had stated this some time ago. And yet you introduced this quote as though this was a new manoeuvre on my part to get out of trouble. To now claim that this is a new move, a sort of back-track, is not really very honest.

And OK, now you’ve admitted that your claim about probability was flat wrong. Nice to see! You wouldn’t do that before, instead trying to minimise or re-portray the error, saying that really it was just not “tightly” worded. Now it has been upgraded to flat wrong, which is progress. Your claim about probability was dead wrong, but once this was shown to you, you still seemed to be buoyed by your initial hope that you’d found a great rebuttal. Even now that the probabilistic argument has been discarded, it still appears to be playing a crucial role, and has really become your major reason for not thinking that the moral argument is any good.

And now, with all respect, it has become clear that you’re attacking straw when you complain about me failing to acknowledge that you’re right about a hypothetical five premise argument. Here’s why: I never claimed that your hypothetical five premise argument was strong. Did I? If so, where? So why now – when I raise a concern about partisanship, would you now suddenly engage in a tu quoque by saying “Oh yeah? Well you never admitted that my own hypothetical argument isn’t very strong!”

So what? A hypothetical like that isn’t impressive either way. Your hypothetical argument would establish that the actual probability of a claim is between 32% and 100%, which is neither awful nor awe-inspiring. But I never said that was a very strong argument, so why you think I now have to admit that it’s not very strong… I guess you’ve lost me. Matt is on the money here: “Glenn, please acknowledge that an argument you NEVER made was weak, and that Stephen is right about a trivial claim.” But for what it’s worth: An argument like that does not establish an impressive lower bound of probability, no. It just shows that a conclusion isn’t very unlikely. If for any reason you think that I have denied that somewhere, then you now know that I do not deny this (and to my knowledge, I never have).

Is that clear enough? What relevance this has does escape me somewhat…

“Fail to acknowledge that I was RIGHT when I said I had made this point prior to your saying I hadn’t”

No. I did not fail to acknowledge that you had made this point about your own hypothetical argument. Not sure what you’re getting at here, but I acknowledged that you had made this point. That’s why I kept adding that this wasn’t important, since my argument isn’t a five premise argument (remember how I kept saying that in order to be relevant when it comes to my argument, 0.32 would need to change to 0.64). So while I’m happy to admit that your hypothetical argument wasn’t impressive, I have no reason to admit that I had denied that you had made this point before. You made it repeatedly, apparently gaining confidence from doing so.

And I’m surprised to see you claiming that I had failed to acknowledge that the conditional premise requires extra support. Goodness, you complained about how long my blog post was when I tried to lay out just that support. How can I “acknowledge” this without simply ignoring the facts? Now – and here is the rub, Stephen, so don’t miss this – you might personally believe that the “rambling” case I made for that premise doesn’t warrant me treating it as though it has a probability of 0.8 (or any high probability). Or you might reject every single argument that doesn’t include every reason for accepting every premise (I think this is unreasonable). But as it stands, I have always acknowledged that the premise needs support. Obviously the level of certainty that I have about that premise is meant to be the certainty that one can – in my view – have in light of the reasons I have given for believing it. So let’s have none of this “Glenn won’t admit that the premise needs supporting premises” stuff.

And as for the last thing: “Fail to acknowledge that the “upper bounds” point was almost entirely smokescreen”

I never said anything about upper bounds. My “lower bound” point was anything but a smokescreen. It was an explanation of why your probability claim was “flat wrong,” something we now agree on.

This is now becoming a drawn out case of you getting so tied up in trying to find a “naughty list” that the big issues are slipping away. Unfortunately, I wonder if the real aim here is to distract from the issues that have been spelled out. Sorry if that’s unpleasant, but that’s how it looks. So to recap:

1) The only saving grace you seemed to think you have for the EGC in all of this was that 1) we’re not allowed to consider the moral argument until the problem of evil is fully dealt with first (an ad hoc requirement if ever there was one)
2) The only actual reason you could conjure up for rejecting theodicies is that they are ad hoc (a claim that I believe I have shown to be obviously false in a more recent blog)
and
3) The only actual substantial criticism that I have seen you give of the moral argument itself was based firstly on a method of probability assessment that you now find to be “flatly wrong,” and more recently on a method of assessment that involves simply insisting that I include more premises, a move that appears to just assume without argument that whatever reasons I have laid out in support of the conditional premise of the moral argument fail to give it the credibility that I treat it with. Sorry, you’ll need to argue for this.

So your protracted distractions nothwithstanding, the upshot of all this is that the Evil God Challenge has not fared very well. When you add to this the other considerations that I have offered against it (not counting the moral argument), I’d say the most respectable thing to do would be to shelve it.

Stephen,

“Sure I just said above that Glenn sets out a case for the premises, didn’t I?”

and then

“Moreover, even when Glenn tried to make a case for the conditional premise, Glenn never set out the actual premises so we could see what they were. I asked him to. He refused. We all know why….”

What this sounds like to me is that you are saying, “I asked Glenn for six and he robbed me! He only gave me half a dozen!”

but whatever, it’s a done deal.

One would be justified in assigning a probability higher than 0.32, provided it were at least logically possible that one of the premises be false and yet the argument still true. We can’t say how much more probable, but *that* we can say it is more probable follows directly from the probability calculus.

Mike D, it’s not a red herring for the following reason: If it’s true that God is the basis of all moral duties, then God’s nature or will is revealed in those duties. If those duties involve things that human beings think of as good (e.g. kindness, mercy etc), then God’s nature or will is good in the way that human beings think of goodness. If that’s true, then God is not evil but good.

Well, on the Divine command theory I think the “Evil God” is incoherent as God gets to define good and evil. But then on that theory, as C.S.Lewis pointed out, all one is saying when one says God is good is that he wills what he wills. As does Satan. So it all comes down to God being omnipotent and Satan not. Or put crudely “might is right!” The essence of Calvinism, no need for a theodicy when God can play Humpty Dumpty.