It is _not_ okay to cut and paste arguments without thought, furthermore, I remind you that this is _my_ blog, and not yours, nor is this a class, you can’t assign homework. I’m considering this conversation over. I feel we have reached the limit, my argument (in my opinion) remains unassailed, evidently you are unwilling or unable to cease a pointless conversation. The _fact_ is, for me, my axioms are clear and present, my proofs are well-formed, and thus my theory rests on solid foundation. You don’t have to like it, you don’t even have to accept it, but if you take my axioms as fact, then you must accept their results (by consequence, no less, of those self-same axioms). If you do not like my results, then you must take one of my axioms to be false (or, at least, to not hold).

If you’d like to continue commenting, that’s fine, but come up with your own argument, or talk about something else.

DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE
Nothing that implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.
THOMAS AQUINAS. Summ. Theol., Ia Q. XXV, Art. 4.

“If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.” This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. The possibility of answering it depends on showing that the terms “good” and “almighty”; and perhaps also the term “happy” are equivocal: for it must he admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable In this chapter I shall make some comments on the idea of Omnipotence, and, in the following, some on the idea of Goodness.

Omnipotence means “power to do all, or everything” (Note: The original meaning in Latin may have been “power over or in all “, I give what I take to be current sense.) And we are told in Scripture that “with God all things are possible”. It is common enough in argument with an unbeliever, to be told that God, if He existed and were good, would do this or that; and then, if we point out that the proposed action is impossible, to be met with the retort, “But I thought God was supposed to be able to do anything”. This raises the whole question of impossibility.

In ordinary usage the word impossible generally implies a suppressed clause beginning with the word unless. Thus it is impossible for me to see the street from where I sit writing at this moment; that is, it is impossible to see the street unless I go up to the top floor where I shall be high enough to overlook the intervening building. If I had broken my leg I should say “But it is impossible to go up to the top floor” - meaning, however, that it is impossible unless some friends turn up who will carry me. Now let us advance to a different plane of impossibility, by saying “It is, at any rate, impossible to see the street so long as I remain where I am and the intervening building remains where it is.” Someone might add “unless the nature of space, or of vision, were different from what it is”. I do not know what the best philosophers and scientists would say to this, but I should have to reply “I don’t know whether space and vision could possibly have been of such a nature as you suggest “. Now it is clear that the words could possibly here refer to some absolute kind of possibility or impossibility which is different from the relative possibilities and impossibilities we have been considering. I cannot say whether seeing round corners is, in this new sense, possible or not, because I do not know whether it is self-contradictory or not. But I know very well that if it is self contradictory it is absolutely impossible. The absolutely impossible may also be called the intrinsically impossible because it carries its impossibility within itself, instead of borrowing it from other impossibilities which in their turn depend upon others. It has no unless clause attached to it. It is impossible under all conditions and in all worlds and for all agents.

“All agents” here includes God Himself. His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

It should, however, be remembered that human reasoners often make mistakes, either by arguing from false data or by inadvertence in the argument itself. We may thus come to think things possible which are really impossible, and vice versa. (Note: E.g., every good conjuring trick does something which to the audience with their data and their power of reasoning, seems self contradictory.) We ought, therefore, to use great caution in defining those intrinsic impossibilities which even Omnipotence cannot perform. What follows is to be regarded less as an assertion of what they are than a sample of what they might be like.

The inexorable “laws of Nature” which operate in defiance of human suffering or desert, which are not turned aside by prayer, seem, at first sight to furnish a strong argument against the goodness and power of God. I am going to submit that not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and “inexorable” Nature.
There is no reason to suppose that self consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a “self”, can exist except in contrast with an “other”, a something which is not the self. It is against an environment, and preferably a social environment, an environment of other selves, that the awareness of Myself stands out. This would raise a difficulty about the consciousness of God if we were mere theists: being Christians, we learn from the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that something analogous to “society” exists within the Divine being from all eternity - that God is Love, not merely in the sense of being the Platonic form of love, but because, within Him, the concrete reciprocities of love exist before all worlds and are thence derived to the creatures.

Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between. A creature with no environment would have no choices to make: so that freedom, like self consciousness (if they are not, indeed, the same thing) again demands the presence to the self of something other than the self.

