From: pralmo01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: The "God Does Not Exist" Proof
Date: 7 Apr 92 16:24:18 GMT
Article-I.D.: ulkyvx.1992Apr7.122418.1
Distribution: world,local
Organization: University of Louisville



In his previous post Chris Ho-Stuart points out something I should have
recognized myself which is that just having an infinite
number of chances to do something is not sufficient to show that that something
will in fact occur (since the number of events per interval goes to zero also,
and the rate is non-zero but finite.)  This contradicts the argument I give 
below.  Well, what does this do to the argument that God could not guarantee
that individuals with free-will will not do evil?

If evil is in fact only due to conscious choices which can
be made then one must say that evil is in fact possibley avoidable.  However,
lets
take a look a Ho-Stuart's model of commiting evil.  If there are say,
100 chances of comitting evil in a day by a responsible person--
I am here including 'sins of omission'--and we 
assume that the average God created individual has a %50 of doing wrong in
each case then the probability of the average person being sinless after
one day is 0.5^100.  This number is 10-(0.3*100) or 
                 0.000000000000000000000000000000001.

The chance of a person getting through even a very short lifetime without 
sinning (say 5,000 days of responsible adulthood) is 
                    10-(-log(p)*days)
where log(p) is the logarithm of the probability of committing a sin.

Now, suppose we have a saint on our hands, and p is very high, say
0.99 (i.e. one sin in 100 chances).  Suppose the saint lives 
a short life of 5,000 days (14 years
of responsible adulthood.).  Then the chance of doing no sin is about
                  0.0000000000000000000001.

On a planetful of 10 billion saints, reproducing at the rate of one death
and one birth every twenty years,  in a length of time equal to about
a trillion times the lifetime of the universe, you would have about a %50 
chance of producing one saint.

In short, creating people who don't sin means not creating anyone in our
universe.


It appears that there is an easy route for reducing sin:  reduce the 
reproduction rate or kill'em off.
Or
reduce the lifespan and leave the reproduction rate the same.

However, they don't seem so good to me.

Important point:  Whether or not people will sin depends on whether or not
certain other people are present (since they will create situations which
would not otherwise have existed).  This means that the concept that it is
*logically* impossible for God to imagine non-overlapping respective 
contributions from individuals to the moral order.  (i.e., it's a nonlinear
theory, in which the effect affects the effect) 



(I think Ho-Stuart stacks the deck when he has the probability of 
commiting a sin decrease exponentially.  I don't know anyone like that,
do you?  As I see it, the only simple mathematical model which is 
justifiable is assuming a relatively constant probability for doing evil
at each opportunity.)

His original post follows.

Joe Deasy
 

In article <702544671.14884@minster.york.ac.uk>, cjhs@minster.york.ac.uk writes:
> in article <1992Apr4.201457.1@ulkyvx.louisville.edu>, pralmo01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu says:
>> Since the free will I am talking about means free will to do evil,
>> and since the number of chances men and women have to make choices
>> to do good or evil is in fact infinite (since time is continuous)
>> the only possible way for people to not do evil is for the probability
>> of doing evil to be identically equal to zero.  Since this contradicts
>> the notion of free will, I conclude that God cannot create people
>> who have free will and who will, in fact, not do any evil whatsoever.
> 
> I've done this to people here before....
> 
> There is a 15% chance it will be appreciated.
> 
> Suppose that you have an infinite period of continuous time starting
> now during which you may do evil according to the following exponential
> probability distribution:
> 
> There is a 32% chance that you will do evil during the first day.
> There is a 16% chance that you will do evil during the second day.
> There is a 8% chance that you will do evil during the third day.
> 
> And so on. The probability density function is 
> 
> d(t) = 0.443614 * exp(-0.693147 t)
> d(infinity) = 0.36
> 
> The term d(infinity) is the probability of never doing evil at all.
> 
> This distribution is partly discrete, partly continuous, and over any
> period of time there is a non-zero probability of doing evil. There is
> also a non-zero probability of never doing evil at all.
> 
> The devil made me do it :-)  Best wishes -- Chris Ho-Stuart