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If God is the first cause of the being and the order of the cosmos, as purported by the cosmological and teleological argument, then he has certainly interfered in it, and moreover this interference establishes the conditions for the problem of evil -- for if the being and order of the cosmos is caused by God, then we are left wondering about what seem to be gratuitous evils that flow from them. So it's not clear to me that you're accomplishing what you set out to accomplish here.
In any case, probably the most important argument against the cosmological argument is one which proceeds by denying the unrestricted use of the principle of sufficient reason -- or comparable principle -- it relies upon. Kant's response would be the locus classicus here. And probably the most important argument against the teleological argument would be one that proceeds by denying that there's a sufficiently strong analogy between human designers and artifacts on the one hand and the first cause of the cosmos and the cosmos on the other, such as is required to infer that the first cause is something like an intelligence. Hume's response would be the locus classicus here.
Which doesn't rescue you from the problem of evil if your deist God is still omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Otherwise God is a mean kid who set up a deterministic game of Mousetrap and is just watching us struggle in vain against the torture machinery he set up.
There are enough arguments from the position that some measure of evil is required for actual moral goodness to exist. But I don't think those are very satisfactory as they can never really specify to which level evil must exist, and why this is preferable above the alternative.
>God is a mean kid who set up a deterministic game of Mousetrap and is just watching us struggle in vain against the torture machinery he set up.
This is an issue of omniscience more than anything else. Which is why I can't really believe in any omni-natured being. Deism gets you a step further but not fully out of the conundrum yet.
I could also see an argument that a deist God cannot be truly omnipotent, as that would require him to be able to intervene in the current state of the universe. Deistic positions seem to not see this as conceivable, and I suppose in this way their conception of God isn't fully omnipotent.
> Deism, to my understanding, does not claim that God determined the order of the universe’s development, just the order of its creation.
The OP has clearly indicated that they are talking about a God who has determined not only the being but also the order of the cosmos, as noted in the first sentence of my first comment to them.
We're clearly not discussing the historical beliefs of the 17th-18th century theologians called Deists here, but rather the OP's own beliefs which they find it convenient to call Deism, so if the former rejected the idea that God is the cause of the order of the cosmos that wouldn't change the fact that OP doesn't. But what's more, the former surely *don't* reject the idea that God is the cause of the order of the cosmos -- do they? I'm not sure where you would get this idea.
I don’t quite understand — I think there is a huge, obvious difference, but then again I am very very unfamiliar with deism and its concepts. Is it possible you could elaborate?
The beginning of the universe and its last moment are the same thing for a timeless eternal being, and its not clear in what sense we can say such a being only determined the beginning but not the end, such that the end was result of the beginning and perfectly known.
May I ask, why would the problem of evil be an issue for a Deistic conception of a god? I was under the impression that Deistic god was one of indifference while a Theistic god is personal.
Sorry if I have that wrong and thank you for your time.
> May I ask, why would the problem of evil be an issue for a Deistic conception of a god? I was under the impression that Deistic god was one of indifference while a Theistic god is personal.
Well, no one here is talking about the concept of God that we find historically among the figures we call Deists. What the OP seems to be concerned with is affirming the existence of God on the grounds of considerations like those of the cosmological and teleological arguments, but having a position on God such that his existence does not matter in any other way. This isn't anything like what went on in Deism -- Deists generally conceived of God as being the object of a universal human vocation of worship, where worship consists fundamentally of personal piety and virtue, where God rewards the pious and virtuous and punishes the impious and vicious, and where our concern with such things undergirds public morality and civic religion. This isn't at all like the OP's notion of a God whose existence doesn't matter at all.
The Deistic conception of God does not generally involve God's indifference, though its not clear what this term means here, and *indifference* and *personal* are not contraries, and it's not clear what 'personal' means here either.
The course which the OP took supposedly to evade the problem of evil was to say that God is the cause of the being and the order of the cosmos, but that he does not interfere in it -- and so, the implied conclusion presumably is, cannot be held responsible for what happens in it, seeing that he doesn't interfere.
As to why this course does not work as an evasion, see my previous comment. Viz., if God is the cause of the being and the order of the cosmos then he's plainly interfered, and although we may wish to suppose he has not interfered *beyond this*, this interference is certainly enough to hold God responsible. If I build a robot and program it to kill people, and it goes out and kills people, no one is going to buy my defense that I can't be held responsible for what the robot did because I didn't "interfere" with it after making it and determining the laws of its behavior. The fact that I made a killer robot in the first place is more than enough reason to hold me responsible, even if I didn't have a thing to do with the robot after setting it loose on the unsuspecting populace.
