Talk:Argument from nonbelief

message: I couldn't find "omnibenevolent" in Wiktionary or Dictionary.com.  While it's definition is pretty self-evident, is it actually a real word? --LtNOWIS 02:44, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes. --Maru 16:50, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

text: Yes, it's very common in philosophical texts. Dylan 00:23, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Incidentally, omnibenevolent was added to Wiktionary in 2008. ~ Röbin Liönheart (talk) 20:15, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Real word? 

message: This part was marked as NOR, and it probably is, so I'm dumping it here:
A shortcut of this argument is as follows: God gave us complete unawareness; therefore various paths are realized.  He cannot say they are realized against his will, because his decision whilst creating the world guaranteed there will be no sooths.  The less prerequisites, the more nearing are the probabilities of various options and therefore their relative frequency tends to be equal.  And vice versa, the more knowledge, the more probable (and therefore dominant) is one path over another.  (Actually, Christianity in the Middle Ages used to explain e.g. attacks of faithless Normans as 'the punishment for the sins', therefore admitting these peoples were there in God plans.)  In short: God wanted relativism (and actually it is hard to talk about free will when anyone since their birth thinks the same).
===Summary of proposed resolutions===
*Some theists dispute premise 1.3, arguing that God's desire for a free willed belief in him is more important than the desire for all humans to believe that he exists before they die.
*Others argue against premise 3 by saying that everyone does in fact believe in God, even atheists. Some say humans are born with the God-given "faith of a child" — a faith of trust, love and absolute purity — which is corrupted, but not lost, through contact with a world of evil, pain, selfishness, and harm. According to this argument, everyone retains their faith, even if they don't realize it, so unbelief doesn't truly exist.
**A common response is to assert that anyone calling the atheist an unwitting (or unacknowledged) theist may be an unwitting atheist oneself, given the same uncertainty. As such, the rebuttal is a tu quoque, though not necessarily invalid.
*One popular theodicy is fideism. This states that if God revealed himself he would take away our freedom to believe or not believe. Or, in the same vein, God wants our choice to follow and worship him to be genuine and one not motivated by blind fear of hell. This brings point 1.3 into question. The usual responses are that:
**having strong evidence for a proposition doesn't deprive us of freedom, it only gives us good reason to believe;
**post-revelation worship could and would often still be quite genuine (think of non-Christians just waiting for the right evidence to come along);
**belief and worship are not the same thing, and compelled belief in God is not equivalent to compelled worship.
*Another possibility is that faith in and of itself is something God wants humans to develop without divine prodding, meaning point 1.3 is false. Faith may be some valuable power that is not just a means whereby we can obey God. (This is a tenet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for one.)
**A counter-argument is this would mean that because we have no director of our beliefs, then they are arbitrary (or caused by biological reasons and circumstances, for that matter) and therefore men cannot be punished for misbelief.
*God might allow conversion after death. If that's so, whether people come to believe in him before or after death is irrelevant, so point 1.1 is untrue.
*Open theists, who do not hold God to be omnipotent, would likely contest point 1.2. It might be too great a challenge for God to bring about a situation in which everyone believes in him.
If anyone is willing to work on Drange's argument that would be good, it is mostly discussed online. --Merzul 19:18, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Theodore Drange's argument 

message: *Some theists dispute premise 1.3, arguing that God's desire for a free willed belief in him is more important than the desire for all humans to believe that he exists before they die.
*Others argue against premise 3 by saying that everyone does in fact believe in God, even atheists. Some say humans are born with the God-given "faith of a child" — a faith of trust, love and absolute purity — which is corrupted, but not lost, through contact with a world of evil, pain, selfishness, and harm. According to this argument, everyone retains their faith, even if they don't realize it, so unbelief doesn't truly exist.
**A common response is to assert that anyone calling the atheist an unwitting (or unacknowledged) theist may be an unwitting atheist oneself, given the same uncertainty. As such, the rebuttal is a tu quoque, though not necessarily invalid.
*One popular theodicy is fideism. This states that if God revealed himself he would take away our freedom to believe or not believe. Or, in the same vein, God wants our choice to follow and worship him to be genuine and one not motivated by blind fear of hell. This brings point 1.3 into question. The usual responses are that:
**having strong evidence for a proposition doesn't deprive us of freedom, it only gives us good reason to believe;
**post-revelation worship could and would often still be quite genuine (think of non-Christians just waiting for the right evidence to come along);
**belief and worship are not the same thing, and compelled belief in God is not equivalent to compelled worship.
*Another possibility is that faith in and of itself is something God wants humans to develop without divine prodding, meaning point 1.3 is false. Faith may be some valuable power that is not just a means whereby we can obey God. (This is a tenet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for one.)
**A counter-argument is this would mean that because we have no director of our beliefs, then they are arbitrary (or caused by biological reasons and circumstances, for that matter) and therefore men cannot be punished for misbelief.
*God might allow conversion after death. If that's so, whether people come to believe in him before or after death is irrelevant, so point 1.1 is untrue.
*Open theists, who do not hold God to be omnipotent, would likely contest point 1.2. It might be too great a challenge for God to bring about a situation in which everyone believes in him.
</div>
If anyone is willing to work on Drange's argument that would be good, it is mostly discussed online. --Merzul 19:18, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Summary of proposed resolutions

