Oh, thank you, Gwern! Ok, so retrodiction is more like this: There are facts that we currently know and phenomena that have already happened so you should consider whether your theory would have predicted them. It’s not “did something related precede this” but “If we had known this theory before realizing certain facts or making certain observations, would the theory have predicted or explained these?”
Hmm for examples… if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God, what would I predict? If life on earth evolved, what would I predict?
What would God do? Make something awesome or lounge around feeling enlightened. I’m personifying here, and I know it… I have no idea what a God would do but I suspect that it would not be “Make a bunch of creatures knowing that a bunch of them will experience horrible suffering. Demand that they have faith but confuse them with a bunch of different religions to choose from. Create each of them knowing exactly how they’ll reason and what they’ll experience and what that combination will result in and demand certain beliefs that won’t make sense to some of them.”
Whereas with evolution, I’d predict that various life forms would evolve, some would succeed, some would not, life would be more like a chaotic experiment than a harmonious symphony, the smartest life forms would be dreadfully confused for quite some time before having it together…
Yes, that’s pretty much what retrodiction is. It’s not as good as prediction since you can come up with theories over-fitted to exactly the past (a big problem with financial retrodiction: people routinely find some complex strategy or apparent arbitrage when running over the last 30 years of market data, which disappears the moment they tried to use it), but if predictions are unavailable, at least retrodiction keeps you concretely grounded.
I’m not sure I would use God as an example. Theists like Plantinga have done a good job showing that they can come up with a version of God + concepts like ‘free will’ which is logically consistent with any observation, so neither retrodiction nor prediction matters for their God.
Well, I reworded my point as “The idea that evil is evidence that God gives us free will is contradicted by the existence of evil” but if you don’t think it’s going to be interesting, don’t bother.
Whereas with evolution, I’d predict that various life forms would evolve, some would succeed, some would not, life would be more like a chaotic experiment than a harmonious symphony, the smartest life forms would be dreadfully confused for quite some time before having it together...
I would expect most life to just end up as planets full of green goo (ie. like grey goo but natural). But I’d expect that in a tiny minority of cases things like Fisherian Runaway, complex signalling and just plain luck happen to throw some individual toward the ‘general intelligence’ path (and a bunch of other deal breaking to not happen on the way). I’d expect any intelligent agents to observe that they are on a planet, in a galaxy in an Everett Branch where life had evolved much like you said.
I disagree. The incentivising force for continued adaptation is changes in your environment (including your fellow other species). Static goo—or uniformly adapting goo—cannot be optimal for all of a planet at once, leaving room to be outcompeted by diversifying dark-green goo, which may eventually evolve into goo-man (I mean, hu-man):
A planet filled with homogeneous green goo would still be subject to offering advantages based on adaptation on two major axes:
1) Planets universally offer different conditions for habitats, pole temperature versus equatorial temperature, seismic activities on active planets, surface versus underground habitats. The green goo would eventually split off into various types, each best suited to the environment. There is no such thing as an “optimal green goo for every environment”, optimal refers to a specific set of conditions. Some tasks are hard for single-celled organisms to fulfill, which is probably why the uniform green goo that life developed as on earth diversified while spreading, and that bacteria, while ubiquitous, still aren’t considered the dominant life form.
2) As a hypothetical, even a planet transformed into a uniform green goo blob in space would be an environment in itself, allowing for niches for different forms of life (as long as there’s still some entropy to waste i.e. a mechanism for mutation). For a crude comparison, think of lava as goo on a different time scale.
Lastly, if you allow certain variations in your green goo, you could well argue that earth as it is now is an amalgam of various sorts of green goo—us. Especially from the vantage point of our basic goo unit—the gene. See the goo now?
(To me, the curious thing isn’t the eventual appearance of memetic-temetic based adaptability (intelligence), but of subjective experience to go with it. Good fiction novel on that: Peter Watts’ Blindsight.)
I would expect most life to just end up as planets full of green goo (ie. like grey goo but natural).