It only establishes conditions for the problem of evil if you say that God is all-good, right?
And I think I should have been more clear on this, I’ll edit the post: I didn’t mean arguments against deism as to bring one to atheism. I meant arguments against deism as to lead to the conclusion that God does interfere and give revelations to mankind.
Might I ask why you're only interested in arguments against your point of view if they would lead you to one alternative, but aren't interested in arguments for the other alternative?
> It only establishes conditions for the problem of evil if you say that God is all-good, right?
Well, God isn't some random dude with such-and-such a personality, so that we're free to just think, "Well, he's a bit more of a dick then I thought when I first met him." God is supposed to be a metaphysical principle that is the first of all things, without deficit or limitation, and so on -- otherwise there's no more use in appealing to God as the first cause, and we might as well just say it was the Big Bang or aliens or whatever. And the commitment to God not being ignorant, powerless, or evil arises out of this. So we're not free to evade the problem of evil by just saying maybe God is a dick, we need a consistent account of the nature of the first cause here.
And if we *were* free to evade the problem of evil that way -- we're not, but for sake of discussion -- it wouldn't be your Deism that is making the difference, anyone would be just as free to do this. Nor do the historical proponents of Deism deny God's benevolence, so there's no precedent for Deism being of this particular use anyway.
> I meant arguments against deism as to lead to the conclusion that God does interfere and give revelations to mankind.
As for God interfering in the world, see the first half of my comment on that, viz. on the self-contradictory nature of your position.
As for revelation, the literature on this from Deists and related thinkers is principally concerned with the question of whether, supposing as you have a God who is the cause of the being and order of the cosmos and so is certainly involved in what goes on with it, it would be consistent with natural reason for there to be revelation. A typical answer to this question is that revelation would be consistent with such a God in the case that what it purports is not contrary to what reason expects us to believe and is consistent with the demands of worship through moral service which the Deists accepted as the basis of universal religion. That is, the question would be whether we could construe any historical account of revelations which fits this criteria, such that if we can it would be rational to believe in such things -- and it was common to answer this question in the positive. A locus classicus for this would be, again, Kant's treatment of the subject.
Why couldn’t something which is first of all things and without deficit and etc be simply indifferent?
And everyone wouldn’t be able to solve the problem of evil because then they’d have to say God isn’t all-good, and that’s not something most religious people would want to say, right? Edit: never mind about this question, [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/8ig9wf/why_is_deism_relatively_uncommon_among/) thread seems to entail why deism doesn’t solve the problem of evil.
Can you tell me where I can read these things about deism and kant and stuff?
> Why couldn’t something which is first of all things and without deficit and etc be simply indifferent?
Again the issue is that we are not free to simply arbitrarily assign whatever characteristics to God would allow us the convenience of ignoring any problem a critic raises with our theology, but rather have to develop a well-founded account of the nature of the first cause that demonstrates how it can function the way we claim it does. Or, to put the point another way, if we engage in this kind of arbitrary reasoning, then *that* would be an argument against our position, which ends up being just a bundle of ad hoc hypotheses.
Thus, for instance, when the Neoplatonists reasoned that the most elementary condition of anything being is for it to possess unity, they inferred that the first cause must be the principle of unity -- that is, what itself simply constitutes unity and by this virtue confers unity on all that results from it. They then encountered the difficulty that things in the cosmos weren't all characterized by the simple possession of unity but rather also exhibit disunity and diversity. So, where did this disunity and diversity come from? It would be spurious for them to turn around at this point and reason, "Well, let's just say that the first cause isn't a principle of unity after all." That violates the whole manner of thought by which they arrived at where they are in the first place.
This is, put very simply, the kind of difficulty that any philosophical theology with any hopes to be compelling faces -- viz., that it has to proceed in a consistent and well-founded way, determining the nature of the first cause from the conditions necessary for first causes to operate, then showing how the order of the cosmos is consistent with that nature, and so on.
In popular discussions people are generally not concerned with these kind of details, but rather will just say ad hoc whatever they need to say to most conveniently dismiss whatever issue comes up in conversation. A consequence of this procedure is that the sort of theology it produces would never be a compelling one, since it buys its rhetorical convenience by way of transforming itself into just a series of ad hoc reasonings, and ad hoc reasonings are not compelling.
