Theodicies

Yep.


Nope.

Where's the essential difference?

The first is genuinely logically impossible. Logical impossibility is a formal concept which essentially means that a proposition or set of propositions entails a contradiction. Compare with logical possibility, which Wikipedia defines as both "a logical proposition that cannot be disproved" as well as, in terms of modal logic, a proposition that is "true in some possible world". There is no possible world in which a bag can contain no more than 10 pounds and simultaneously can contain more than 10 pounds (100 pounds), because this is contradictory.

The second is only (purported by yourself to be) physically impossible. That is to say that, given the (presumed) laws of physics, the requirements cannot be met. There is no logical contradiction entailed by the design requirements though: there is a possible world in which they are or can be met.

But is there a possible world in which all the greatly conflicting design requirements for the tank, and also all the physical reality design requirements for human life and fulfillment, are both met? Consider the very finely tuned and balanced standard model of physics in which if almost anything is even minutely changed, what is left of the Universe is impossible for life to exist in, much less flourish. That total job gets so difficult and implausible to accomplish I think it is preposterous, even if not absolutely logically impossible. Making tradeoffs and adjustments balancing many opposing factors still necessary even for a powerful but non-omnipotent creator being. 

And as I have pointed out, it is evident in our existing physical reality that countless tradeoffs have already been accomplished to allow our existence as complete and accomplished and creative human beings in a physical reality system exhibiting a high degree of regularity and predictability and humanly understandable mathematical basis all allowing the development of science. Certainly we may not like many of these value balancing decisions, but that must be a clue to the nature including limitations of the creator being(s).

Might be of interest here ->

The gnosticism of Harold Bloom — or, What Does the Daemon Know?

Nathan Smith

...Bloom denies a God who could allow the Holocaust and schizophrenia and yet still be considered all powerful and all good. The solution for these particular Jews, rather than become what we may traditionally refer to today as atheists, instead addressed their problems through a theological innovation: borrowing from the legacy of Plato and his students, they instead envisioned the world as created by the Demiurge (or “craftsman,” a god who creates from pre-existing materials on his own wits and intuitions), yet far from being the God of covenantal love and care, this craftsman deity was at best a bumbling fool and at worst a malevolent menace. This god, in the Gnostic view, had fashioned a shoddy world littered with errors and defects (the numerous traumas and tragedies of life) and trapped every human being inside. Salvation from this dilemma would not come through getting on the Demiurge’s good side, either by action, faith, or fidelity — but by gnosis, Greek for knowledge. For Gnostics, the road to deliverance was to realize that one had been entrapped in this material world by a nefarious power, and that the way out of suffering was to seek for that which was higher than the world’s craftsman — an even higher God, estranged from this world, yet who created the Demiurge and out of whom the Demiurge created human beings. Each human being possessed within themselves a splinter of this higher God, which they must come to know themselves (a Greek virtue if there ever was one) in order to escape the evil Demiurge and return to their heavenly home.

In line with each form of Gnosticism, Bloomian gnosticism contemplates our sense of being strangers in a strange land, even in our own lives. I’ve written rather extensively in other posts about the psychological distance one may experience between reality itself and one’s understanding of that reality, and I suspect this alienation may be at least akin to the estrangement described in Bloom’s gnosticism and its constituents.

Not only in myself but even in Bloom I sense a hesitation to condemn the material world itself. Traditionally, Gnosticism is quite dualistic, dividing the world in half, one being the evil and entrapping world of matter, the other being the underlying and liberating world of the spirit. While I can’t quite speak for Bloom here, I sense in his preference for Western literature, far from a distaste for materiality or physicality, something like a shared sorrow for the mayhem and confusion of typical human existence. One needn’t reject matter wholesale on any metaphysical principle in order to acknowledge the suffering intrinsic to life as a finite, conscious being. Thus it seems to me the themes which Bloomian gnosticism recapitulates are an acknowledgment of the potentially profound suffering of existence, and an insistence that that suffering (or at least the painful way in which we experience it) is to be blamed on a deep sort of separation from a crucial foundation — a lost transcendence to contain us. In a word, we feel much like a child being chased through the woods, carrying vague memories of having been instead an unborn infant safely held in its mother’s womb.