The minimum condition of self consciousness and freedom, then, would be that the creature should apprehend God and, therefore, itself as distinct from God. It is possible that such creatures exist, aware of God and themselves, but of no fellow-creatures. If so, their freedom is simply that of making a single naked choice - of loving God more than the self or the self more than God. But a life so reduced to essentials is not imaginable to us. As soon as we attempt to introduce the mutual knowledge of fellow-creatures we run up against the necessity of “Nature”.

People often talk as if nothing were easier than for two naked minds to “meet” or become aware of each other. But I see no possibility of their doing so except in a common medium which forms their “external world” or environment. Even our vague attempt to imagine such a meeting between disembodied spirits usually slips in surreptitiously the idea of, at least, a common space and common time, to give the co- in co-existence a meaning: and space and time are already an environment. But more than this is required. If your thoughts and passions were directly present to me, like my own, without any mark of externality or otherness, how should I distinguish them from mine? And what thoughts or passions could we begin to have without objects to think and feel about? Nay, could I even begin to have the conception of “external” and “other” unless I had experience of an “external world”? You may reply, as a Christian, that God (and Satan) do, in fact, affect my consciousness in this direct way without signs of “externality”. Yes: and the result is that most people remain ignorant of the existence of both. We may therefore suppose that if human souls affected one another directly and immateriality, it would be a rare triumph of faith and insight for any one of them to believe in the existence of the others. It would be harder for me to know my neighbour under such conditions than it now is for me to know God: for in recognizing the impact of God upon me I am now helped by things that reach me through the external world, such as the tradition of the Church, Holy Scripture, and the conversation of religious friends. What we need for human society is exactly what we have – a neutral something, neither you nor I, which we can both manipulate so as to make signs to each other. I can talk to you because we can both set up sound-waves in the common air between us. Matter, which keeps souls apart, also brings them together. It enables each of us to have an “outside” as well as an “inside”, so that what are acts of will and thought for you are noises and glances for me; you are enabled not only to be, but to appear: and hence I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance.

Society, then, implies a common field or “world” in which its members meet. If there is an angelic society, as Christians have usually believed, then the angels also must have such a world or field; something which is to them as “matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic, sense) is to us.

But if matter is to serve as a neutral field it must have a fixed nature of its own. If a “world” or material system had only a single inhabitant it might conform at every moment to his wishes “trees for his sake would crowd into a shade”. But if you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will.

Nor is it clear that you could make your presence known to me -all the matter by which you attempted to make signs to me being already in my control and therefore not capable of being manipulated by you.

Again, if matter has a fixed nature and obeys constant laws, not all states of matter will be equally, agreeable to the wishes of a given soul, nor all equally beneficial for that particular aggregate of matter which he calls his body. If fire comforts that body at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance is reduced. Hence, even in a perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals which the pain-fibres in our nerves are apparently designed to transmit. Does this mean an inevitable element of evil (in the form of pain) in any possible world? I think not: for while it may be true that the least sin is an incalculable evil, the evil of pain depends on degree, and pains below a certain intensity are not feared or resented at all. No one minds the process “warm -beautifully hot - too hot - it stings” which warns him to withdraw his hand from exposure to the fire: and, if I may trust my own feeling, a slight aching in the legs as we climb into bed after a good day’s walking is, in fact, pleasurable.

Yet again, if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society. If a man travelling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction must be going uphill. If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is very far from being an evil: on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil, that of competition and hostility. And if souls are free, they cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem by competition instead of by courtesy. And once they have advanced to actual hostility, they can then exploit the fixed nature of matter to hurt one another. The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbour on the head. The permanent nature of matter in general means that when human beings fight, the victory ordinarily goes to those who have superior weapons, skill, and numbers, even if their cause is unjust.

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free-will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore, stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him - if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking - then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once the limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

As I said before, this account of the intrinsic necessities of a world is meant merely as a specimen of what they might be. What they really are, only Omniscience has the data and the wisdom to see: but they are not likely to be less complicated than I have suggested. Needless to say, “complicated” here refers solely to the human understanding of them; we are not to think of God arguing, as we do, from an end (co-existence of free spirits) to the conditions involved in it, but rather of a single, utterly self-consistent act of creation which to us appears, at first sight, as the creation of many independent things, and then, as the creation of things mutually necessary. Even we can rise a little beyond the conception of mutual necessities as I have outlined it - can reduce matter as that which separates souls and matter as that which brings them together under the single concept of Plurality, whereof “separation” and “togetherness” are only two aspects. With every advance in our thought the unity of the creative act, and the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though this or that element of it could have been removed, will become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the “best of all possible” universes, but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only “worlds that God could have made, but didn’t”. The idea of that which God “could have” done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them -that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower.

