Substack latest.
The nature and tractability of the problem depends on the type of theism espoused.
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Vito Caiati comments:
I very much profited from the short essay “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil” that you posted on Substack yesterday. I have read it several times, and, if viewed from the perspective of the ultimate destiny of the members of our species alone, I see the merit of your claim that “It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A, . . . [those who regard] this world [as] a ‘vale of soul-making’ (the phrase is from John Keats) in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil.”
However, what about non-human animals, who “Despite being wholly corporeal, . . . enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also . . . intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger” (Maverick Philosopher, “Soteriology for Brutes,”3/21/2019)?
It seems to me, who, as you know, is a philosophic neophyte in these matters, that the theist-A operates with too narrow a perspective on sentience, for ultimate value is placed only on those sentient beings that are rational and hence capable to abstract thought and moral judgments. The suffering of all the others, including the highest mammals, counts very little or not at all; it certainly does not figure in the soteriology of, say, Christianity, which is obsessively centered on human sin and the need for salvation from it, rather than on the agony and death that permeates the natural world. Perhaps “death is the wages of sin” for mankind, but what explains the agonizing deaths of our fellow sentient creatures that have not sinned? Only by remaining in his sin/redemption theory of salvation, which is necessarily restricted to human beings, can theist-A be more reconciled to the existence of evil.
None of these may be worth your time, but I wanted to share it with you, since it is one of the central concerns of my intellectual and emotional life.
You have pointed out a serious lacuna in my discussion, Vito. I focused on moral and natural evil as it pertains to human animals but left out of account the natural evil, including both physical and mental suffering, that besets non-human animals. I will now try to formulate your objection to me as trenchantly as I can. 'You' in what follows refers to me!
1) You maintain that the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of God is considerably more tractable if we humans survive our bodily deaths and come to enjoy (after a period of purgation) eternal bliss.
2) You also argue that "It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when . . . some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come."
3) You are presenting a sort of "All's well that ends well" response to moral and natural evil. You are arguing that the evils of this life are far outweighed and almost completely made up for by the unending bliss of the world to come, so much so that the the 'problem' of evil vanishes for those who subscribe to the specific theism that you call Theism-A.
4) You ignore, however, the problem of animal pain which is certainly real. (We both reject as preposterous the Cartesian view that non-human animals are insensate or non-sentient.) Given that non-human animals are not spiritual beings as we are, and do not survive their bodily deaths, there is no redemption for them: their horrific suffering — imagine the physical pain and mental terror of being eaten alive! — is in no way recompensed or outweighed. And given how many species of non-human critter there are, and how many specimens per species, and how long these animals existed before man made the scene, there is a VAST amount of evil that goes unredeemed.
5) Your argument therefore fails to get God off the hook.
I take this objection seriously and I thank Dr. Caiati for raising it. At the moment, three possible lines of response occur to me, assuming that there is no Cartesian way out.
A. We can take something like the line that David Bentley Hart champions against Edward Feser, which I briefly discussed in "Soteriology for Brutes?" (linked above) namely, that animals do survive their bodily deaths and 'go to heaven.' (Lacking as they do free will, I see no reason to posit purgatory or hell for them. The savagery of a tiger devouring its prey alive is amoral unlike the savagery of humans. No homo is literally homini lupus.)
B. Without embracing Cartesianism, one might argue that we are engaging in illicit anthropomorphic projection when we project into animals our terrors and physical pains. One might to try to argue that their sufferings, while real, are next to nothing as compared to ours and don't really count very much or at all when it comes to the problem of evil.
C. One might take a mysterian tack. God exists and evil exists. Therefore, they co-exist, whence it follows that it is possible that they co-exist. The fact that we cannot understand how it possible reflects poorly on our cognitive architecture but has no tendency to show that God and evil do not co-exist. Of course, if one took a line like this, one could evade the particulars of my Substack proposal.
While (B) strikes me as lame, (A) and (C) show promise, (A) more than (C).
ComBox now open.
ADDENDUM (9/17)
This morning I found a passage in Berdyaev that supports Dr. Caiati's intuitions about animal suffering from a broadly Christian perspective.
The death of the least and most miserable creature is unendurable, and if it is irremediable, the world cannot be accepted and justified. All and everything must be raised to eternal life. This means that the principle of eternal being must be affirmed in relation to human beings, animals, plants and even inanimate things. [. . .] Christ's love of the world and for man is victory over the powers of death and the gift of abundant life. (Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 253.)
The (febrile) Russian existentialist is making a surprisingly radical claim here. He is maintaining that the existence of the world is justified and our lives in it are affirmable as worth living only if absolutely everything is redeemed and preserved in the end, not only everything living, but the inanimate as well. Somehow everything temporal must be somehow cancelled and preserved — aufgehoben in Hegel's sense — in eternity. How the inanimate could be brought to eternal life is of course a thought transgressive of the discursive and hard by the boundary of the mystical.
In Berdyaev as in Simone Weil, we are at the outer limits of the religious sensibility.
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