One might compare this to ecosystems of reproducing known-number iterated prisoner’s dilemma robots—the analogous idea is that these ecosystems will usually end up as “tit for tat goo.”
Tit for tat is reliable. Like algae in the sea of early earth, tit for tat can serve as a “background” for our ecosystem—cooperation is harvesting energy from the sun, defection is being a predator, but if everyone tries to be a predator everyone dies. So algae reproduces. But also like a sea full of algae, there are predatory / parasitic strategies that work really well once the plants are common, like defecting at the end, or eating plants. If a tit for tat robot has the first mutant baby that defects at the end, that baby will only play against tit for tat robots, so it will defect successfully and have more babies than usual, eventually leading to a whole new strain. The zooplankton of the ecosystem. But then if that becomes common, it may be worth it to produce a parasite to the parasite—defecting twice from the end. The bigger the possible rewards, the more layers of strategies will be viable. Tit for tat goo is unstable—plants quickly grow herbivores, and herbivores can sometimes grow predators.
And that’s just iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Add in more dimensions, multiple equilibria… things could get pretty complicated.
Hmm. I notice that I was not as specific as you are. I didn’t say anything about what “most” life forms would be like or whether there would be lots of smart life forms. I haven’t really done a thorough retrodiction on evolution, to tell the truth. But I am really liking this new imagination trick of “try to predict the past if the theory was true” (which is subtly different from my other tricks like “is there anything in the past that supports / refutes this?”) and it’s pleasant atheism-promoting effect on the remnants of my dead agnosticism phase. I’m glad I asked this question and that Gwern helped.
Thinking it out, I do not agree with your green goo hypothesis. I think that as long as there were mutations in the green goo’s pattern (and stability in this pattern would be the exception not the rule due to the complexity of making a self-replicating, self-incarnating pattern, and due to environmental differences more complex and diverse than the green goo’s pattern would be able to expect) and as long as there was always room for improvement (for something this complex that evolved randomly, perfection in the pattern would be the exception not the rule) it would have to change and mutate and new variations would inevitably emerge.
What would it take to have that kind of stability in life forms? Other than a perfectly stable planet? The life game is very, very complex.
I think, perhaps, a drastic reduction in the number of physical laws (when you have all kinds of neat toys to play with from electricity to friction, room for improvement is immense), as well as the number of substances available (otherwise the goo will only expand and encounter new things which promote adaptations), it MIGHT result in a simple life form becoming “perfect” for it’s environment and then stabilizing it’s genes as a way of optimizing perfection.
I think diversity and increasing improvement is more likely to result from evolution than perfect, stable green goo.
Hmm. I notice that I was not as specific as you are. I didn’t say anything about what “most” life forms would be like or whether there would be lots of smart life forms.
We may also have meant different things by “if life on earth evolved”. I read it as “conditional on self replicating things we could call ‘life’ emerged on earth, how would I expect things to proceed” where it could also have meant “conditional on intelligent life like we know it having been evolved, how would I expect that process to have gone”.
What I was intending to convey was not so much that one stable form of goo would remain permanently but rather that there is a significant component of the great filter in the stages between life emerging and general-intelligence evolving as well as the component before life emerges at all. I expect that most planets where life evolves at all to not evolve general intelligence or even other lifeforms as interesting as what we consider lesser animals. I expect it to get stuck in local minima rather frequently.
Hmm for examples… if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God, what would I predict? If life on earth evolved, what would I predict?
What would God do? Make something awesome or lounge around feeling enlightened. I’m personifying here, and I know it… I have no idea what a God would do but I suspect that it would not be “Make a bunch of creatures knowing that a bunch of them will experience horrible suffering. Demand that they have faith but confuse them with a bunch of different religions to choose from. Create each of them knowing exactly how they’ll reason and what they’ll experience and what that combination will result in and demand certain beliefs that won’t make sense to some of them.”
I find myself more inclined to ask the opposite question. That is, assuming that God exists (unpack ‘God’: A being both omniscient and omnipotent; unpack “omnipotent”: having the equivalent of root access to the universe), why is the universe as it is?
