On the problem of the problem of evil and Darwin

Comments (23)

1. “The suffering of one single organism with a neural system gives you the problem.”

   John, I have trouble seeing this. I believe in God while I’ve no moral qualms about piercing a worm’s neural system with a barbed hook to deceptively lure a fish to my barbed hook. Does this in itself make me evil?

   I also suppose I should take a closer look at Brothers Karamazov. Off the top of your head, do you know if that critique of free will and evil not being worth salvation include the possibility of universal reconciliation while everybody who suffered horribly but finitely could eventually enjoy everlasting bliss? Or was that criticism based on the traditional Western Christian view that the billions of people would suffer with everlasting torment apart from those who enjoy everlasting bliss? I’ll look into this more at some time in the future.

   1. Whatever is the smallest quantum of evil, that is sufficient to set up the problem. If you think pain is not an inherent evil unless there’s a moral aspect to it, say, then a single human being who suffers the smallest amount of whatever counts as suffering will do. Same point. I personally think that a world in which beings suffer pain is, in theistic tri-omni terms, an evil (although if you do not think the universe is inherently moral, as I don’t, then that is not the case, so we probably agree on the moral content of a worm suffering). Just scale the argument up.

      Everlasting (and cognate terms for infinite goods) bliss is not eternal if there are cases of actual, real, suffering in the present world. Some slice of my existence is suboptimal. Now God may be constrained to have to do it that way, sure, but that’s in effect denying omnipotence. So the problem exists anyway, whether or not others are condemned to Thomist torments (Summa Theologica, Supplementum Tertiae Partis, Q94). Hell, if I stub my toe once, and that is the whole of the evil in the world, logically that is the same problem. An infinitely everything deity ought not to permit any suffering. The only conclusions are that either God does not exist, or God/the gods are not tri-omni, in which case the ultimate reality is the cosmos that constrains it/them. So it seems to me.

      1. We may first consider that a rigid definition of “omnipotent” is incoherent. For example, omnipotent deity cannot make an unbending rod and then bend that rod. Bending the rod would indicate that an unbending rod was never made in the first place. Also, omnipotent deity cannot make a powerful free will agent that cannot oppose the will of the deity, as futile as the opposition might ultimately end. Likewise, deity without some consistent constraints is an impossible concept. Moreover, many propose that a coherent definition of “omnipotent” goes along the lines of “all possible power,” which some call “maximal power.” Many hold to the doctrine of divine omnipotence with that caveat. I suppose that many others hold to the absolute foreordination of all dust bunny accumulation, but even that might not fit a rigid definition of omnipotence because such a deity might be unable to generate genuine probabilistic events.

         Also, the traditional view of divine omniscience might be incompatible with the doctrine of genuine free will. If that’s the case, then “omniscient” may be defined along the lines of open futurism (open theism). In that case, an omniscient deity has exhaustive self-consciousness and exhaustive knowledge of (1) all possibilities, (2) the past, and (3) the present, but not exhaustive definite foreknowledge because all of the future might not be completely settled. The omniscient deity knows all possibilities and all that has been settled.

         I agree that you can define the three “omnis” as consistently impossible while that definition is unnecessary.

      2. Mediaeval theologists said that although God was omnipotent he could do nothing that contradicted the laws of logic. Your example is an illustration of that.

2. Some theological arguments retain their interest even after you’ve stopped taking the notion of God seriously or, in my case, even flippantly. Scholastic thinkers who debated the relationship of the soul and the body, for example, make points that still seem (to me, anyhow) relevant to current issues in the philosophical psychology. So here’s my question: is there some transformation of the problem of evil that preserves its relevance in a post-theist setting? As I recall, in the last pages of his Eros and Civilization Herbert Marcuse did raise the issue of whether even a utopian conclusion to human history could redeem the suffering of so many generations; but maybe these rather eschatological ruminations are just as obsolete as traditional theology.

3. Reading the post I wondered when the ‘Tri-omni’ usage started. I don’t recall it being stated clearly in the Bible, so I looked in Wikipedia:

   “Omnibenevolence” appears to have a very casual usage among some Protestant Christian commentators. The earliest record for its use in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is in 1679. The Catholic Church does not appear to use the term “omnibenevolent” in the liturgy or Catechism.

   Now if the Christian God is merely ‘good’ as opposed to ‘omni-good’ some of the objections about pain and suffering are less telling. But why, as Epicurus would say, worship a god that could ease suffering and doesn’t?

   1. Well whatever terms are used, you can find the ideas in the Summa, Prima Pars. I’m sure it will be in the Fathers too.

4. From your Francis Collins quote:

   Let me say that I am not sure that the problem of evil — how could a loving, all powerful God allow evil — can be solved.

   It is easily and fully solved: by accepting that those gods do not exist. A pile of untruths does not become true simply by becoming a higher pile or by being cemented together more strongly with better arguments.

   In the vernacular: any logical argument that starts if [bollocks] … must conclude with … then [more bollocks].

   And of course it helps to appreciate that the referent of the term “evil” is unclear.