And that brings us to our next subject - the Divine goodness. Nothing so far has been said of this, and no answer attempted to the objection that if the universe must, from the outset, admit the possibility of suffering, then absolute goodness would have left better than not to create: I am aware of no human scales in which such a portentous question can be weighed. Some comparison between one state of being and another can be made, but the attempt to compare being and not being ends in mere words.

“It would be better for me not to exist” - in what sense “for me”?How should I, if I did not exist, profit by not existing? Our design is a less formidable one: it is only to discover how, perceiving a suffering world, and being assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we are to conceive that goodness and that suffering without contradiction!

1. God is “bound” by logic (essentially, this comprises my Axiom of Logic and Axiom of Consistency, eg, Logic is infallible in the sense that if something has a logical proof, then it is true. In other words, a Consistent logic reigns supreme in the universe).
2. People misunderstand “Divine Goodness”
3. Therefore, God is all-powerful (for whatever value of all-powerful) and Divine Goodness works out.

The reason I skimmed over the rest of the argument is because the only part that matters to my rebuttal is the conclusion. CS argues that God is all powerful, but (at least from your summary, perhaps I am incorrect in this) never elaborates on the specifics as I did. Furthermore, he assumes the two core axioms from my proofs, the only one he does not take is the Axiom of Physics (or whatever I called it, I’m talking about the axiom which says that if God interacts with the physical world, it is in a scientifically consistent way — eg, that any god’s actions are fundamentally _naturalistic_, and thus explainable by the tools of science). Now, I think that this last axiom follows from the other two, but I don’t have a proper proof for it, so if we simply assume that the first two hold (as Lewis does) then my proof from before still holds, up to the point where the AoP is required, which (still) means that it is impossible for any logically-bound deity to be truly “all powerful”, so the problem of evil/problem of divine benevolence/whatever is still true — though perhaps vacuously — in that, since the implied thing is true (eg, god is not allpowerful (at least not in any proper sense)), everything implies it. So whether or not god is omnibenevolent or not is irrelevant, he’s still not all powerful.

For me, the problem of evil is a nonstarter, I actually agree with CS’s reviewing of the problem, namely that it is _people_, and not god, who cause evil. However, I would add, that it is _also people who cause good_. Thus, god doesn’t really come into the problem-of-evil picture at all, he’s a useless hypothesis here. In fact, in general I find simpler explanations for things where god is a common hypothesis.

By the way, just because some random philosophy came to faith, doesn’t mean he was right.

According to Lewis, the problem of pain in its simplest form is as follows: “If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either the goodness, or power, or both”. To answer this, he says, we need to look more closely at erroneous assumptions built into the words “all-powerful” and “good” when ascribed to God.

The “all-powerfulness” of God is often taken to mean that God can do anything. But, says Lewis, he cannot do what is against his nature or choice. For example, even God cannot make 2+2 anything other than 4. Having made the world to work in certain consistent ways, like the force of gravity, he does not arbitrarily change these whenever potential harm rears its head. Though this does not rule out what we call miracles, if God kept changing the way things normally operate in the world, it would be impossible for us to rise to genuine challenges or act with real responsibly within it.

Unfortunately, fashioning such a reliable world opens up the possibility of people hurting each other in various ways. We might be able to conceive of a world in which God would correct every overstepping of a risk or abuse of the free will through constantly intervening in our affairs. However, such short-circuiting of all harmful actions and evil intentions would involve the destruction of human responsibility and freedom.

Lewis then examines how people tend to understand “divine goodness”. He argues that if the difference between our human and a divine view of goodness is too great, we would not be able to distinguish God from an evil fiend. Also, unless we have some sense of God’s standards, Jesus would not have been able to call us to repent from our ways.