If God exists, then the universe is clearly there for a reason. A certain amount of observation has suggested to me that a part of this reason appears to be related to the existance of free will. (Reason: Most of the present evil in the world appears to be caused by the free will of other humans. Thus, I conclude that the presence of free will is more important to God than the total eradication of evil; totally eradicating all evil would eliminate free will).
The idea that evil is evidence that God gives us free will is contradicted by the existence of evil. I identified some potential unreasoned assumptions in this view:
Unreasoned Assumption #1: Evil people want to be evil.
Unreasoned Assumption #2: Evil people have the ability to change that they’re evil.
Unreasoned Assumption #3: Evil people know they’re being evil.
In my experience most people who do bad things do not know that they’re being evil, don’t want to be evil, or can’t change the fact that they’re doing evil things. However, if they were made evil and don’t want to be, they are evil against their will—this is not in support of free will. If they’re not able to change that they’re evil, they don’t have an alternative to evil, so they’re not choosing evil of their own free will. If they don’t know they’re doing evil then they weren’t even given the proper opportunity to choose whether or not to be evil, which is not a situation most people want, so they can’t be said to be evil of their own free will.
I can’t tell myself “Being evil is so much fun that God just wants us to be free to do it.” That does not seem to be the case.
And even if that was the case, why the heck did God make it fun to be evil? Why would you ever call it free will to enjoy evil and wish you didn’t and be unable to change it?
How many people who find evil things fun would, of their own free will, prefer it if they did not find those things fun?
Most of them, in my experience.
For the free will idea to be supported, it would require that everyone has all of the following:
In my experience most people who do bad things do not know that they’re being evil, don’t want to be evil, or can’t change the fact that they’re doing evil things.
That isnt a straightforward piece of evidence. Many would describe evil as the deliberate commital of harm. By that definition, there’s simply no such things an unwilling or unknowing evil.
No, I don’t think that’s necessary. Sometimes, indeed often, evil is caused by people who simply don’t care whether a given course of action is evil or not. Take, for example, the example of the owner of a factory. His factory produces chemical X during its production processes; nobody wants X, nobody likes X. If he dumps it in a lake and hopes that no-one notices, that’s definitely evil (especially if people downstream will be drinking the water), but that’s not out of a desire to be a moustache-twirling evil villain—that’s out of a desire to save on the cost of disposing of it properly.
Evil people have the ability to change that they’re evil (If they don’t, the evil is not due to free will).
True. A lot of evil can be changed.
Evil people know they’re being evil.
Again, not necessary. It merely needs to be reasonably possible for evil people to find out whether or not they are being evil. Sometimes, this requires a fair amount of study. Take the example of a large corporation that’s looking for a factory to produce some goods for them. Factory A in Europe says it can produce it for a hundred Euros per item; factory B in China says it can make the same item for fifty Euros per unit. The corporation picks B, and doesn’t go and have a look at the apalling conditions that the factory workers are enduring in a very aggressive attempt to cut costs. (Factory B’s managers will probably claim that it is a wonderful place to work unless someone actually goes there and looks).
I’m not saying that being evil is at all fun. I’m saying that it’s something that some people do; usually, I suspect, because there’s something else they care about more. Most of the time, they’re either not aware that they are being evil (usually because they never bothered to just sit down and think through the consequences of their actions) or the potential benefit to them is high enough that they don’t care about the negative consequences (any action that a company takes to protect a monopoly on a given product or service from fair competition probably falls under here).
So, if we just went by this simplistic calculation based on human deaths, only about 2.1% of the evil in the USA would appear to be caused by the free will of other humans—thus leaving 97.9% of this particular evil as “God”’s province.
But perhaps you can tell us your own set of calculations and how they reached the conclusion that most of the evil is caused by people’s free will?
By what kind of calculation have you derived this?
I admit, I haven’t sat down and calculated it; it was merely an impression that I had recieved. I’m not sure whether the number of deaths is necessarily an accurate measure of evil—torture, for example, is evil but results in no deaths, and the possibility of an afterlife may mean that death is not, in and of itself, always evil—but I’ll accept that there is at least some correlation with the figure you have chosen.