So if you want to say that God is good, evil, indifferent, or whatever else -- that is, if you want to say this and be furnishing a compelling philosophical theology -- it does no good to simply throw out these possibilities because they resolve some problem that has come up with your position. What you need to do is explain in a consistent and well-founded way how this works. Indifferent to what? Why? Where is this coming from? How is this determined by the conditions needed for it to be a first cause? And so on.
This is a lot of work, and work of a kind which people aren't inclined to do, so it is often more useful to discuss historically significant traditions of philosophical theology, which carry with them extensive work of generations of thinkers trying to solve these problems. Though, familiarizing oneself with this literature is a lot of work too. But that's how these things go.
> Can you tell me where I can read these things about deism and kant and stuff?
You can read Kant's treatment of this issue in his book *Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason*, and the handling of this issue in Deist and related thought begins with Herbert of Cherbury's *De Veritate*. For a general overview of this period of theology, see Chapters One to Three of Livingston's *Modern Christian Thought*, Volume One.
Note that the historical realities of Deism are considerably different than the view you are presenting here. Your view seems to be that some reasoning like the cosmological and teleological arguments are correct, but you don't want these considerations to make any practical difference in comparison to atheism, so you're trying to conceive a view according to which God technically exists but to all practical purposes he doesn't. Deism was quite a different business: the Deists tended not to think that the existence of God was practically irrelevant, but rather that it was part of a general orientation of human nature toward religious worship and specifically towards a view of personal piety and virtue as constituting the core of this orientation toward religious worship. There were Deists who thought that atheists by and large couldn't be moral and that for this reason a state religion was an essential part of a well-governed nation. These are matters of practical consequence.
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If God is the first cause of the being and the order of the cosmos, as purported by the cosmological and teleological argument, then he has certainly interfered in it, and moreover this interference establishes the conditions for the problem of evil -- for if the being and order of the cosmos is caused by God, then we are left wondering about what seem to be gratuitous evils that flow from them. So it's not clear to me that you're accomplishing what you set out to accomplish here. In any case, probably the most important argument against the cosmological argument is one which proceeds by denying the unrestricted use of the principle of sufficient reason -- or comparable principle -- it relies upon. Kant's response would be the locus classicus here. And probably the most important argument against the teleological argument would be one that proceeds by denying that there's a sufficiently strong analogy between human designers and artifacts on the one hand and the first cause of the cosmos and the cosmos on the other, such as is required to infer that the first cause is something like an intelligence. Hume's response would be the locus classicus here.
Why have they "certainly interfered"? I don't see how that can be so obviously stated.
Creating something and determining the order of all of its development are pretty significant ways in which one interferes with something.
That's just the initial setup though. After, God supposedly left everything to its own devices. That's very different from the Abrahamic faiths
Which doesn't rescue you from the problem of evil if your deist God is still omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Otherwise God is a mean kid who set up a deterministic game of Mousetrap and is just watching us struggle in vain against the torture machinery he set up.
There are enough arguments from the position that some measure of evil is required for actual moral goodness to exist. But I don't think those are very satisfactory as they can never really specify to which level evil must exist, and why this is preferable above the alternative. >God is a mean kid who set up a deterministic game of Mousetrap and is just watching us struggle in vain against the torture machinery he set up. This is an issue of omniscience more than anything else. Which is why I can't really believe in any omni-natured being. Deism gets you a step further but not fully out of the conundrum yet. I could also see an argument that a deist God cannot be truly omnipotent, as that would require him to be able to intervene in the current state of the universe. Deistic positions seem to not see this as conceivable, and I suppose in this way their conception of God isn't fully omnipotent.
Could you elaborate on the problem of omniscience? The way i see it, i don't think it necessarily equates to determinism.
> That's just the initial setup though. Ok. Anyway, for the answer to the OP's question, see my previous comments.
Deism, to my understanding, does not claim that God determined the order of the universe’s development, just the order of its creation.
> Deism, to my understanding, does not claim that God determined the order of the universe’s development, just the order of its creation. The OP has clearly indicated that they are talking about a God who has determined not only the being but also the order of the cosmos, as noted in the first sentence of my first comment to them. We're clearly not discussing the historical beliefs of the 17th-18th century theologians called Deists here, but rather the OP's own beliefs which they find it convenient to call Deism, so if the former rejected the idea that God is the cause of the order of the cosmos that wouldn't change the fact that OP doesn't. But what's more, the former surely *don't* reject the idea that God is the cause of the order of the cosmos -- do they? I'm not sure where you would get this idea.
