Secondly, following Dennett, the point of modeling cognitive systems according to the intentional stance is that we evaluate them on a behavioral basis and that is all there is to evaluate.
I am confused on this point. Several people have stated that Dennett believes something like this, e.g., Quintin and Nora argue that Dennett is a goal “reductionist,” by which I think they mean something like “goal is the word we use to refer to certain patterns of behavior, but it’s not more fundamental than that.”
But I don’t think Dennett believes this. He’s pretty critical of behaviorism, for instance, and his essay Skinner Skinned does a good job, imo, of showing why this orientation is misguided. Dennett believes, I think, that things like “goals,” “beliefs,” “desires,” etc. do exist, just that we haven’t found the mechanistic or scientific explanation of them yet. But he doesn’t think that explanations of intention will necessarily bottom out in just their outward behavior, he expects such explanations to make reference to internal states as well. Dennett is a materialist, so of course at the end of the day all explanations will be in terms of behavior (inward or outward), on some level, much like any physical explanation is. But that’s a pretty different claim from “mental states do not exist.”
I’m also not sure if you’re making that claim here or not, but curious if you disagree with the above?
“So God can’t make the atoms be arranged one way and the humans be arranged another contradictory way.”
But couldn’t he have made a different sort of thing than humans, which were less prone to evil? Like, it seems to me that he didn’t need to make us evolve through the process of natural selection, such that species were always in competition, status was a big deal, fighting over mates commonplace, etc. I do expect that there’s quite a bit of convergence in the space of possible minds—even if one is selecting them from the set of “all possible atomic configurations of minds”—but I would still guess that not all of those are as prone to “evil” as us. I.e., if the laws of physics were held constant, I would think you could get less evil things than us out of it, and probably worlds which were overall more favorable to life (fewer natural disasters, etc.). But perhaps this is even more evidence that God only cares about the laws of physics? Since we seem much more like an afterthought than a priority?