Well, all I can say is that “getting a deity off the hook” couldn’t possibly be further from my motives! :-) For the record, I see no evidence for a deity anything like that of conventional religions, and I see enormous evidence that such a deity would have to be pretty morally monstrous if it did exist. (I like the Yiddish proverb: “If God lived on earth, people would break His windows.”) I’m guessing this isn’t a hard sell here on LW.
Furthermore, for me the theodicy problem isn’t even really connected to free will. As Dostoyevsky pointed out, even if there is indeterminist free will, you would still hope that a loving deity would install some “safety bumpers,” so that people could choose to do somewhat bad things (like stealing hubcaps), but would be prevented from doing really, really bad ones (like mass-murdering children).
One last clarification: the whole point of my perspective is that I don’t have to care about so-called “causal determination”—either the theistic kind or the scientific kind—until and unless it gets cashed out into actual predictions! (See Sec. 2.6.)
Well, all I can say is that “getting a deity off the hook” couldn’t possibly be further from my motives! :-) For the record, I see no evidence for a deity anything like that of conventional religions, and I see enormous evidence that such a deity would have to be pretty morally monstrous if it did exist. (I like the Yiddish proverb: “If God lived on earth, people would break His windows.”) I’m guessing this isn’t a hard sell here on LW.
Furthermore, for me the theodicy problem isn’t even really connected to free will. As Dostoyevsky pointed out, even if there is indeterminist free will, you would still hope that a loving deity would install some “safety bumpers,” so that people could choose to do somewhat bad things (like stealing hubcaps), but would be prevented from doing really, really bad ones (like mass-murdering children).
One last clarification: the whole point of my perspective is that I don’t have to care about so-called “causal determination”—either the theistic kind or the scientific kind—until and unless it gets cashed out into actual predictions! (See Sec. 2.6.)