message: This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 03:46, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  WikiProject class rating

message: Someone has added to the free will section: 
: "The question here is: does God have what he wants? E.g. if he wants people to believe or not basing only on who they are and what conditions they encountered, then the result is what we see: it might be other if people were other, or acted otherwise, but they don't, so the above question remains."
When I get the time I will expand a bit on this. This objection is questioning whether libertarian accounts of free will are possible. If they are not, then evil (and even more nonbelief) is a serious problem. For example Graham Oppy uses this reasoning in his "Why I am not a Christian":
: If we suppose that claims about human free actions are intelligible, then it seems to me that it is a mistake to think that human beings have what philosophers call 'libertarian' freedom, as opposed to 'compatibilist' freedom. To act freely is simply to act on one's normally acquired beliefs and desires in the absence of certain kinds of constraints, and there is no inconsistency in the thought that actions that possess this kind of freedom have physical causes. On the libertarian conception of freedom, one acts freely only if, in the very circumstances in which one acted, it was within one's power to do otherwise--which is incompatible with efficient causation of action. But as I see it, the only alternative to efficient causation is absence of causation; and, if one's actions are only 'free' because they have no causes, then this is not a kind of 'freedom' worth wanting. Among the consequences of this view, two are particularly important. First, it is a mistake to suppose that the free choices of a supernatural agent might be 'ultimate' explainers: for if 'freedom' is libertarian, then what is appealed to ultimately has no explanation; and if 'freedom' is compatibilist, then free choices are no less in need of explanation than any other kinds of events. Second, given that freedom is 'compatibilist,' it is very hard to see how the presence of evil in the world might be explained in terms of the value that freedom possesses; for there surely are possible worlds in which agents always freely choose the good, and it is very hard to see why a perfect creator either could not or would not make one of those worlds if it made any world at all.
On the other hand, this rebuttal is better dealt with in argument from evil, I'm still thinking about how discuss those parts, which are actually the most important parts of this article. --Merzul (talk) 20:02, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Free will 

message: Fascinating article, but ...
1. Shouldn't the Bertrand Russell quote be referenced?
2. The following makes no sense.
The question here is: does God have what he wants? E.g. if he wants people to believe or not basing only on who they are and what conditions they encountered, then the result is what we see: it might be other if people were other, or acted otherwise, but they don't, so the above question remains.[clarify]
Someone has said earlier in the discussion that they intend to tidy up/expand on this bit. That would be helpful, but my main problem is grammar and sentence structure.  Should 'basing" be "based"?
3.  Re the earlier discussion about whether we are talking about "god" - deity in general - or "God" (Judeo-Christian) - surely this is an essential point, and the inconsistencies remain throughout the article.  I would tend to vote for capital-G "God" myself from what I understand of the argument.
--V1oletv (talk) 00:04, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  A few points from a lay agnostic ... 

message: I noticed a small problem with how the argument is described at the very beginning of the article: "The premise of the argument is that if God existed (and wanted humanity to know it), he would have brought about a situation in which every reasonable person believed in him; however, there are reasonable unbelievers, therefore, this weighs against God's existence." The problem is with the part in parentheses: "(and wanted humanity to know it)". If this is included, then what follows from the two premises is not that God doesn't exist but that either God doesn't exist or God doesn't want humanity to know it. Since the argument is an argument for atheism, for 'God doesn't exist' full stop, something needs to be changed. I suggest that instead of 'and wanted humanity to know it' we put in the parentheses 'and has the traditional attributes' or 'and is perfectly good and loving'. According to the argument God wanting humanity to know God's existence isn't separate from God existing (as the present statement suggests) but part of it because included in the attributes of God.
Does anyone have a concern about my making a change here, or about my earlier suggestions above? If I don't get a response, I'll take it that no one does. 
Teecrosser 18:38, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: You are absolutely right. Schellenberg does not assume that God wants to be known, he argues that this follows from God's moral perfection. Thank you for making the change. Vesal (talk) 18:57, 12 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  One more thing 

message: Most of the changes I made were discussed above. A few were done to remove typos or create consistency, and changes to the discussion of Murray and biblical references to Satan were introduced to make that discussion more coherent. I added a sentence to the Plantinga reference near the end to explain the point of the defence he uses when it is applied in the context of a discussion of divine hiddenness. Later I'll try to find some secondary sources to add to the discussion of Drange's argument.
Teecrosser 15:10, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  My changes of 13/6/13 

message: 3.4 says "This is the argument that all true atheists are at heart lying [...]". Accusing all atheists of lying is not a counterargument to their position. There are no references to support this accusation and the wording is messed up. I suggest deleting 3.4.
--84.155.82.251 (talk) 13:37, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  "3.4 There really are no atheists defense" is not a counterargument. 

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message: In Deism / Pandeism / Pantheism qua theology, the hiddenness of the deity is actually a feature and not a bug. Worth mentioning. Hyperbolick (talk) 01:03, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Deism]] / [[Pandeism]] / [[Pantheism]]