Suppose all who are born will receive an utterly blissful, unending, afterlife. That’s quite a supposition, but just suppose. Add to this the reasonable assumption that one first comes to be at birth, or rather at conception: one does not pre-exist one’s conception either as an actual Platonic soul awaiting embodiment, or as a merely possible individual awaiting actualization. Two assumptions, then. The second assumption amounts to the claim that before one is conceived one is nothing at all.
Given the truth of both assumptions, had I never been born, I could not have missed out on any good things, in this life or the next, and this for the reason that one cannot be the recipient of any good if one does not exist. Call that the underlying principle.
To state the underlying principle in general form: Nothing can give, receive, have, lack, enjoy, or suffer any thing, action, property, or state unless it exists.
And so, although I am alive, and the good in my life preponderates and will (let us assume) continue to preponderate over the bad as long as I am alive, and I will receive eternal bliss from the moment of death on, I would not and could not have missed out on anything had I never been born (or rather conceived).
Is the underlying principle more reasonably accepted or more reasonably rejected?
Assume you agree that it is the former. Now consider someone whose life in this world is on balance very bad, but its badness will be more than compensated for by an eternity of heavenly bliss. Even so, it seems to me that it would have been better had this poor schmuck never been born, and this for the reason that, first, had he never been born, he would never have suffered the terrible things he suffered in this life, and second, had he never been born, he would not and could not miss out on anything good including transcendent goods that would have more than compensated him for his earthly suffering.
I was with you until your last paragraph. Now consider someone who had had as happy a life as it is possible to have in this world – no war, no hunger, but good health, intelligence, education, good family and friends (you get the picture). Nevertheless there can be no doubt that he has had some pain along the way, such as is unavoidable in this life. By your reasoning, despite an eternity of heavenly bliss in prospect, it would still be better if he had never been born. Therefore the smallest modicum of temporary physical pain outweighs an eternity of bliss.
Have I misunderstood you to be an anti-natalist?
Hi Dr. Vallicella, I don´t know if you remember me, I´m writting from Portugal. I’ve never stopped following your blog and your work, including this new transition to a new platform. Now, for the blog post, some questions occured to me: can the divine nature be such that it justifies any and all suffering (and there are some truly horrific sufferings), if the destiny of that creature is the union with that divine nature in the Beatific Vision? In what way are you conceiving implicitly “blissful, unending, afterlife”? Hope you are well and good. Wish you a good week. Thank you.
Thank you João Gabriel for reading me all these years. I do remember you. I do think of a blissful, unending afterlife in terms of the Beatific Vision in which Thomas, the Great Synthesizer, combines the mysticism of Plato and the Platonists, the bios theoretikos of Aristotle, and Christianity. I would not, however, say that the visio beata involves the union of the creature with the divine nature. If I understand Aquinas, his view is that the creature never becomes one with God: the Lord dwelleth in light inaccessible (1 Timothy 6:16), which implies that God in his innermost essence remains utterly transcendent. The creature always remains a creature: the duality creature-Creator is lessened but never erased. A Hindu sage might say, “I am the eternal Atman,” meaning that his true self is the Universal Self. A Christian saint could never say that and remain a Christian.
Still, the visio beata is the ultimate felicity possible to a creature. So I would agree that if the visio beata is our destiny, then that would compensate for the worst earthly sufferings. But we don’t know that the VB is our destiny. My point was that, had I never been conceived, I could not suffer anything or enjoy anything.
As for your second comment, I agree that if we think of the soul as pre-existing conception/birth along Platonic lines, then, had I not been conceived/born then I would miss out on the good and avoid the bad, at least in this life.
Christianity is anti-Platonic in that it denies soulic pre-existence. But there may be an exception. The Second Person of the Trinity pre-exists his Incarnation, and thus his birth!
In orthodox (lower case ‘o’) Christian doctrine, the human soul of Jesus came into existence with his body at conception, so the Saviour is no counter-example to the denial of the pre-existence of souls. To say that in Christ the human soul is replaced by the divine Logos would be to commit the error of Apollinaris, who was refuted by Athanasius with two words: ‘aproslepton, atherapeuton’ (that which has not been assumed is unhealed).