[Laird]

But is there a possible world in which all the greatly conflicting design requirements for the tank, and also all the physical reality design requirements for human life and fulfillment, are both met?

Yes, I think there is. It's potentially even this one: as I mentioned earlier, if nuts-and-bolts UFOs can instantaneously accelerate at unbelievable rates, then why couldn't a tank achieve 100mph over rough ground?

Consider also that the designers of our reality could overcome pretty much any limitation by stipulating more specific laws of physics that get around (override) it in a given situation, without even the need for divine/designer intervention.

If I understand you correctly - based on these posts and our past convos - the idea here is that there is a God of Good and a God of Evil, which means Good and Evil are elemental forces of some sort?

Yep, that's it in a nutshell.

I guess to me this feels a bit odd, as I see Evil as a result of varied issues ranging from personal weakness to societal conditioning to outright mental illness stemming from certain unfortunate abnormalities of the body. Why I assume, given the accounts of hostile spirits, that such problems - or other issues perhaps - manifest even beyond this life.

I get where you're coming from, but to me, evil is not merely a deficit of good - a weakness or abnormality - and thus in a sense passive, but rather an active malevolence in its own (oppositional) right. You can, at times, both literally and figuratively smell it.

The rest of your post I'm fairly amenable to other than that I frame the situation differently per the above.

I'm curious as to how you reconcile your views as above with the fairly massive body of experiential evidence from at least most Western NDEs of a near afterlife state of total good, light, and love, associated with a similarly massive amount of veridical evidence for the reality of these states of consciousness as being of another state of existence. Evidence which includes profound spiritual personality changes over the subsequent lives of the experiencers. 

This evidence also seems to point to there still somehow being against all logic another more positive rationalization for the existence of pain and evil, that there somehow really is a fully valid and successful theodicy if we could only find it.

Do you view all of this NDE evidence as an attempt at deception by the dark forces you surmise to exist? This then would be similar in a way to the attitude of Christian fundamentalists toward NDEs.

[Laird]

I'm curious as to how you reconcile your views as above with the fairly massive body of experiential evidence from at least most Western NDEs of a near afterlife state of total good, light, and love, associated with a similarly massive amount of veridical evidence for the reality of these states of consciousness as being of another state of existence. Evidence which includes profound spiritual personality changes over the subsequent lives of the experiencers. 

I'm not sure how to fully reconcile the two, but I do think it's worth pointing out that a significant number of NDEs involve hellish states. They're not all love and light.

This evidence also seems to point to there still somehow being against all logic another more positive rationalization for the existence of pain and evil, that there somehow really is a fully valid and successful theodicy if we could only find it.

Maybe. I sure hope there is.

Do you view all of this NDE evidence as an attempt at deception by the dark forces you surmise to exist?

I don't need to - because, recognising an ultimate force for good, positive afterlife experiences are compatible with that force - but it is a possibility.

I'm not sure how to fully reconcile the two, but I do think it's worth pointing out that a significant number of NDEs involve hellish states. They're not all love and light.


Maybe. I sure hope there is.


I don't need to - because, recognising an ultimate force for good, positive afterlife experiences are compatible with that force - but it is a possibility.

On "hellish" or frightening NDEs, a few thoughts.
 
