In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes,
We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.
I think that Lewis is right that felt pain is not additive across different subjects. Your pain and my pain cannot be summed. This holds for both physical and psychological pain. Pain is additive only in a given subject and not across subjects. "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it."
So far, so good. It is equally true, however, that two people being tortured to death is worse than one person being tortured to death. Both states of affair are evil, but the first is more evil than the second. The quantity of felt pain is the same, but in the first there are twice as many evils than in the second.
I conclude that the question of the quantity of pain in the world is distinct from the question of the quantity of evil in the world. This is relevant to the problem of evil faced by theists. Lewis has shown that "the maximum that a single person can suffer" is "all the suffering that there ever can be in the universe." And that includes all the suffering of the non-human animals who suffer. But the problem of evil faced by the theist is precisely a problem of evil and not a problem of felt pain. And this despite the fact that many pains are evil (all those, I should think, the suffering of which does not lead to a greater good.)
My tentative conclusion is that the considerations adduced in the passage quoted above do little to alleviate the severity of the problem of evil faced by traditional theists.
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.
Bradley Schneider sent me the following argument and would like my opinion. I am happy to accommodate him. (I have edited his argument for the sake of brevity, the soul of blog. I have also given it a title.)
PRESENTISM FALSE? THEN GOD DOES NOT EXIST!
1) An all-good, omniscient, omnipotent God should not allow any horrendous evil.
2) If there is a solution to the problem of evil, it must entail that God eventually defeats evil and, to defeat evil, God must not only compensate the victims of evil but destroy evil's existence.
3) If presentism is not true, however, it means that past events still exist, even if they do not exist now.
4) But this implies that a horrendous evil that occurred in, say, 1994 (the Rwandan genocide, for example) still exists. Not only that, it will always exist. As will every other horrendous evil throughout human history.
5) God may be able to vanquish evil at the eschaton, but all of the horrendous evils will persist throughout all eternity. Even while the blessed are enjoying heaven, the horrendous evils will continue to exist. All of the past evils will remain real and hence undefeated, even if God can assure that no further evil will occur post-eschaton.
6) So God ultimately cannot vanquish evil if presentism is false.
7) Therefore, God doesn't exist if presentism is false.
The problem is with (3). If presentism is not true, then presumably eternalism is true. Presentism is the view that only temporally present items (times, events, . . .) exist. That is, everything that exists exists at present. On eternalism, this is not the case: past and future items also exist. Now for these two views to be contradictory, 'exist(s)' must be used in the same sense. But what sense is that? It cannot be the present-tensed sense because that would reduce presentism to a tautology and eternalism to a contradiction. How so?
Well, 'Everything that exists (present tense) exists at present' is a trivial logical truth devoid of metaphysical import. On the other hand, 'Past, present, and future items all exist (present tense)' is logically contradictory since wholly past and wholly future items are not temporally present. Presentism and eternalism are substantive metaphysical theses that contradict each other only if 'exist(s)' is taken tenselessly.
Now glance back at (3). It reads, in part, "If presentism is not true, however, it means that past events still exist . . . " This is arguably a presentist misunderstanding of what the eternalist is saying. 'Still exists' means 'existed and exists (present tense).' That is not what the eternalist is saying. He is not saying, for example, that the gladiatorial combat in the Coliseum is still going on. He is saying that past events, i.e., events earlier than his speaking, exist simpliciter, i. e., tenselessly, whatever that comes to.
Note also that if past events still exist, then they do exist now, which contradicts the rest of (3): " . . . even if they do not exist now."
So Schneider's argument needs some work.
My view is that both eternalism and presentism are fraught with insuperable difficulties. Using either for theological purposes is not likely to get us anywhere.
When Confucius was asked his opinion of the injunction to return good for evil, he answered, "With what then will you return good? Return good for good, but justice for evil." Is this not wiser counsel? Does not the other push goodness to an extremist position, rendering it almost ridiculous by condoning bad conduct? (Volume Seven, The Negatives, p. 156, entry 113)
But what is justice? Contemporary liberals, leftists in plain English, have no notion of it. They confuse it with what they call 'equity.' The word is an obfuscatory coinage of the sort one can expect from Orwellian language-abusers. The typical leftist is a stealth ideologue. His near-congenital mendacity disallows an outright call for equality of outcome or result, and merit be damned; he weasels his 'thought' into sleepy heads with 'equity' in violation of one of the traditional meanings of the word, namely, "justice according to natural law or right." (Merriam-Webster) "Equity' as used by a leftist language-hijacker has a meaning opposite to the traditional one. Hence my accusation of Orwellianism.