The trouble is that we frequently water down the meaning of goodness. We do this when we view love as merely showing kindness or as seeking other’s happiness. We need to see that for God love is “pure giving” and that ultimately for us, love is not about others’ kindness to us, about our happiness, or even about our love for God, but instead God’s love for us as sacrificially demonstrated in Christ.

Having clarified what God’s goodness and power are, Lewis is then in a position to address what lies at the root of the problem of pain. He says modern people need “a recovery of the old sense of sin”. Sin must be reclaimed from the way in which it has been sentimentalised, psychologised, and statistically relativised in favour of what is allegedly “normal”. At the root of this sense of sin is the abuse of our free will by disobeying God—what we describe as the Fall, which for Lewis was an historical event passed on by heredity.

Therefore much of the problem of pain stems from wanting “some corner of the universe in which we could say to God ‘This is our business, not yours’”. A direct consequence of our self-centredness is our causing pain to others. It is people, not God, “who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs: it is by human avarice or stupidity, not the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork”.

In order to bring us to our senses, he says, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world”. Lewis does not say that pain is God’s direct judgment upon people, meted out according to how much they have offended him or others. Often it is something we bring upon ourselves because of our selfish actions, and sometimes it falls more on people who are more decent and caring than others. Nor does he say that God only calls to people when they suffer; he also calls them through their sense of right and wrong, and through what gives them pleasure—both of which ultimately come from him. In and through all such things, God is reminding us that the good things in life—indeed our earthly life itself—do not give us what we desire.

By the way, when the philosopher C.E.M. Joad eventually came to faith, he credited C.S. Lewis with helping him to overcome the final obstacle to faith presented by the problem of pain. So have many others since.

Thus, it was not a cop out. In fact, I am saying _exactly_ what you are saying, his reasoning stands alone. His reasoning cannot affect mine unless it is based in the same theory as mine, since it is likely not, then I cannot judge his work based on my theory.

I agree, it is easy to construct a theory to prove anything, however, it is hard to produce a _cogent_ theory to prove something. The benefit of my theory is that it is cogent, the axioms are obvious facts — logic _does_ work, science _does_ work. I should qualify, they are obvious to me, and I think obvious to any rational person with a scientific outlook. Since my axioms are cogent, and my proofs similarly cogent (eg, using standard proof techniques), then my theory (not, notably, that God doesn’t exist, simply that — if he or she did — that it would not be dissimilar from an advanced lifeform, eg, a “super” version of us) remains cogent.

So, the _only_ way CS’ theories could pose a threat to my cogent theory is if it is simultaneously cogent, based on my axioms (or something equivalent to my axioms), and indicating that a Supernatural God (eg, a classical notion of God) could exist. Since this is _terribly_ unlikely, our theories are likely to be _independently true_ (assuming benefit of doubt, that CS has cogent, valid proofs) which means whatever he says (again, assuming benefit of doubt) and whatever I say would both be true, assuming you accepted our sets of axioms.

As I said, though, I have more pressing things to deal with then argue against dead men and their theories, especially since, if they was a cogent contradictory theory (as described above), we would have _far_ greater problems to deal with then whether some silly man-in-the-sky was watching us. Namely, the breakdown of, y’know, all math…

No- I haven’t considered it as a career, mostly because I like Math more. Writing for me is a kind of mathematics of words, each paragraph is an attempt to prove it’s own beauty, and I really rather like that self-referential feeling. Just like I love music, I love words — writing is okay, but only as an avenue to new and interesting words. Phrases too, really I just love sound, for a long time I wanted to be a phoneticist — a kind of linguist concerned with sounds and how we use them to make words and communicate and such — then I found math. Math is a kind of music in it’s own way, too. Not literally, but I suppose in some semisynthaesic way I could say that I “hear” math, a good proof triggers the same set of neurons as a good fugue or a good book. A bit of the old masters — whether Segovia, Bach, Shakespeare, or Goedel — just feels good. I love words because they sound pretty, I love alliteration and cadence and enumeration — I _really_ like alliteration and enumeration, and consonance, can’t forget consonance.

It’s all a bit of a wash really, reading Hamlet is as good as playing Beethoven is as good as doing math is as good as, is as good as, is as good as…

All this to say that I haven’t considered it as a career, solely because I like other things better. I’m a clever fellow, as is anyone else who desires to be, writing is just an expression of my innate cleverness…

Anyway, yah, I wrote it.