It's important to note that there have been relatively reassuring interpretations of frightening NDEs, especially in contrast to Christian Fundamentalist hellfire-and-damnation beliefs. For instance, from an insightful article at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...xperiences:

"We do know that Frightening Near Death Experiences (FNDEs) are rare, but it has been hard to determine the exact frequency at which they occur. Reports in the literature suggest that distressing experiences range from only 1% to 15% of those having NDEs.
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Investigators have been able to identify three primary types of frightening experiences. The first is basically experiencing the NDE. The individual is scared by such an unusual experience and the feeling of loss of control. After all, it is not every day that someone has an out-of-body-experience. The second type is experiencing being in a void. It is described as being completely alone in vast darkness and disconnected from everything and everybody. Ken Vincent refers to it as an “existential hell.” The last type is the least common of the frightening experiences. These are the truly hellish NDEs. People describe scenarios that could easily be found in the lower levels of Dante’s Inferno, complete with fire and demonic beings.
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The frightening aspects of the NDEs have been viewed by some as representing a separation from God, whether it is the disconnection of the void or finding oneself in a hellish environment.
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If a distressing or hellish NDE has impacted a person negatively, then it is important to support and educate them as to the potentially positive impact it can have on their lives. Mystical narratives are replete with individuals entering the “darkness” on their way to being united with God, such as St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. History and literature abound with people who have gone through distressing and trying times who then emerge transformed. These are the classic ancient stories of suffering, death, and rebirth.
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Another way of putting their experience into perspective is to educate them about what Joseph Campbell refers to as the Hero’s Journey. The journey begins with the hero leaving his home, going to a strange and unknown place, encountering challenges and temptations, and returning home forever changed and transformed. Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow is also helpful to a further understanding of what has transpired. Basically, the shadow is the dark side of our personality, those parts of ourselves that we do not want to acknowledge and keep hidden from the world and ourselves in our unconscious. Bringing these out into the light to be examined and incorporated can make us whole. What better way to be confronted with that aspect of ourselves than a trip to hellish surroundings. Confronting our demons wherever they may be has the power to heal us, strengthen us, and make us whole. Perhaps it is those who have the FNDE who actually benefit the most."

[Laird]

On "hellish" or frightening NDEs, a few thoughts.
 
It's important to note that there have been relatively reassuring interpretations of frightening NDEs, especially in contrast to Christian Fundamentalist hellfire-and-damnation beliefs. For instance, from an insightful article at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...xperiences:

A couple of thoughts in response:

Firstly, it's noted more or less explicitly in that article that hellish NDEs don't seem to correlate with the moral character of the experiencer, which is what we'd expect if the demonic - as an independent power - was simply pulling whomever it could into darkness.

Secondly, I admit, though, that it is hard to understand why, given my supposition based on my personal, visceral experiences of evil entities, during positive NDEs presumably under the control of The Good, the nature of reality as a war between Light and Darkness is not emphasised. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that, according to my reading, the ideologies and metaphysics affirmed in NDEs vary widely, such that there is, in my opinion, very little that we can infer from them other than that after death, we most likely persist in some way in some state determined by who-knows-which criteria. What the point, then, of NDEs, and any genuine knowledge transmitted through them, actually is remains, in my opinion, yet to be determined.

In the context of the theodicy debate, here is some new material bearing on the apparently contentious question of the necessity or not in nature and life for the designer or designers to have carried out countless tradeoffs in order to develop something close to an optimal design yet one which is inherently by principle not perfect. Inevitably, many or most design requirements must be modified or reduced because of interactions with other systems and subsystems.

I ran across an excellent top-down explication of the incredibly intricate, complex and ingeniously designed living body systems found in biology. In particular, the human body. This is in a new book by both a medical doctor and an engineer, Your Designed Body, at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637120206/, summarized at https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/your-i...f-systems/.

"A large multi-cellular organism (like you) is like a continent with a deep and dark interior. Most of the cells reside deep in the interior with no direct access to the body’s surrounding environment. For a multicellular organism, then, harvesting the raw materials its cells need and getting rid of toxic by-products becomes a major logistical problem.

Several hundred such problems must be solved for a complex body to be alive. And many of the solutions to these basic problems generate new problems that must also be solved, or that constrain other solutions in critical ways. The result is that for a complex body to be alive, thousands of deeply interconnected problems must be solved, and many of them solved at all times, or life will fail."