   I agree entirely with Jim Harrison: the whole soul and body thing is baffling and fascinating; the nature of the “me” that is associated with this bunch of cells (and I assume that your bunch of cells also has a “you”) is difficult to get one’s head round. But I suspect that this isa result of how limited our brains are: for example, our best scientists are untangling the biochemistry of our cells, yet all of us “know” how to work a Krebs cycle, how to execute a blood clotting cascade, how to synthesise hormones, how a sleep-wake cycle works. I wonder if enough philosophers and theologians appreciate how little our brains understand?

5. I find it strange that a scientist brings up the problem of evil,
   because there is no such thing as ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ to a scientist.
   The world consists of particles and quantum fields and that is all there is.

6. So, you theists, stop worrying about Darwin and start worrying about physics, ecology and physiology.

   The problem is, as I see it, none of these other scientific disciplines so directly hits at the ego-centric, anthropic-principle as evolution. Lets face it, somewhere along the line it boils down to: you’re just a clever ape…

   1. They object (the intelligent and educated theists do) to the qualifying adjective “just”. Me, I think it’s best to say, wow, we are a clever ape indeed!

      1. I have no problems with being called an ape but I’m not sure about clever. To quote Wittgenstein on A J Ayer:

         “The trouble with Freddie is that he’s clever all of the time”.

      2. You can call me just an ape, a monkey, an amphibian, a fish, an archaebacteria, or second generation stardust, but just don’t call me late for dinner.

7. Mediaeval theologists said that although God was omnipotent he could do nothing that contradicted the laws of logic. Thony C

   If there is one thing that no one I’ve ever known who believes in God seems to disagree on, it’s that God isn’t a person. We are people and we are limited, individually and collectively, that’s certain. So anything we can say about a number of things is limited by our abilities, the structure of the universe, the scope and character of evolution, the foundations of the number system and logic. Given our inability to comprehensively understand those, the idea that we could comprehend God is idolatrous. Even the seemingly infinite tripartite formula Omni…. is a limitation. I like what it says in the beginning of Moses und Aron, by Schoenberg, Single, eternal, omnipresent, invisible, unimaginable, I especially like the last one, which opens up the implied limitations of the definitions and accounts for seeming contradictions.

   About the idea that God couldn’t act in contradiction to logic. Logic is a human development based in our experience of the physical universe, it’s the product, first, of our every day experience of how things happen and every other development of logical application stands on that experience. Nothing we can do with logic or mathematics or science, never mind every other time we use logic, can escape that heritage, it’s only through that experience that we have any reason to believe in even the most sophisticated and impressive product of logic. Which is the reason I can’t accept the fashionable idea in some branches of physics that you can separate science from the knowledge of the physical world.

   But if you believe God is omnipotent that would include the ability to surpass the restrictions of logic, if that wasn’t the case then in some sense logic would be more powerful than God and God wouldn’t be omnipotent. Remembering that God isn’t a person and that logic is the product of human experience, then that’s not such a troubling idea. God could create a rock so big God couldn’t pick it up and also pick it up, to put it in a way that seems illogical but I think it’s, actually, logical.

   Given that, any answer we could come up with on the question of a benevolent God and the existence of evil is bound to be unsatisfying, for whatever reason, we don’t have access to an answer to the question that will make sense or give us an understanding of how a benevolent God, who could construct a universe or a human experience that would achieve whatever end we can assign to the existence of evil that would also allow us to be free of suspicions about the benevolence of God. Since we can’t understand what would seem to be far simpler problems of the physical universe with the tools we’ve made from our experience of the physical universe, expecting those to result in an understanding of the mind of God is irrational.

   That said, we’re not exactly good at eliminating what evil we have the power to, so who are we to find fault?

   1. You might like to study the Trinitarian literature and pay especial attention to the term “prosopon”: all modern theisms treat God as a person. Now you can redefine God all you like to avoid the problem, but moving goalposts doesn’t resolve the problem orthodox theists have.

   2. By a ‘God’ he understands something like a ‘person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free and able to do anything, knows everything and is perfectly good, is the proper object of worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.’

      Richard Swinburne, Coherence of theism.

8. I’ve got a problem with the idea that religion has to address this question through “Darwinian evolution”. First, it assumes that Darwinian evolution presents a sufficiently complete view of evolution, when evolution is just about the most complex phenomenon that science proposes to study, billions of years, many powers of billions of organisms, the myriad of details in the structures of the organisms – on all levels in at all levels of taxonomy as well as sub groupings and down to the individual — the changing nature of their bodies, all of those within their changing environments, their niches, their behavior, the effects of that behavior on their survival and reproduction, the relationship between all of those and the number of offspring they did or didn’t have, …. and those are only the aspects of the phenomenon make me believe that Darwin’s ideas about it, influential as they are, are hardly a scratch in the surface of what will remain a largely unknowable phenomenon. That natural selection can’t seem to be made to fit with any idea isn’t a final verdict on the validity of the idea, it can only be a tool to come up with an explanation of documentable phenomena.

