Talk:Argument from nonbelief

Real word?

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)

Yes. --Maru 16:50, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

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

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

I would not reference any other texts to prove existence of this word. Please keep in mind that language develops as we form words with our mouths, then is committed to paper using symbols to represent those sounds. If you can use etymological resources to define the prefix omni as all inclusive, and benevolent to mean helpful and good willed, then you can understand the word that came out of my mouth when I say "omnibenevolent".

The self evidence of its meaning is what may soon put this word in the dictionary. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.30.170.151 (talk) 07:30, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

So what's the difference from nonbelief to evil?

What is the difference between the problem of evil and Argument from nonbelief? It seems to be the same from a different point of view and therefore easily unifyable: You just equal "not believing" with "not obeying or ignoring gods moral amendments" and nonbelief equals imoral and evil. Common practice in religion. "You're either good or bad, go to heaven or hell, belief in this god or don't, are with us/god or against us/god." Religion seems intollerant to neutrality and calls evrything "is not good" autimatically "is evil", therefore "nonbelief" equals "evil" and both arguments are unified.

Any dogma here?

==

Evil is hard to measure and nebulous, whereas belief and relationships are much more easily defined. Essentially, if a god existed and wanted people to believe in it, it should be able to go to every individual person and say hello in such a fashion where people would believe. It's a very clear and measurable metric.

Terrible, absolutely terrible

This is by far one of the worst written articles I've ever come across. I know that isn't saying much for Wikipedia, but the way this article is worded, particularly the "Summary of proposed resolutions" section, simply amazes me. I have never seen such an awful display of rhetoric. The extent of unnecessary wordiness and illogical orderings/bulletings is astounding. I cannot even being to attempt to salvage anything that makes any kind of normal sense in this article.

69.0.39.195 03:26, 02 January 2007

Well, this is quite a fringe article, most editor attention go to more common arguments. Maybe I will work on this one a bit, because I think it is quite a good argument. --Merzul 00:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I think it is a terrible argument. --69.0.39.195 09:38, 09 January 2007

I think he meant argument in the sense of a bust-up, barney or ding-dong, not in the sense of cogent justificationary support for a claim.1Z 22:58, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Your pretentious language is even worse than the article itself. And the guy above (who wrote volumes) really needs a life. 69.37.105.233 04:42, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

I wish I had the time to continue writing volumes... Hopefully though, some day I will find the time to do some of the issue on the TODO list. --Merzul 14:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

If you want, add a section on Matt Dillahunty's take on it. It's short and designed for non-philosophers. If a god existed that wanted people to know it existed, and could do something about it, then everyone would know that a god existed and there would be no atheists. That god would go around, say hi to everyone in a way that would be clear, and everyone would believe that god existed. Since there are nonbelievers, we can say that no god exists that both wants people to know it exists and could do something about it.

Theodore Drange's argument

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)

Capitalization of God, and masculine pronoun

I reverted a well-intended edit that changed the style of the article. The reason is that all the sources, both atheist and theist, that discuss this argument refer to God with a capital G. This entire argument has developed in a Judeo-Christian setting, and if we are discussing Schellenberg's argument, I think we should follow the style that all the sources of this article are using. Note that I don't feel strongly about this, and if anyone feels the genderless god is more appropriate I won't present any further objection. --Merzul 14:39, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

"The reason is that all the sources, both atheist and theist, that discuss this argument refer to God with a capital G". I didn't change the capitalisation on any references to God (other than pronouns, which clearly shouldn't be capitalised). I changed common nouns. Ilkali 17:20, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I see your point. You only changes things like "if there is a god". Yet, the sources do capitalize them, so I'm a bit worried that we are changing the meaning. In some sense, proving that there is no God is more narrow than proving that there is no god. This is a minor concern though, I'll leave it be, except the formalism that is taken directly from the source... --Merzul 17:27, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

The problem is that, as you're presumably aware, a significant number of theists habitually capitalise the word in all contexts, leaving us to try and determine which is intended. The safest and most natural reading in almost all cases is the common-noun one, and I think that's the one we should represent. Also, it's worth noting that the argument in question would apply to any deity with the relevant properties, so there's no sense in restricting it to the mishmash of entities commonly called 'God'.

Regarding the formalism: Mea culpa. I didn't realise it was a quotation when I was editing. Might be helpful to make it more clear in the article, to protect against people making the same mistake I did - perhaps something like "Schellenburg's formalization of the argument is as follows"? Ilkali 19:12, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

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)

Free will

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)

A few points from a lay agnostic ...

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)

I also think that it needs to be pointed out that this arguing against a strict, Judeo Christian God, not just any god within any religion. Because for these arguements to work, we need to assume that God is one and such way and wants to reveal and stuff. So a more agnostic religion would dispute that on the assumptions alone. 69.85.154.45 (talk) 04:46, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Some issues and suggestions

I'm new to editing; I guess I should have suggested my May 20, 2013 revisions here instead of just putting them in. Sorry!

I have two issues:

1. The argument from divine hiddenness is the one atheists usually discuss. It is sometimes called the argument from reasonable nonbelief but never just the argument from nonbelief. 'The argument from nonbelief' is the label Theodore Drange gives his argument. So this article, in suggesting that 'argument from nonbelief' and 'argument from divine hiddenness' are two names for the same argument is misleading. I suggest that the article should be renamed 'argument from reasonable nonbelief' or 'argument from divine hiddenness' and that Drange's argument from nonbelief (without the 'reasonable') should be presented as an alternative to Schellenberg's approach. (Another way to deal with this would be to call 'argument from nonbelief' a more general label covering both Drange and Schellenberg. But I see now that this would probably count as 'original research.')

2. In the preface to the paperback version of his book (Cornell, 2006, p. viii) Schellenberg says that it is misleading to use the formal statement of his argument suggested at the beginning of chapter 4. According to him this is because, as he implies at the beginning of chapter 4, premise 2 is "grounded in the deeper claim...that if there is a perfectly loving God, anyone capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who is not resisting relationship with God is in a position to participate in such relationship." Belief is necessary for being in such a position and that's why reasonable nonbelief is problematic. This point is also emphasized in The Wisdom to Doubt, where Schellenberg restates the argument. So I suggest that either something should be said about this point in the article when the formal statement of Schellenberg's argument is given, or that statement should be replaced by the more up to date version in The Wisdom to Doubt.

Cheers!

Teecrosser 16:55, 23 May 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Teecrosser (talk • contribs)

Hi, about your two points:

1. You are right, and I actually agree with the change you attempted to make, but when you change the lead you may need to discuss them first, especially since you are attempting something that is borderline original research. I personally think it is the right way to go. It reminds me of the leads of atheism and free will, which are both original in the sense that no individual source defines the topic this way, but they are very good attempts to do justice to all definitions. I will try something along the ideas you proposed. Let me know what you think.
2. Here, you need to tweak the formulation a bit. This page is already highly essay-like, and you edit made it even more so. I mean "need to read two chapters"; you could, however, say that "Schellenberg subsequently regrets presenting a logical formulation of the argument as it trivializes the deeper issue of ..." Wikipedia prefers a much more objective style than the sometimes personal style that you find in the specialist literature.

Also, I hope you will not hesitate to edit the article. You seem to know much about the topic, so please do stay around and make changes. Regards, Vesal (talk) 19:23, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

One more thing

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) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Teecrosser (talk • contribs)

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)

My changes of 13/6/13

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)

"3.4 There really are no atheists defense" is not a counterargument.

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)

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Deism / Pandeism / Pantheism

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)