Note that the necessity for engineering tradeoffs in the design process is specifically recognized, being in essence the accounting in the overall design of the system of systems for conflicts between the engineering solutions adopted for many of the disparate biological subsystems and parts. Inevitable and absolutely necessary tradeoff studies between candidate solutions to countless design issues.

At greater length, this book looks deeply into the engineering of the human body, and discovers incredible levels of complex engineering design. And all engineers inherently recognize the necessity for design tradeoffs in complex systems.

"Together, the many thousands of problems the body must solve for survival and reproduction require many thousands of ingenious solutions. Most of these solutions need special-purpose equipment across all levels of the body plan, from specifically adapted molecular machinery (like hemoglobin molecules) to specialized cells (like red blood cells) to tissues (like bone marrow) to whole body systems (like the cardiovascular system). This may involve hundreds of thousands of parts, replicated in millions of places.

Solutions to this class of problems always exhibit four interesting characteristics:

1. Specialization
It takes the right parts to make a working whole. Each part must perform a function with respect to the larger system. Each part must be made of the right materials, fine-tuned to precise tolerances, and equipped with suitable interfaces with the other parts. This is a design principle known as separation of concerns. Virtually every designed object in human experience is based on this design strategy. And this appears to be equally true in biological systems, including virtually every capability in the human body.

2. Organization
The parts must be in the right places, arranged and interconnected to enable the function of the whole. Each part must work with the other parts in an integrated way. The parts are often made of different materials, where a material is chosen for how its particular properties support the specific needs of that particular part and how it must function in light of the whole. This is a design principle known as the rule of composition. It counterbalances the separation of concerns principle. Separation of concerns breaks large problems into subproblems that are (slightly) easier to solve, while the rule of composition puts the solutions to the subproblems (the parts) together such that the function of the whole is achieved.

3. Integration
The parts must have exactly those interfaces that enable the parts to work together. With bones, this obviously involves their shapes, especially at their connection and articulation points (the joints). For other body systems this can involve structural support, alignment, shock absorption, gating and transport systems, electrical signaling, chemical signaling, exchange of complex information, and integrated logic.

4. Coordination
The parts must be coordinated such that each performs its respective function or functions at the right time. This usually requires one or more control systems, either active or passive, and usually some form of sensing and communication between the parts and the controls. This property is achieved by orchestration or choreography, which differ in the ways the controls are achieved, the former by a more centralized approach and the latter by a more distributed approach. In an old Chevy pickup, this function for the engine is achieved by a camshaft. In ATP Synthase, this is also achieved by a camshaft.

In designing a complex system, all four of the above factors must be considered across the whole when designing each of the parts.

When a system has all the right parts, in all the right places, made of the right materials, with the right specifications, doing their respective functions, at all the right times, to achieve an overall, system-level function that none of the parts can do on its own, you have what is known as a coherent system. Coherence, in this sense, is a functional requirement for all non-trivial systems. Moreover, in life the systems are never standalone — there are always interdependencies between and among the various component systems and parts. The human body is composed of coherent, interdependent systems."

It would seem then the maker(s) of this universe had to deal with existing constraints, causal regularities/rules perhaps put in place by some higher entity(ies) or are just Eternal Laws...though I'm admittedly wary of the latter proposition.

After all if the Highest Entity, the Ground of Being, is Aquinas' "Supreme Intellect" who sets causal relationships into place had rearranged the base regularities/rules of this universe differently then perhaps we could exist here as we do in varied spiritual/astral realms.

I guess one way of looking at it is the programmer who makes a game engine from scratch versus someone who makes a game in that engine versus an end consumer who uses an included level editor for that game. Each iteration means the person is working with the constraints the last person in the chain set. We could even add the person who made the programming language, the person who made the OS, the person who made the computer (going back to Alan Turing)...

On a separate note, Whitehead - or at least some readers of his - suggested God's goal is Novelty rather than moral concerns. Though I don't think Whitehead was a moral relativist so not sure how Good/Evil figure in this schema but perhaps God is aware but unconcerned about Platonic Good and Platonic Evil save for the novelty they generate?