I think the problem for an evil God is several-fold. First of all, believing in an evil God is self-defeating--an evil God would want to deceive you, so you have no reason to trust your cognitive faculties that told you God is evil. Second, I find it pretty plausible that an evil God would just make a torture world--that seems more obvious than that a good God would make a bliss world. Third--and I think this is biggest problem that just applies to an indifferent God--why would a being want to maximize evil? You could imagine a celestial deity of limited power wanting to maximize anything: tomatoes, corn, bricks, and so on. It's highly unlikely that such a being would want to maximize evil.
Now you might wonder: how does a good God avoid this? I discuss this in more detail here https://benthams.substack.com/p/god-may-be-maximally-simple but the short answer is that God is conceived of as being simply a mind without limit. But if he has no limits then he knows all the moral facts. If one knows all the moral facts and has no rational inhibitions or contrary desires, by default they'll want to pursue the good (at least plausibly). This is why by default people would rather experience their own pleasure rather than pain. Therefore, it's not arbitrary for a God to care about good, but it is arbitrary for them to care about evil.
Fourth, I think an evil God is an intrinsically weird and improbable way for the world to be. I mean, being maximally evil, it would want to maximally hurt itself. That's an improbable sort of entity.
Regarding an indifferent God, same basic third point: whatever it is maximizing will be improbable and arbitrary. In addition, an indifferent good could want to maximize any of a nearly infinite range of things, so it's unlikely that its aims would involve creating infinite humans, fine-tuning, psychophysical harmony, and so on.
I think this comment implies a bunch of things about God that we really have no proof for -- namely, that God is broadly like us in our desires and motivations. Sure, if *I* had infinite power, I would try to maximize the good in the universe instead of maximizing evil (or maximizing something arbitrary like the number of tomatoes). But God may be nothing like us. God may be masochistic, or God may not have our intuition that pleasure is better than suffering. So from my perspective, I still don't see why a good God is any less arbitrary than an evil one.
Well I think the earlier comment explained it. A commonly held thesis is that one will be motivated to follow the good absent a conflicting desire. The good is the same as the desirable, but by default coming to see that something is desirable makes you desire it. Just as a rational person wouldn't value the upcoming sunday over the upcoming monday, they wouldn't value one person over another. So then it wouldn't be a coincidence for a limitless mind to desire the desirable, the way it would be if they desired strawberries. See also my other objections.
Do you believe in the Orthogonality thesis (https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/orthogonality-thesis)? It basically says that any level of intelligence can go with any goal. I understand you argue for objective definitions of the terms "good" and "evil". But how can you be confident that God would be good simply because he's maximally smart? If you're right, can't Eliezer Yudkowsky solve alignment simply by building a really really smart AI? (Imagine Yudkowsky becoming e/acc. Sorry that was too funny to leave out!)
Someone more philosophically competent than myself could probably phrase this better, but I think ceteris paribus, if one is a theist, then one should believe in a perfectly good God over a perfectly evil God because of Occam's Razor; I.e. good is more metaphysically simple than evil.
If one looks at it in an Aristotelian sense of things having a final cause, then in a sense "evil" is "corruption-of-thing" but "good" is "thing-in-itself"
I don't think anyone should believe in an arbitrary/indifferent God because the facts of the universe we would anticipate under such a being would be identical to simple naturalism(and therefore one should prefer atheism because atheism is metaphysically simpler than an all-powerful but perfectly arbitrary God)
Nice post!
I think the problem for an evil God is several-fold. First of all, believing in an evil God is self-defeating--an evil God would want to deceive you, so you have no reason to trust your cognitive faculties that told you God is evil. Second, I find it pretty plausible that an evil God would just make a torture world--that seems more obvious than that a good God would make a bliss world. Third--and I think this is biggest problem that just applies to an indifferent God--why would a being want to maximize evil? You could imagine a celestial deity of limited power wanting to maximize anything: tomatoes, corn, bricks, and so on. It's highly unlikely that such a being would want to maximize evil.
Now you might wonder: how does a good God avoid this? I discuss this in more detail here https://benthams.substack.com/p/god-may-be-maximally-simple but the short answer is that God is conceived of as being simply a mind without limit. But if he has no limits then he knows all the moral facts. If one knows all the moral facts and has no rational inhibitions or contrary desires, by default they'll want to pursue the good (at least plausibly). This is why by default people would rather experience their own pleasure rather than pain. Therefore, it's not arbitrary for a God to care about good, but it is arbitrary for them to care about evil.
Fourth, I think an evil God is an intrinsically weird and improbable way for the world to be. I mean, being maximally evil, it would want to maximally hurt itself. That's an improbable sort of entity.
Regarding an indifferent God, same basic third point: whatever it is maximizing will be improbable and arbitrary. In addition, an indifferent good could want to maximize any of a nearly infinite range of things, so it's unlikely that its aims would involve creating infinite humans, fine-tuning, psychophysical harmony, and so on.
I think this comment implies a bunch of things about God that we really have no proof for -- namely, that God is broadly like us in our desires and motivations. Sure, if *I* had infinite power, I would try to maximize the good in the universe instead of maximizing evil (or maximizing something arbitrary like the number of tomatoes). But God may be nothing like us. God may be masochistic, or God may not have our intuition that pleasure is better than suffering. So from my perspective, I still don't see why a good God is any less arbitrary than an evil one.
Well I think the earlier comment explained it. A commonly held thesis is that one will be motivated to follow the good absent a conflicting desire. The good is the same as the desirable, but by default coming to see that something is desirable makes you desire it. Just as a rational person wouldn't value the upcoming sunday over the upcoming monday, they wouldn't value one person over another. So then it wouldn't be a coincidence for a limitless mind to desire the desirable, the way it would be if they desired strawberries. See also my other objections.
Do you believe in the Orthogonality thesis (https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/orthogonality-thesis)? It basically says that any level of intelligence can go with any goal. I understand you argue for objective definitions of the terms "good" and "evil". But how can you be confident that God would be good simply because he's maximally smart? If you're right, can't Eliezer Yudkowsky solve alignment simply by building a really really smart AI? (Imagine Yudkowsky becoming e/acc. Sorry that was too funny to leave out!)
Someone more philosophically competent than myself could probably phrase this better, but I think ceteris paribus, if one is a theist, then one should believe in a perfectly good God over a perfectly evil God because of Occam's Razor; I.e. good is more metaphysically simple than evil.
If one looks at it in an Aristotelian sense of things having a final cause, then in a sense "evil" is "corruption-of-thing" but "good" is "thing-in-itself"
I don't think anyone should believe in an arbitrary/indifferent God because the facts of the universe we would anticipate under such a being would be identical to simple naturalism(and therefore one should prefer atheism because atheism is metaphysically simpler than an all-powerful but perfectly arbitrary God)