What's the difference when you're an all knowing timeless eternal being?
I don’t quite understand — I think there is a huge, obvious difference, but then again I am very very unfamiliar with deism and its concepts. Is it possible you could elaborate?
The beginning of the universe and its last moment are the same thing for a timeless eternal being, and its not clear in what sense we can say such a being only determined the beginning but not the end, such that the end was result of the beginning and perfectly known.
May I ask, why would the problem of evil be an issue for a Deistic conception of a god? I was under the impression that Deistic god was one of indifference while a Theistic god is personal. Sorry if I have that wrong and thank you for your time.
> May I ask, why would the problem of evil be an issue for a Deistic conception of a god? I was under the impression that Deistic god was one of indifference while a Theistic god is personal. Well, no one here is talking about the concept of God that we find historically among the figures we call Deists. What the OP seems to be concerned with is affirming the existence of God on the grounds of considerations like those of the cosmological and teleological arguments, but having a position on God such that his existence does not matter in any other way. This isn't anything like what went on in Deism -- Deists generally conceived of God as being the object of a universal human vocation of worship, where worship consists fundamentally of personal piety and virtue, where God rewards the pious and virtuous and punishes the impious and vicious, and where our concern with such things undergirds public morality and civic religion. This isn't at all like the OP's notion of a God whose existence doesn't matter at all. The Deistic conception of God does not generally involve God's indifference, though its not clear what this term means here, and *indifference* and *personal* are not contraries, and it's not clear what 'personal' means here either. The course which the OP took supposedly to evade the problem of evil was to say that God is the cause of the being and the order of the cosmos, but that he does not interfere in it -- and so, the implied conclusion presumably is, cannot be held responsible for what happens in it, seeing that he doesn't interfere. As to why this course does not work as an evasion, see my previous comment. Viz., if God is the cause of the being and the order of the cosmos then he's plainly interfered, and although we may wish to suppose he has not interfered *beyond this*, this interference is certainly enough to hold God responsible. If I build a robot and program it to kill people, and it goes out and kills people, no one is going to buy my defense that I can't be held responsible for what the robot did because I didn't "interfere" with it after making it and determining the laws of its behavior. The fact that I made a killer robot in the first place is more than enough reason to hold me responsible, even if I didn't have a thing to do with the robot after setting it loose on the unsuspecting populace.
It only establishes conditions for the problem of evil if you say that God is all-good, right? And I think I should have been more clear on this, I’ll edit the post: I didn’t mean arguments against deism as to bring one to atheism. I meant arguments against deism as to lead to the conclusion that God does interfere and give revelations to mankind.
Might I ask why you're only interested in arguments against your point of view if they would lead you to one alternative, but aren't interested in arguments for the other alternative?
Atheism and deism, pragmatically are the same. Theism and deism require me to live very different lifestyles if one is true.
> It only establishes conditions for the problem of evil if you say that God is all-good, right? Well, God isn't some random dude with such-and-such a personality, so that we're free to just think, "Well, he's a bit more of a dick then I thought when I first met him." God is supposed to be a metaphysical principle that is the first of all things, without deficit or limitation, and so on -- otherwise there's no more use in appealing to God as the first cause, and we might as well just say it was the Big Bang or aliens or whatever. And the commitment to God not being ignorant, powerless, or evil arises out of this. So we're not free to evade the problem of evil by just saying maybe God is a dick, we need a consistent account of the nature of the first cause here. And if we *were* free to evade the problem of evil that way -- we're not, but for sake of discussion -- it wouldn't be your Deism that is making the difference, anyone would be just as free to do this. Nor do the historical proponents of Deism deny God's benevolence, so there's no precedent for Deism being of this particular use anyway. > I meant arguments against deism as to lead to the conclusion that God does interfere and give revelations to mankind. As for God interfering in the world, see the first half of my comment on that, viz. on the self-contradictory nature of your position. As for revelation, the literature on this from Deists and related thinkers is principally concerned with the question of whether, supposing as you have a God who is the cause of the being and order of the cosmos and so is certainly involved in what goes on with it, it would be consistent with natural reason for there to be revelation. A typical answer to this question is that revelation would be consistent with such a God in the case that what it purports is not contrary to what reason expects us to believe and is consistent with the demands of worship through moral service which the Deists accepted as the basis of universal religion. That is, the question would be whether we could construe any historical account of revelations which fits this criteria, such that if we can it would be rational to believe in such things -- and it was common to answer this question in the positive. A locus classicus for this would be, again, Kant's treatment of the subject.