So. Let me take a look at the page that you have provided (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm). I see that the two leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer, adding up to close to half of the deaths for 2009. Heart disease is caused, in large part, by such things as poor diet and insufficient exercise (http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm). By this measure, therefore, any popular restaurant that does not serve healthy food (and only healthy food, or at least if there is less healthy food then it is clearly marked as such and not more expensive) is encouraging poor diet, increasing mortality due to heart disease, and is therefore evil. In fact, something like 34% of US adults have obesity as a heart disease risk factor (the restaurants are not the only holders of blame here) - and that’s not the highest risk factor (inactivity is, at 53%).
As to cancer, the major villain there is tobacco, estimated to be responsible for 30% of cancer deaths and increasing. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7017215). Yet people still sell cigarettes (and other people still buy them—I do not understand why anyone would want to actually spend money on this, yet amazingly they do).
That’s a clearly free-willed agency involved in over 30% of heart disease and cancer deaths, which make up over one-third of total deaths. So that’s over 10% of total deaths. Before even looking at murders, suicides, and chronic lower respiratory diseases (I expect to find tobacco, and therefore the tobacco industry, as a major culprit there as well). I suspect that a closer analysis may increase that figure.
On the other hand, there are deaths that can have no human agency involved. A common example here is deaths due to natural disasters. Here’s a page (http://voices.yahoo.com/worst-natural-disasters-2009-5105563.html) that claims to list the ten worst natural disasters of 2009, worldwide. Total deaths: 10469, including 10000 for the H1N1 flu pandemic. The tenth disaster on the list had only three fatalities, so unless there were a whole lot of disasters in 2009, there can’t have been all that many fatalities due to natural disasters.
...to get a really good idea of what’s going on here, I’d need to sit down for a long time with a pretty complete set of statistics. I don’t have a full analysis to back up my claim here, yet.
Most of the evil in the world is caused by god. People starve, because god made us to hunger. This can make you rob, beat, and kill to survive. People are lonely, horny, prideful, angry and vengeful. This makes them fight each other for status, war and plot for glory, and rape for sex. God gave us glands, faulty brains, and hormones. In what sense is our will free? Does someone choose to be born during a drought, or to be infected with malaria by a mosquito?
If I have to assume an involved creator I have to assume we’re either entertainment or an experiment
Yes, God gave us glands and hormones. And then God allowed us to override them. He gave us faulty brains, but allowed us to see the faults and train ourselves to avoid them. People starve—but the supermarkets are full of food. Starvation is an economic problem, not a biological one, and the economy is created by, used and ruled by humanity. There’s disease, yes, but there are also doctors. (Incidentally, I have heard the question asked—wouldn’t the world be a better place if some of the hard corners are rounded off, if, in effect, it were a padded room instead of a hard, steel floor, so that it would hurt less when we fell. The trouble with that is that, for all I know, we are in the padded room, and what we call steel is simply a slight stiffness in the padding… if we’ve never seen real steel, how would we know the difference?)
Of course, we might well be entertainment—that’s a possibility. I guess we might be an experiment as well, though the trouble with that is that an omniscient being would know the result of the experiment before running it (which puts us back into being entertainment again).
Even if you are correct that starvation and disease are both solvable now, so what? Are the thousands of years of human history before now irrelevant? More people have died than are alive today.
The world doesn’t just hurt when we “fall”, it hurts many people all the time, for no reason. People are born without limbs, people are struck by lightning, people are born depressed and suicidal. Our minds are built to suffer, evolved to use the pain of existence to encourage us to reproduce. If god could subject us to worse, how does that let you call what we have now good?
You do raise a very good point here. Even if people in the past had all acted in the most perfect possible way, millions would have died of old age in any case during that time. If God (unpack: omnipotent, omniscient being) exists, therefore, then this must have been a design feature of the universe; or at least, one that He is unwilling to stop.