That’s a good response, and I am well aware of the Apollinarian heresy. But what muddies the waters is the ambiguity between soul as life-principle and soul as subject of conscious states. Christ qua man has a soul and a body and that soul (life principle) is not identical to the 2nd Person of the Trinity. In the Incarnation, the 2nd Person does not merely take on a human body, he takes on or becomes a man, soul and body. But who is conscious when Christ is conscious of something or conscious of himself? When Christ knew what was in the heart of Judas, it was presumably Christ as God who had that knowledge, which is to say, Christ as 2nd Person of the Trinity who pre-existed his Incarnation.
Bill,
This may be an unsophisticated philosophical question, but nonetheless it troubles me: If the underlying principle is true, does it not follow, given a theistic worldview, that it would have been best had the one existing Being, perfect in all respects, not created other beings whose existence, whatever “blissful afterlife” may await them, are destined for embodied lives that are, to a less or greater degree, marked by evil and suffering? What justification for not leaving “nothing at all” alone?
Vito
If you allow me one more comment. It seems to me that the reasoning here makes the case for an understanding of the soul in Platonic/Plotinian lines as one of the tenable possible positions to avoid the conclusion.
Thanks for the comment, Jonathan.
>>By your reasoning, despite an eternity of heavenly bliss in prospect, it would still be better if he had never been born.<< First of all, despite my use of 'assured' in the first sentence of my post, the supposition at the outset is that we all will enjoy an eternity of bliss, but not that we, or any of us, know this to be the case.
You give the example of someone who in this life has had a wonderful time of it, except for minor pain. Would it have been better had this person not have been born? I didn't say or imply that. What I am saying is that, had he or anyone not have been born, then neither he nor anyone else would have missed out on anything.
But you are on to something, for it does seem that I am heading in an anti-natalist direction, to wit: it would have been better not to have been born because one would be spared the undeniable horrors of this life, and one could not miss out on the supposed unending bliss of the world to come.
Now suppose I say that about myself: it would have been better had I not been born, for then I would have been spared the horrors of this life — which includes the evil of not knowing what the ultimate truth is — and I could not miss out on any supposed compensatory bliss to come in the afterlife.
And now an even tougher question arises, a Nietzschean question: is my anti-natalist statement merely a reflection of my particular lack of vitality, a reflection of my physiological decadence, and thus of no objective interest? And is this the case with all judgments of the value of life? Nietzsche's view was that any judgment as to the value of life merely reflects the quality of life of the person making the judgment. There is no fact of the matter. There is ascending life and descending life. People who shout "Life is good!" say nothing objectively true or false, they merely affirm the life they live and find worth living. The life-deniers who escape into monasteries and hinter-worlds (hinterwelten) are decadents.
A gastroenterologist was asked whether life is worth living. He replied, "It depends on the liver!" That's is N's point put in the form of a joke.
Vito asks, >>If the underlying principle is true, does it not follow, given a theistic worldview, that it would have been best had the one existing Being, perfect in all respects, not created other beings whose existence, whatever “blissful afterlife” may await them, are destined for embodied lives that are, to a less or greater degree, marked by evil and suffering?<<
That's a legitimate question. On a classical conception of deity, God is an infinitely blessed, wholly self-sufficient, *ens perfectissimum.* There is no necessity that he create: he creates freely, and might not have created anything. Given that, would it have been better had he not created anything?
I don't know, but here's a thought. God is love. To love is to love something or someone. God's love is neither eros nor philia but agape. So if God is love, he overflows with an agapic love of someone. If this agapic love is not merely intra-divine by being inter-Trinitarian, then perhaps we should re-think the notion that God is wholly self-sufficient. Perhaps by his very nature as Love he must create free beings that he knows will go wrong.
Your final paragraph reminds of our brief discussion of kenotic creation in your 11/6 post on the paradox of creation. I didn’t bring up agapic love then because it seemed irrelevant to the question, but I was wrong.