   I wonder if the fact that Darwin has been so influential within biology has created a dominant culture that sets limits on possible explanations and if biology continues if other cultures of biology might come up with other ideas that might even be incompatible with our present understanding of evolution. It’s a relatively young science as compared to the size of its subject matter. Which you’d think was good news for biologists as the “End of Biology” doesn’t seem like a book that will be written very soon. Though it’s an idea that seems to make people very nervous because if feels heretical.

   The second is that evil isn’t a concept that science can take on as a subject, it can’t deal with “ought” statements and the concept of evil is inseparable from that kind of determination. It’s as impossible for us to find answers to moral questions with science as it would for science to find a supernatural God, which surpasses the natural universe, the only thing which science is competent to study.

   I doubt that evolution has anything like an understanding of human behavior, it seems to change so drastically every few decades, I’ve seen two major schools go on their way to the bone yard in my lifetime. I think that the current ultra-adaptationist school will too, based as it is in story telling instead of evidence. It’s a problem only to the extent that it’s culturally dominant, for now, I think the problem of the existence of evil will survive it, if we do. Dealing with moral issues by trimming them to fit into contemporary conceptions of natural selection isn’t different from not dealing with them at all.

9. You might like to study the Trinitarian literature and pay especial attention to the term “prosopon”: all modern theisms treat God as a person. J. W.

   I should have said “human being” which is the sense of “person” I meant. No religion I’m aware of believes that a god is a human being, the concept of “person” as in the idea of the trinity is certainly not the same thing as saying that God is three human beings in one.

   1. Putting aside for a moment the scriptural detail about man being created in God’s image, I have a problem with the notion of the personhood of God even if you leave man out of it as rigorous theologians such as Maimonides were at pains to do. The concept of person simply doesn’t seem to make a huge amount of sense except as a way of conceptualizing something like an animal, i.e. a finite being with wants. Of course God might not be much like a human animal. Nevertheless. The traditional attributes of God contradict personhood because they contradict animality. As has been pointed out at various times, an omniscient being would be something of an idiot, an omnipotent being would be an inert mass, an infinitely good being would somehow have to keep from taking sides, etc.

      I don’t worry about the theological dimensions of this issue because I don’t think God is worth much at this point as a conceptual option, but the issue of personhood is why I’m not worried about computers that are smarter than human beings so much as I am about computers that have balls.

10. I’d never claim that scripture is anything but a product of human minds, whether or not it’s taken to be inspired it’s presented in human terms. Everything we talk about is in specifically human terms and as human understanding is limited, so are any terms that are understandable by humans. Everything the scriptures say about God is very partial, at best, especially if God is infinite. Any conclusions we have about the nature of omnipotence, omniscience, etc. is limited by our ability to concieve of things which we don’t have direct experience of but can only make inferences about. We don’t have any idea what omniscience is like because none of us appears to be omniscient, we are certainly not omnipotent. We don’t have direct access to either experience in the physical universe, whether or not we have intimations of them through our minds is, obviously, a matter of dispute.

    I doubt that computers are intelligent, though the idea that they might be doesn’t bother me. If computers were intelligent they would have computer experience, based on the conditions of their existence and their physical address of the universe. I doubt that much of that experience would match ours and that it would generate quite different ideas, many of them sufficiently inhuman so as to be incomprehensible to us. I think that a successful run of the Turing Test would probably be indicative that the computer didn’t have intelligence but was just a reflected image of human input and human programming. Though it could be a computer hiding its inner life from us. We’d have to catch them at it and I’d imagine an intelligent computer could be sneaky.

    An image isn’t the same thing as what is imaged.

11. There are actions of people and unhappy events, each of which needs understanding. To create an abstract noun – evil – that gathers all into one category seems stupid. To bring gods into the discussion seems unnecessary to a biologist – yet gods have been used to create this category. Without them – there could be no evil – only unpleasant actions and events. There are thousands of actions by individuals in specific situations that are certainly nasty, heartless, vicious, – choose your adjective. Each has its own situation, and big fellas like Hitler are able to convince thousands of people to hate Jews, homosexuals, deviants and Gypsies enough to go kill them. Studying such situations may lead to some understanding, but elevating them into the category of evil lets our culture and language place them into a religious category. But agnostics and aethists can’t find such a category. Sad for them. Evil in teh religious sense is no more understandable or intelligible than are any other religious constructs – I think it was George Bernard Shaw that convinced me during a big evil war that things unknowable should be ignored. So I see no evil – but lots of unpleasant situations and human activity.

12. The problem of evil is of course only a problem for theists who believe there is a moral order to the universe independent of human wants and exigencies. Those theists and others who do not think this are exempted from the problem, which is effectively one of the resolutions I mention above. This is a tu quoque.

13. John,

    I’m curious of what you think about theist proposals of a long term resolution for evil such as Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank eventually getting past their differences. In the context of agnosticism, do you see this as necessarily illogical or remotely plausible ? Or do you see other options for this view other than necessarily illogical or remotely plausible?

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