It’s at this point that the question of whether an afterlife exists enters the debate. What death means, for the person who dies, changes pretty dramatically between the universe where an afterlife exists and the universe where an afterlife doesn’t exist; and an omniscient being has access to this datum, and can plan according to it.
It is always possible, of course, that an omniscient, omnipotent being might not be good. I doubt the extreme of evil (life is too pleasant for me to believe that that is true), but there is certainly the possibility of indifference to consider.
Oh, thank you, Gwern! Ok, so retrodiction is more like this: There are facts that we currently know and phenomena that have already happened so you should consider whether your theory would have predicted them. It’s not “did something related precede this” but “If we had known this theory before realizing certain facts or making certain observations, would the theory have predicted or explained these?”
Hmm for examples… if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God, what would I predict? If life on earth evolved, what would I predict?
What would God do? Make something awesome or lounge around feeling enlightened. I’m personifying here, and I know it… I have no idea what a God would do but I suspect that it would not be “Make a bunch of creatures knowing that a bunch of them will experience horrible suffering. Demand that they have faith but confuse them with a bunch of different religions to choose from. Create each of them knowing exactly how they’ll reason and what they’ll experience and what that combination will result in and demand certain beliefs that won’t make sense to some of them.”
Whereas with evolution, I’d predict that various life forms would evolve, some would succeed, some would not, life would be more like a chaotic experiment than a harmonious symphony, the smartest life forms would be dreadfully confused for quite some time before having it together…
And this sounds like earth.
Yes, that’s pretty much what retrodiction is. It’s not as good as prediction since you can come up with theories over-fitted to exactly the past (a big problem with financial retrodiction: people routinely find some complex strategy or apparent arbitrage when running over the last 30 years of market data, which disappears the moment they tried to use it), but if predictions are unavailable, at least retrodiction keeps you concretely grounded.
I’m not sure I would use God as an example. Theists like Plantinga have done a good job showing that they can come up with a version of God + concepts like ‘free will’ which is logically consistent with any observation, so neither retrodiction nor prediction matters for their God.
I love it. Retrodiction is awesome.
I think I broke the free will God argument. The idea that evil is evidence that God gives us free will is contradicted by the existence of evil. What do you think?
In general, if someone thinks they’ve said something that is both new and valuable about the theodicy: they haven’t.
Looking at your link, I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
Well, I reworded my point as “The idea that evil is evidence that God gives us free will is contradicted by the existence of evil” but if you don’t think it’s going to be interesting, don’t bother.
I would expect most life to just end up as planets full of green goo (ie. like grey goo but natural). But I’d expect that in a tiny minority of cases things like Fisherian Runaway, complex signalling and just plain luck happen to throw some individual toward the ‘general intelligence’ path (and a bunch of other deal breaking to not happen on the way). I’d expect any intelligent agents to observe that they are on a planet, in a galaxy in an Everett Branch where life had evolved much like you said.
I disagree. The incentivising force for continued adaptation is changes in your environment (including your fellow other species). Static goo—or uniformly adapting goo—cannot be optimal for all of a planet at once, leaving room to be outcompeted by diversifying dark-green goo, which may eventually evolve into goo-man (I mean, hu-man):
A planet filled with homogeneous green goo would still be subject to offering advantages based on adaptation on two major axes:
1) Planets universally offer different conditions for habitats, pole temperature versus equatorial temperature, seismic activities on active planets, surface versus underground habitats. The green goo would eventually split off into various types, each best suited to the environment. There is no such thing as an “optimal green goo for every environment”, optimal refers to a specific set of conditions. Some tasks are hard for single-celled organisms to fulfill, which is probably why the uniform green goo that life developed as on earth diversified while spreading, and that bacteria, while ubiquitous, still aren’t considered the dominant life form.
2) As a hypothetical, even a planet transformed into a uniform green goo blob in space would be an environment in itself, allowing for niches for different forms of life (as long as there’s still some entropy to waste i.e. a mechanism for mutation). For a crude comparison, think of lava as goo on a different time scale.
Lastly, if you allow certain variations in your green goo, you could well argue that earth as it is now is an amalgam of various sorts of green goo—us. Especially from the vantage point of our basic goo unit—the gene. See the goo now?
