I plead guilty - to my knowledge, you have yet to assert such a thing here. Shall we see if I can pull an assertion of such out of you? ;)
Thus we have the case of an empiricist who, while not satisfied by a “proof of the existence of God” of the “First Cause” or “Prime Mover” type, is effectively persuaded by the proof of the existence of God by Design. He thought he could establish that on empirical grounds, if only inferentially.
Oh? How attached to the notion of omnipotence are you? ;)
That much applauded class of authors, the writers on natural theology, have, I venture to think, entirely lost their way, and missed the sole line of argument which could have made their speculations acceptable to any one who can perceive when two propositions contradict one another. They have exhausted the resources of sophistry to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater---that misery exists, for fear lest there should be misery: a thesis which if ever so well maintained, could only avail to explain and justify the works of limited beings, compelled to labour under conditions independent of their own will; but can have no application to a Creator assumed to be omnipotent, who, if he bends to a supposed necessity, himself makes the necessity which he bends to. If the maker of the world can all that he will, he wills misery, and there is no escape from the conclusion. The more consistent of those who have deemed themselves qualified to ``vindicate the ways of God to man'' have endeavoured to avoid the alternative by hardening their hearts, and denying that misery is an evil. The goodness of God, they say, does not consist in willing the happiness of his creatures, but their virtue; and the universe, if not happy, is a just universe. But waving the objections to this scheme of ethics, it does not at all get rid of the difficulty. If the Creator of mankind willed that they should all be virtuous, his designs are as completely baffled as if he had willed that they should all be happy, and the order of nature is constructed with even less regard to the requirements of justice than to those of benevolence. If the law of all creation were justice and the Creator omnipotent, then, in whatever amount suffering and happiness might be dispensed to the world, each person's share of them would be exactly proportioned to that person's good or evil deeds; no human being would have a worse lot than another, without worse deserts; accident or favouritism would have no part in such a world, but every human life would be the playing out of a drama constructed like a perfect moral tale. No one is able to blind himself to the fact that the world we live in is totally different from this, insomuch that the necessity of redressing the balance has been deemed one of the strongest arguments for another life after death, which amounts to an admission that the order of things in this life is often an example of injustice, not justice. If it be said that God does not take sufficient account of pleasure and pain to make them the reward or punishment of the good or the wicked, but that virtue is itself the greatest good and vice the greatest evil, then these at least ought to be dispensed to all according to what they have done to deserve them; instead of which, every kind of moral depravity is entailed upon multitudes by the fatality of their birth, through the fault of their parents, of society, or of uncontrollable circumstances, certainly through no fault of their own. Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good. which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.The only admissible moral theory of Creation is that the Principle of Good cannot at once and altogether subdue the powers of evil, either physical or moral; could not place mankind in a world free from the necessity of an incessant struggle with the maleficent powers, or make them always victorious in that struggle, but could and did make them capable of carrying on the fight with vigour and with progressively increasing success. Of all the religious explanations of the order of nature, this alone is neither contradictory to itself, nor to the facts for which it attempts to account. According to it, man's duty would consist not in simply taking care of his own interests by obeying irresistible power, but in standing forward a not ineffectual auxiliary to a Being of perfect beneficence; a faith which seems much better adapted for nerving him to exertion than a vague and inconsistent reliance on an Author of Good who is supposed to be also the author of evil. And I venture to assert that such has really been, though often unconsciously, the faith of all who have drawn strength and support of any worthy kind from trust in a superintending Providence. There is no subject on which men's practical belief is more incorrectly indicated by the words they use to express it than religion. Many have derived a base confidence from imagining themselves to be favourites of an omnipotent but capricious and despotic Deity. But those who have been in goodness by relying on the sympathizing support of a powerful and good Governor of the world have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved his goodness at the expense of his power. They have believed, perhaps, that he could, if he willed, remove all the thorns from their individual path, but not without causing greater harm to some one else, or frustrating some purpose of greater importance to the general well-being. They have believed that he could do any one thing, but not any combination of things; that his government, like human government, was a system of adjustments and compromises; that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to his intention. And since the exertion of all his power to make it as little imperfect as possible leaves it no better than it is, they cannot but regard that power, though vastly beyond human estimate, yet as in itself not merely finite, but extremely limited. They are bound, for example, to suppose that the best he could do for his human creatures was to make an immense majority of all who have yet existed, be born (without any fault of their own) Patagonians, or Esquimaux, or something nearly as brutal and degraded, but to give them capacities which by being cultivated for very many centuries in toil and suffering, and after many of the best specimens of the race have sacrificed their lives for the purpose, have at last enabled some chosen portions of the species to grow into something better, capable of being improved in centuries more into something really good, of which hitherto there are only to be found individual instances. It may be possible to believe with Plato that perfect goodness, limited and thwarted in every direction by the intractableness of the material, has done this because it could do no better. But that the same perfectly wise and good Being had absolute power over the material, and made it, by voluntary choice, what it is; to admit this might have been supposed impossible to any one who has the simplest notions of moral good and evil. Nor can any such person, whatever kind of religious phrases he may use, fail to believe, that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man.