In Divine Simplicity, God is All-in-All, one with himself. As such, creation can be seen as a kenosis, a self-emptying sacrifice of his simplicity unto a relationship with his creation of ontologically independent beings. Agapic love, sacrificial love, then defines both a principal within the God-head and the ongoing relationship with that which he created and sustains.
The only change I would make is where you say that God “must create free beings.” An act of agapic love is not a necessity, but a true (perhaps the truest) act of moral freedom. God’s freedom in this respect preserves both the Divine Simplicity of God and his creation of independent beings as a real sacrifice. A necessity to create negates both, it seems to me.
Thematically, this places the God of the Bible as a sacrificial God at both the beginning and the end of the story, which is an interesting point in itself. In any case, I am re-reading (again) your SEP on DDS with the thought of making this spare outline into something more rigorous.
Apologies for going off the post topic like this.
I was responding to Vito’s question whether it would have been better had God not created anything. I was suggesting that if God is agapic love then perhaps he must create, in which case he could not have refrained from creating.
I wonder if a Christian Universalist would be obliged to believe in endless procreation given that they believe every soul is eventually drawn into God’s presence. In fact, what argument could they use against such a position? Presumably, never-having-been cannot trump a guarantee of the Beatific Presence.
That would follow only if souls pre-exist their conception/birth. But a Christian Universalist need not believe that. As I understand it, the Universalist holds merely that each soul that has come into existence by procreation will be saved.
To be or not to be – that is the question, isn’t it? And if I understand your answer, Bill, IFF your life on balance turns out to be bad, then it is better not to be born.
The problem is that if my life is turning out irreversibly bad and I am persuaded by your argument – what am I to do about it? I can’t go back and not be born. And suicide doesn’t fix it because the injury has already been incurred. The only thing to do is wait it out and go on to the heavenly bliss.
Unless we look at it from God’s perspective. Knowing what will occur he should, per your argument, not cause me to exist in the first place. But as far as we can tell, he doesn’t do that.
Perhaps he knows something about the heavenly bliss he offers and the derivative value of existence per se that we (sometimes, not all the time) have trouble comprehending.
What Dr. Vallicella is presenting, is an argument built on three assumptions:
Assumption 1: All who are born will receive an utterly blissful, unending, afterlife.
Assumption 2: One first comes to be at conception (one does not pre-exist one’s conception either as an actual Platonic soul awaiting embodiment, or as a merely possible individual awaiting actualization).
Given assumption 2, it doesn´t matter in what way we construe that «utterly blissful, unending, afterlife»: if one does not exist, there was no one there to miss that afterlife. This is the «underlying principle».
If we accept that principle, we have the following conclusion:
Once someone exists, and his life is on balance more bad than good, it would be better for him not to be born (not to exist), since he would be spared all that bad.
(This brings us back again to David Benatar, antinatalism, and all the posts that Dr. Vallicella dedicated addressing his philosophy.)
What some here seem to be wanting to find out, somehow, is if there is a way to neutralize that conclusion with some possible insight into the Divine Nature that would make the two following theses compatible:
(T1, i.e., Assumption 2 above): One first comes to be at conception (one does not pre-exist one’s conception either as an actual Platonic soul awaiting embodiment, or as a merely possible individual awaiting actualization).
(T2, i.e., Assumption 1 modified): All who are born will receive an utterly blissful, unending, afterlife, enjoying the Divine Nature, which is such that makes all possible lives justifiable, including the most horrible ones.
But to somehow «see» their compatibility will not be possible, I think, philosophically. As Dr. Vallicella says quite often, this pushes us into the direction of the Mystical, the Transdiscursive.
I apologize for my poor english and the typo at the beginning: I ment two assumptions and not three.
João,
There are three assumptions if you count the underlying principle (which is not self-evidently true).
My thought was this: Had I never come into existence, I would have been spared the bad (in this life and the next if there is one) and would not have missed out on the good (in this life or the next one). This is because I wouldn’t be around to miss out on it.