(To me, the curious thing isn’t the eventual appearance of memetic-temetic based adaptability (intelligence), but of subjective experience to go with it. Good fiction novel on that: Peter Watts’ Blindsight.)
One might compare this to ecosystems of reproducing known-number iterated prisoner’s dilemma robots—the analogous idea is that these ecosystems will usually end up as “tit for tat goo.”
Tit for tat is reliable. Like algae in the sea of early earth, tit for tat can serve as a “background” for our ecosystem—cooperation is harvesting energy from the sun, defection is being a predator, but if everyone tries to be a predator everyone dies. So algae reproduces. But also like a sea full of algae, there are predatory / parasitic strategies that work really well once the plants are common, like defecting at the end, or eating plants. If a tit for tat robot has the first mutant baby that defects at the end, that baby will only play against tit for tat robots, so it will defect successfully and have more babies than usual, eventually leading to a whole new strain. The zooplankton of the ecosystem. But then if that becomes common, it may be worth it to produce a parasite to the parasite—defecting twice from the end. The bigger the possible rewards, the more layers of strategies will be viable. Tit for tat goo is unstable—plants quickly grow herbivores, and herbivores can sometimes grow predators.
And that’s just iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Add in more dimensions, multiple equilibria… things could get pretty complicated.
Hmm. I notice that I was not as specific as you are. I didn’t say anything about what “most” life forms would be like or whether there would be lots of smart life forms. I haven’t really done a thorough retrodiction on evolution, to tell the truth. But I am really liking this new imagination trick of “try to predict the past if the theory was true” (which is subtly different from my other tricks like “is there anything in the past that supports / refutes this?”) and it’s pleasant atheism-promoting effect on the remnants of my dead agnosticism phase. I’m glad I asked this question and that Gwern helped.
Thinking it out, I do not agree with your green goo hypothesis. I think that as long as there were mutations in the green goo’s pattern (and stability in this pattern would be the exception not the rule due to the complexity of making a self-replicating, self-incarnating pattern, and due to environmental differences more complex and diverse than the green goo’s pattern would be able to expect) and as long as there was always room for improvement (for something this complex that evolved randomly, perfection in the pattern would be the exception not the rule) it would have to change and mutate and new variations would inevitably emerge.
What would it take to have that kind of stability in life forms? Other than a perfectly stable planet? The life game is very, very complex.
I think, perhaps, a drastic reduction in the number of physical laws (when you have all kinds of neat toys to play with from electricity to friction, room for improvement is immense), as well as the number of substances available (otherwise the goo will only expand and encounter new things which promote adaptations), it MIGHT result in a simple life form becoming “perfect” for it’s environment and then stabilizing it’s genes as a way of optimizing perfection.
I think diversity and increasing improvement is more likely to result from evolution than perfect, stable green goo.
We may also have meant different things by “if life on earth evolved”. I read it as “conditional on self replicating things we could call ‘life’ emerged on earth, how would I expect things to proceed” where it could also have meant “conditional on intelligent life like we know it having been evolved, how would I expect that process to have gone”.
What I was intending to convey was not so much that one stable form of goo would remain permanently but rather that there is a significant component of the great filter in the stages between life emerging and general-intelligence evolving as well as the component before life emerges at all. I expect that most planets where life evolves at all to not evolve general intelligence or even other lifeforms as interesting as what we consider lesser animals. I expect it to get stuck in local minima rather frequently.
I find myself more inclined to ask the opposite question. That is, assuming that God exists (unpack ‘God’: A being both omniscient and omnipotent; unpack “omnipotent”: having the equivalent of root access to the universe), why is the universe as it is?
If God exists, then the universe is clearly there for a reason. A certain amount of observation has suggested to me that a part of this reason appears to be related to the existance of free will. (Reason: Most of the present evil in the world appears to be caused by the free will of other humans. Thus, I conclude that the presence of free will is more important to God than the total eradication of evil; totally eradicating all evil would eliminate free will).
I haven’t really got too much beyond that, yet.