- J.S. Mill, "Nature", Three Essays on Religion
Of course I wouldn't presume to answer this question, since I am mot betty boop, but I can ask a question or two about the fustian (or is it faustian?) philosopher.
Why would someone ask "If God is omnipotent, how can he be good?" or "If God is good, how can he be omnipotent?"
I've tended to prefer to ask, "Since God is real and since he has revealed himself with integrity to me, how much can I understand about how he is both good and omnipotent?"
Who is being presumptuous, Mills or me?
Aw go ahead, I can take an insult. BTW, I've found that with an attitude of yielding to God (initiator that he is) one can learn some the most interesting things about him in the paradoxes he presents.
Pretty attached to it, general_re. For creation out of nothing would seem to demand it.
I am aware that J.S. Mill feels that the divine attributes of goodness and omnipotence are apparently irreconcilable. For how can a good God, if he is omnipotent, permit evil in the world? If a good God doesn't "stop it," then he must not be omnipotent.
Mill can only reason from the human side -- he is a committed empiricist. There is a way to answer the apparent conflict between divine goodness and omnipotence; but it is not one that can be directly viewed or "tested" by man. Yet the test of the truth about something is not necessarily that it can be directly observed by man.
God can be good and omnipotent -- yet freely choose to "limit" Himself -- by virtue of the logic of His having vested man with free will. If He were to intervene directly to elmininate the evil of this world, then that would be to violate His own grant of free will to men. To put it crudely, one might say that God made a "deal with man," and He keeps His promises.
Arguably, God did not put the evil in the world. Evil is always a possibility where man is free to choose. To "correct" man in this life for his choices -- which would be the effect of God intervening to overrule and eliminate evil -- would effectively make God an "indian-giver." (So to speak.)
Mill in these passages is only saying what man can know (and thus conclude) on the basis of observation. He does not say that observation is necessarily the ultimate test of what is the truth of reality, just that it's the best tool man has. Mill is aware of the limits of human knowledge. He does not say that man -- or more precisely, what man can know via empirical means -- is necessarily "the measure" of all things. But he does in effect say he chooses to remain "agnostic" about things that are not knowable on the basis of observation and experience.
He is not so agnostic, however, as to fail to note that the universe is "designed." Or to note that ideas of God can draw man to his own great benefit and to the benefit of society. He has noticed that human nature quite often resonates to ideas of God. This is something an empiricist can respect. Unlike his father, J.S. Mill was not an outright atheist.
I smell a fallacious fume in the "if."
A can of possibility will never yield a does existentially (unless it is cooked up in a sentence and salted to taste with logic).
Suppose Mill grants that his divine being is perfect. Are we to be led blindfolded through this dance of a silly trio?
The divine being is perfect.The only way that last conclusion works is through sham. It works by tanking on the presupposed but unstated logical meaning of "omnipotence" in order to yield a conclusion about an existential reality.
Perfection excludes imperfection.
ergo God cannot be imperfect.
Omnipotence exludes all impotence.
The divine being is impotent (God cannot be imperfect),
ergo God is not omnipotent.
God could really use the assistance of a good libertarian here: at least the libertarian holds "he don't force the can." It's an old canard, I know, but it is presumptious to disregard the agency of a divinity or human being, whether the god is a State or a Nature. If agency is real in a world of plural beings, there are limitations to the ubiquitous blanket of a logical omnipotence.
Aristotle's distinction between what can be deliberated about or not might lend all a hand. And if his distinction can't be accepted, all we have left is the sardonic grin inside the terror of an "it is written."
(IOW the comic general_re inside the tyranny of a serious tpaine.)