I am tempted to conclude: it would have been better had I never come into existence. For there is no denying the horrendous evils of this life among which is the evil of ignorance about ultimates: no one knows whether we have a destiny beyond the grave. I don’t know about you, but I experience that ignorance as part of what make our predicament evil. And note that if my particular life is on balance good, that is irrelevant to the question whether human life in general is worth living. How can I find this life satisfactory knowing as I do that Christians are being slaughtered in the most brutal ways as we speak?
There is also something puzzling about “I might never have come into existence” given the fact that I do exist. Parse it like this: I exist at the present time & it is possible that no time t is such that I exist at t. The first occurrence of ‘I’ is about BV. What about the second occurrence? Is the possibility mentioned in the second conjunct a DE RE possibility involving BV? If yes, how could the second conjunct be true? But if the possibility mentioned in the second conjunct is DE DICTO, does the conjunctive proposition succumb to equivocation?
I am also making the unobvious anti-Nietzschean assumption that there is an objective fact of the matter as to whether or not human life in general is affirmable as good and worth living.
Dr. Vallicella,
Thank you for your responses.
I believe that if we were exposed in detail and graphically to all the horrible evils in the world, past and present, we would be so overwhelmed, that we would end up killing ourselves. Once, a dear friend, in a conversation deeply connected to the present topic, quoted a poem by William Blake (Auguries of Innocence), where he states that some “are born to endless night”. Some sufferings are conducive to your growth towards religious and philosophical maturity, and of these we, of a religious disposition, don´t have much trouble making sense of, but other kinds of suffering seem to be so unnecessary and gratuitous.
Yes, I do experience the ignorance about ultimates as part of what makes our predicament evil. And that brought into my mind transcendent experiences (mystical, near-death experiences, etc.). I know you argue against inferring ontological reality from the phenomenology of the experience. But I´m also aware that you agree that, at least for those who have had these experiences, the scope, or power of this ignorance is significantly diminished. If we cannot achieve certainty through philosophy, how else could we but through direct experience (some reports of these experiences seem to present non-representational forms of knowledge, like knowing by being identical to the object known)? “Intimations of Elsewhere”, is everything we can have here. Do they slightly change the predicament of those having those intimations thou?
If I understood you correctly, your reading of “I might never have come into existence” in terms of the conjunctive proposition seems to imply that, given my present existence, I can´t think intelligibly “I might never have come into existence” on pain of contradiction (if the possibility is de re) or equivocation (if the possibility is de dicto).
João,
I appreciate your comments; you understand me well. I have had enough experiences of a religious, mystical, and paranormal nature, not to PROVE the existence of God, the soul, angels & demons, but to convince me that the denizens of the Unseen Order are rationally acceptable — when the experiences are supplemented by rigorous arguments against opposing positions and in favor of my positions — and that the wise course is to live as if the Unseen entities are real. Faith comes into it, but it is a reasoned faith supported by the aforesaid experiences and nailed down by personal decision and a way of life consonant with that decision. Faith and TRUST.
Because we cannot achieve certainty via philosophy we must go beyond philosophy, magnificent as she is, — to allude to the title of a book I am trying to finish, assuming I don’t die first — via religion, mysticism, and what I call radical aporetics. As you suggest, the ultimate knowing is not objectifying but involves a participation of the knower in the Absolute. You are right, all we get here below are intimations of the Metaphysical Elsewhere. Do they alter the predicament of those who have them? Yes, they make the predicament more bearable. If I were objectively certain that it’s all a tale told by an idiot, etc. , signifying nothing, then I would go out into the desert and blow my brains out (but not before my wife dies). But only fools claim to KNOW what the ultimate disposition of things is, or believe dogmatically that the ultimate truth is housed in some institution or in some book.
As for the puzzle involved in “I might never have come into existence,” I plan to write a separate post about it. It involves tricky modal questions.
Incidentally, Calvin conceded that without faith in God regretting birth was a perfectly legitimate position: “I grant indeed the correctness of their opinion, who considered it the greatest blessing not to be born, and as to the next, to die immediately.” ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion’, 9:3:4. David Bentley Hart is of the same opinion, and has defended Benatar’s anti-natalism.
Hart defends Benatar? Do you have a reference for me?
1.25.20 +. Says the philosophy is perfectly rational from a materialist perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo55wWKB92o