The idea that evil is evidence that God gives us free will is contradicted by the existence of evil. I identified some potential unreasoned assumptions in this view:
Unreasoned Assumption #1: Evil people want to be evil.
Unreasoned Assumption #2: Evil people have the ability to change that they’re evil.
Unreasoned Assumption #3: Evil people know they’re being evil.
In my experience most people who do bad things do not know that they’re being evil, don’t want to be evil, or can’t change the fact that they’re doing evil things. However, if they were made evil and don’t want to be, they are evil against their will—this is not in support of free will. If they’re not able to change that they’re evil, they don’t have an alternative to evil, so they’re not choosing evil of their own free will. If they don’t know they’re doing evil then they weren’t even given the proper opportunity to choose whether or not to be evil, which is not a situation most people want, so they can’t be said to be evil of their own free will.
I can’t tell myself “Being evil is so much fun that God just wants us to be free to do it.” That does not seem to be the case.
And even if that was the case, why the heck did God make it fun to be evil? Why would you ever call it free will to enjoy evil and wish you didn’t and be unable to change it?
How many people who find evil things fun would, of their own free will, prefer it if they did not find those things fun?
Most of them, in my experience.
For the free will idea to be supported, it would require that everyone has all of the following:
Ability to change evil behavior.
Ability to see own evil.
Ability to stop enjoying evil.
That isnt a straightforward piece of evidence. Many would describe evil as the deliberate commital of harm. By that definition, there’s simply no such things an unwilling or unknowing evil.
No, I don’t think that’s necessary. Sometimes, indeed often, evil is caused by people who simply don’t care whether a given course of action is evil or not. Take, for example, the example of the owner of a factory. His factory produces chemical X during its production processes; nobody wants X, nobody likes X. If he dumps it in a lake and hopes that no-one notices, that’s definitely evil (especially if people downstream will be drinking the water), but that’s not out of a desire to be a moustache-twirling evil villain—that’s out of a desire to save on the cost of disposing of it properly.
True. A lot of evil can be changed.
Again, not necessary. It merely needs to be reasonably possible for evil people to find out whether or not they are being evil. Sometimes, this requires a fair amount of study. Take the example of a large corporation that’s looking for a factory to produce some goods for them. Factory A in Europe says it can produce it for a hundred Euros per item; factory B in China says it can make the same item for fifty Euros per unit. The corporation picks B, and doesn’t go and have a look at the apalling conditions that the factory workers are enduring in a very aggressive attempt to cut costs. (Factory B’s managers will probably claim that it is a wonderful place to work unless someone actually goes there and looks).
I’m not saying that being evil is at all fun. I’m saying that it’s something that some people do; usually, I suspect, because there’s something else they care about more. Most of the time, they’re either not aware that they are being evil (usually because they never bothered to just sit down and think through the consequences of their actions) or the potential benefit to them is high enough that they don’t care about the negative consequences (any action that a company takes to protect a monopoly on a given product or service from fair competition probably falls under here).
By what kind of calculation have you derived this? In 2009, there were 2,437,163 deaths in USA. The number of murders and suicides for that year put together were only 52,308. (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm )
So, if we just went by this simplistic calculation based on human deaths, only about 2.1% of the evil in the USA would appear to be caused by the free will of other humans—thus leaving 97.9% of this particular evil as “God”’s province.
But perhaps you can tell us your own set of calculations and how they reached the conclusion that most of the evil is caused by people’s free will?
I admit, I haven’t sat down and calculated it; it was merely an impression that I had recieved. I’m not sure whether the number of deaths is necessarily an accurate measure of evil—torture, for example, is evil but results in no deaths, and the possibility of an afterlife may mean that death is not, in and of itself, always evil—but I’ll accept that there is at least some correlation with the figure you have chosen.