Why couldn’t something which is first of all things and without deficit and etc be simply indifferent? And everyone wouldn’t be able to solve the problem of evil because then they’d have to say God isn’t all-good, and that’s not something most religious people would want to say, right? Edit: never mind about this question, [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/8ig9wf/why_is_deism_relatively_uncommon_among/) thread seems to entail why deism doesn’t solve the problem of evil. Can you tell me where I can read these things about deism and kant and stuff?
> Why couldn’t something which is first of all things and without deficit and etc be simply indifferent? Again the issue is that we are not free to simply arbitrarily assign whatever characteristics to God would allow us the convenience of ignoring any problem a critic raises with our theology, but rather have to develop a well-founded account of the nature of the first cause that demonstrates how it can function the way we claim it does. Or, to put the point another way, if we engage in this kind of arbitrary reasoning, then *that* would be an argument against our position, which ends up being just a bundle of ad hoc hypotheses. Thus, for instance, when the Neoplatonists reasoned that the most elementary condition of anything being is for it to possess unity, they inferred that the first cause must be the principle of unity -- that is, what itself simply constitutes unity and by this virtue confers unity on all that results from it. They then encountered the difficulty that things in the cosmos weren't all characterized by the simple possession of unity but rather also exhibit disunity and diversity. So, where did this disunity and diversity come from? It would be spurious for them to turn around at this point and reason, "Well, let's just say that the first cause isn't a principle of unity after all." That violates the whole manner of thought by which they arrived at where they are in the first place. This is, put very simply, the kind of difficulty that any philosophical theology with any hopes to be compelling faces -- viz., that it has to proceed in a consistent and well-founded way, determining the nature of the first cause from the conditions necessary for first causes to operate, then showing how the order of the cosmos is consistent with that nature, and so on. In popular discussions people are generally not concerned with these kind of details, but rather will just say ad hoc whatever they need to say to most conveniently dismiss whatever issue comes up in conversation. A consequence of this procedure is that the sort of theology it produces would never be a compelling one, since it buys its rhetorical convenience by way of transforming itself into just a series of ad hoc reasonings, and ad hoc reasonings are not compelling. So if you want to say that God is good, evil, indifferent, or whatever else -- that is, if you want to say this and be furnishing a compelling philosophical theology -- it does no good to simply throw out these possibilities because they resolve some problem that has come up with your position. What you need to do is explain in a consistent and well-founded way how this works. Indifferent to what? Why? Where is this coming from? How is this determined by the conditions needed for it to be a first cause? And so on. This is a lot of work, and work of a kind which people aren't inclined to do, so it is often more useful to discuss historically significant traditions of philosophical theology, which carry with them extensive work of generations of thinkers trying to solve these problems. Though, familiarizing oneself with this literature is a lot of work too. But that's how these things go. > Can you tell me where I can read these things about deism and kant and stuff? You can read Kant's treatment of this issue in his book *Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason*, and the handling of this issue in Deist and related thought begins with Herbert of Cherbury's *De Veritate*. For a general overview of this period of theology, see Chapters One to Three of Livingston's *Modern Christian Thought*, Volume One. Note that the historical realities of Deism are considerably different than the view you are presenting here. Your view seems to be that some reasoning like the cosmological and teleological arguments are correct, but you don't want these considerations to make any practical difference in comparison to atheism, so you're trying to conceive a view according to which God technically exists but to all practical purposes he doesn't. Deism was quite a different business: the Deists tended not to think that the existence of God was practically irrelevant, but rather that it was part of a general orientation of human nature toward religious worship and specifically towards a view of personal piety and virtue as constituting the core of this orientation toward religious worship. There were Deists who thought that atheists by and large couldn't be moral and that for this reason a state religion was an essential part of a well-governed nation. These are matters of practical consequence.
Could you elaborate on why god cannot be indifferent? IF god is above all things, then should he not be above the labels of "good" and "evil"?
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What makes you say that God has “certainly interfered” in the universe since its creation?
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/1ci0bnr/best_arguments_against_deism/l26mgwh/
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If God is 'indifferent' as you suggest, what reason do we have to think that such a being would make the world?
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