Dec. 27, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:03
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| Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Men. | |
| Hope you're doing well. So, look, I'm no theologian, but there's a question that's kind of been floating around that seems important and seems hard to answer for people. | |
| I'm gonna answer it in a philosophical sense. | |
| I hope this will make some sense to you. | |
| So, the question goes something like this. | |
| Why is there evil in the world? | |
| If God is all good, God created all things, why is there evil in the world? | |
| Well, I'm going to give you a framework for looking at this that I think tidies it up a little bit. | |
| You can let me know what you think, of course. | |
| Just give me feedback. I'm always happy to hear it. | |
| So I want you to imagine that God, whatever your beliefs, let's just look at this as a theoretical construct, right? | |
| So God wants to maximize the amount of goodness in the universe. | |
| God enjoys being good. | |
| God is a The joy in the universe. | |
| Like a doctor who enjoys good health, obviously wants to increase the amount of good health in his environment. | |
| So he dedicates himself to being, I want people to be wise and rational and think for themselves and so on. | |
| So I promote philosophy in the world because I enjoy the fruits of philosophy, which is a wonderful life and great love and purpose and meaning and depth and all of that. | |
| So if you are in possession of a great good, part of that good It's wanting to spread that goodness in the world to others. | |
| If you love your life, then if you have the capacity, as most of us do, to create life, to nurture life, then you should become a parent, because part of the greatness of life is creating and sharing that life with others. | |
| So God is in possession of the joys of virtue, and therefore God wishes to add more virtue to the universe as a whole. | |
| Now, if you're a solitary universal being, how do you add more good to the universe as a whole? | |
| Well, since virtue can only be achieved through free will, then you obviously need to create A race of beings with the capacity for free will. | |
| To choose virtue, right? | |
| Since the only joy that comes out of virtue is if it is freely chosen. | |
| In other words, if virtue is compelled, it's no longer virtue. | |
| If somebody is losing weight and they're in a situation of freedom, we admire them for their willpower. | |
| If an obese person is captured and thrown into a dungeon and starved, we would not say, wow, it's really good of you to not eat. | |
| It's really strong-willed of you and good of you to not eat. | |
| No. That's not the case at all. | |
| We don't consider good or evil, even in the law, we don't consider good or evil to be a factor when under coercion. | |
| If somebody kidnaps you and forces you to rob a bank with a gun to your back or something, then you're not going to be charged with bank robbery because you didn't choose to rob the bank. | |
| You're under a Can only result in the sense of virtue from free choice. | |
| Now, free choice with regards to virtue can only exist if there's the possibility of vice. | |
| You can only choose good if you can also choose evil. | |
| You can only be considered doing good or exercising strong willpower in not eating as much if you have the capacity to eat as much or more. | |
| So God cannot create more virtue in the universe by creating a race of beings who are enslaved to being virtuous, because the moment that you're enslaved, you can no longer achieve virtue, and therefore you cannot achieve the happiness or the joys of virtue. | |
| So, of course, human beings have to be created with the capacity to do evil. | |
| Otherwise, there's no capacity to increase the amount of virtue in the universe. | |
| In other words, there's no chance for God to create a race of beings who can experience the joys that he experiences by being virtuous. | |
| Then, of course, the question comes, well, can God choose to do evil? | |
| Well, of course God can choose to do evil because he couldn't gain any satisfaction out of being good if he had no capacity to choose evil. | |
| Neither would he be all-powerful if evil were removed from him as a choice. | |
| He would be a sort of good automaton, a virtuous automaton, which means that if you program a robot to do good, then the robot isn't doing good. | |
| They're just following programming. But I would assume that in this construct that God himself... | |
| I would not be tempted to choose evil. | |
| I mean, I was raised in a brutal and violent manner as a child myself. | |
| I have dedicated my parenting to the principles of peaceful parenting. | |
| I never raise my voice at my daughter. | |
| I never call her names. I never intimidate her. | |
| I never punish her. I never hit her. | |
| I never do anything like that. | |
| And it's worked even better than I could possibly have imagined in terms of the security, affection, and love that we have for each other. | |
| So, I don't wake up every day saying, well, oof, I could choose to just beat up my daughter or spank or whatever, you know, it would be legal. | |
| And I don't have that temptation. | |
| That temptation never crosses my mind. | |
| I don't have the temptation to yell at her. | |
| I don't have the temptation. Like, I just don't have those temptations. | |
| I mean, you could say that that is the result of a consistent application of virtue. | |
| Like, I worked for years, I went to therapy, learned how to get my temper under control, learned how to turn it to virtuous ends. | |
| In other words, I have resolution and strength in the battle for virtue and against evil, but I don't have resolution or strength in terms of exercising power and violence and coercion and abuse over people that I love, because love and abuse, of course, are kind of antonyms. | |
| So... God has created us, in this formulation, as a race. | |
| In order to maximize the potential for virtue in the universe, therefore he has to give us the choice to choose evil. | |
| Otherwise, he can't share the virtue. | |
| If there was a nutritionist who was fantastic at helping people lose weight... | |
| You know, people went to her nutrition camp and came back like half their weight or something like that, and was just wonderful at helping people lose weight, we would consider that person to be very motivational, very good, in a sense virtuous in helping people stay healthy in someone. | |
| But if it turned out that all she did, or he did, was kidnap the people who went to the fat camp and locked them in a basement and starve them, we would no longer consider them to be good or virtuous or motivational, but instead they would be evil. | |
| So, if you want to motivate people to lose weight, eat less and exercise, all that good stuff, if you achieve that through voluntary communication and then you're doing a good thing, if you lock them up and take away their free will and destroy their liberties, then you're no longer doing a good thing. | |
| You're doing an evil thing. | |
| So, if God were to compel us and not give us the choice to choose good or evil, he would in fact be evil. | |
| So, as to why there's evil in the world, well, there's evil in the world because that's the only way to maximize the spread of virtue in the world. | |
| If you are trying to convince people to quit smoking, some people will listen to you and quit smoking, and that's good, and other people won't listen to you and will continue to smoke. | |
| Is that your fault? No, because you're doing everything that you can to convince people to... | |
| Quit smoking. So what does God do? | |
| Well, God has created us with a desire for universal consistency, which is why rules are so often used to entrap and ensnare us and enslave us. | |
| But we have a desire for universal truth. | |
| We have a desire for virtue. | |
| We actually get the physical dopamine. | |
| We get happy, happy joy juice in our brains when we do good. | |
| Of course, we're tempted to evil as well, because if we're not tempted for evil, we can't be good. | |
| We can't be virtuous. So God has designed us for universal consistency. | |
| He's designed us with a gravitational force within us that pulls us towards virtue, that gives us happiness when we do good things. | |
| And he's also given us all the rules by which we need to live in order to be good. | |
| I'm not just talking about the Ten Commandments, but everything that's in the Bible, the examples, and so on. | |
| And so God, and in particular Jesus, has really focused on universal rules, universal morality. | |
| God has designed us to be pulled towards virtue, and God has designed us to be miserable when we're evil. | |
| Beyond those nudges, he would simply be taking away our free will. | |
| So if you want to know why there's evil in the world, Then you simply have to understand it from the framework of you can't have virtue. | |
| You can't have joy. | |
| You can't have happiness. And God cannot share the joys of virtue if he removes from us our capacity to do evil. | |
| Then we are no longer capable of being good. | |
| We are only abject slaves. | |
| And that would be an immoral choice for God to make. | |
| And since God enjoys being moral so much, he would never make that choice. | |
| I hope that helps. I look forward to your thoughts below. |
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