So. Let me take a look at the page that you have provided (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm). I see that the two leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer, adding up to close to half of the deaths for 2009. Heart disease is caused, in large part, by such things as poor diet and insufficient exercise (http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm). By this measure, therefore, any popular restaurant that does not serve healthy food (and only healthy food, or at least if there is less healthy food then it is clearly marked as such and not more expensive) is encouraging poor diet, increasing mortality due to heart disease, and is therefore evil. In fact, something like 34% of US adults have obesity as a heart disease risk factor (the restaurants are not the only holders of blame here) - and that’s not the highest risk factor (inactivity is, at 53%).
As to cancer, the major villain there is tobacco, estimated to be responsible for 30% of cancer deaths and increasing. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7017215). Yet people still sell cigarettes (and other people still buy them—I do not understand why anyone would want to actually spend money on this, yet amazingly they do).
That’s a clearly free-willed agency involved in over 30% of heart disease and cancer deaths, which make up over one-third of total deaths. So that’s over 10% of total deaths. Before even looking at murders, suicides, and chronic lower respiratory diseases (I expect to find tobacco, and therefore the tobacco industry, as a major culprit there as well). I suspect that a closer analysis may increase that figure.
On the other hand, there are deaths that can have no human agency involved. A common example here is deaths due to natural disasters. Here’s a page (http://voices.yahoo.com/worst-natural-disasters-2009-5105563.html) that claims to list the ten worst natural disasters of 2009, worldwide. Total deaths: 10469, including 10000 for the H1N1 flu pandemic. The tenth disaster on the list had only three fatalities, so unless there were a whole lot of disasters in 2009, there can’t have been all that many fatalities due to natural disasters.
...to get a really good idea of what’s going on here, I’d need to sit down for a long time with a pretty complete set of statistics. I don’t have a full analysis to back up my claim here, yet.
Most of the evil in the world is caused by god. People starve, because god made us to hunger. This can make you rob, beat, and kill to survive. People are lonely, horny, prideful, angry and vengeful. This makes them fight each other for status, war and plot for glory, and rape for sex. God gave us glands, faulty brains, and hormones. In what sense is our will free? Does someone choose to be born during a drought, or to be infected with malaria by a mosquito?
If I have to assume an involved creator I have to assume we’re either entertainment or an experiment
Yes, God gave us glands and hormones. And then God allowed us to override them. He gave us faulty brains, but allowed us to see the faults and train ourselves to avoid them. People starve—but the supermarkets are full of food. Starvation is an economic problem, not a biological one, and the economy is created by, used and ruled by humanity. There’s disease, yes, but there are also doctors. (Incidentally, I have heard the question asked—wouldn’t the world be a better place if some of the hard corners are rounded off, if, in effect, it were a padded room instead of a hard, steel floor, so that it would hurt less when we fell. The trouble with that is that, for all I know, we are in the padded room, and what we call steel is simply a slight stiffness in the padding… if we’ve never seen real steel, how would we know the difference?)
Of course, we might well be entertainment—that’s a possibility. I guess we might be an experiment as well, though the trouble with that is that an omniscient being would know the result of the experiment before running it (which puts us back into being entertainment again).
Even if you are correct that starvation and disease are both solvable now, so what? Are the thousands of years of human history before now irrelevant? More people have died than are alive today.
The world doesn’t just hurt when we “fall”, it hurts many people all the time, for no reason. People are born without limbs, people are struck by lightning, people are born depressed and suicidal. Our minds are built to suffer, evolved to use the pain of existence to encourage us to reproduce. If god could subject us to worse, how does that let you call what we have now good?
You do raise a very good point here. Even if people in the past had all acted in the most perfect possible way, millions would have died of old age in any case during that time. If God (unpack: omnipotent, omniscient being) exists, therefore, then this must have been a design feature of the universe; or at least, one that He is unwilling to stop.
It’s at this point that the question of whether an afterlife exists enters the debate. What death means, for the person who dies, changes pretty dramatically between the universe where an afterlife exists and the universe where an afterlife doesn’t exist; and an omniscient being has access to this datum, and can plan according to it.
It is always possible, of course, that an omniscient, omnipotent being might not be good. I doubt the extreme of evil (life is too pleasant for me to believe that that is true), but there is certainly the possibility of indifference to consider.