Brunton's Notebooks are a treasure trove of wisdom. Your humble correspondent owns and has read all seventeen volumes several times over. The man is old-school, writes well, talks sense, speaks the broad truth, makes enough mistakes to keep things interesting, and will introduce you to authors of yesteryear you've never heard of. He is of my grandfather's generation, and of your great, great grandfather's generation.
You absolutely must read old books to be in a position to assess justly the dreck and drivel pumped out by today's politically-correct quill drivers and so-called 'journalists' who wouldn't know a gerund from a participle if their colons depended on it.
Ignorance is evil, and the worst ignorance is the ignorance of evil itself: that it is real, and that free will is real, without which evil cannot exist.
Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising:
Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end).
Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical skeptics are evil; rather, our inability to counter radical skepticism and to be sure about our knowledge of reality is an evil).
Premise 3: God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will (creating another evil) — e.g., a skeptic who dies and goes to heaven may still not be convinced that he or she is not under an illusion created by a Cartesian demon; heaven could be part of the illusion.
Conclusion: God does not exist.
I accept the first two premises. With respect to the second, I have long believed that our deep and irremediable ignorance on matters of great importance to us is a major evil and germane both to the case for God's nonexistence, but also to the anti-natalist case. (Atheists who argue to the nonexistence of God from evil ought to consider whether the manifold evils of this world don't also put paid to the notion that human life is worth living and propagating.)
I balk, however, at the third premise. Schneider seems to be assuming that the origin of radical skepticism is in a free decision not to accept some putative givenness. There is, I admit, the willful refusal on the part of certain perverse individuals to accept the evident, and even the self-evident; as I see it, however, the origin of radical skepticism is not in a free refusal to accept what is evident or self-evident, but in a set of considerations that the skeptic finds compelling. A skeptic is not a willful denier, but a doubter, and indeed one whose doubt is in the service of cognition. He doesn't doubt for the sake of doubting, but for the sake of knowing. The skeptic wants to know, but he has high standards: he wants objective certainty, not mere subjective conviction. He doubts whatever can be doubted in order to arrive at epistemic bedrock. This is what motivates the hyperbolic doubt of the Dream Argument and the considerations anent the evil genius.
I therefore reject the claim that "God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will . . . ." Free will doesn't come into it. Heaven is the Beatific Vision, and in that vision there will be such a perfect coalescence of finite knower and Infinite Object that no doubt can arise. In the visio beata, radical skepticism will not be possible. A mundane analog is supplied by the experience of a sensory quale such as a felt pain, or rather pleasure. In the moment that one feels it, one cannot doubt it, so long as one attends to its phenomenal features alone and brackets (in Husserl's sense) all external considerations as to causes, effects, etc. The phenomenology is indubitable whatever may be the case with the etiology.
So if heaven is the Beatific Vision, heaven cannot be illusory. But this highly refined, highly Platonic, Thomist take on heaven is not for everyone. It is not for Protestants whose conception is cruder. I call that conception Life 2.0 and I contrast in with the Thomist conception in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision ? On a crude conception, according to which Jethro will be united after death with his faithful hound 'Blue,' drink home brew, and hunt rabbits, there is room for illusion. It could be that there is a whole series of quasi-material 'spiritual' heavens above the sublunary but shy of the ultimate heaven of the Beatific Vision, but I won't pursue that speculation here.
It just so happens that I am now reading Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence (Marquette UP, 1999), which is a translation of L'Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas. On p. 35, we read:
By a profoundly logical coincidence the beatific vision, which is the final cause of the world and ultimate perfection of the created spirit, is also, according to Thomas, the only example of a created knowledge other than the intuitions of personal consciousness which seizes and possesses being such as it is, directly, not only without abstraction but with no mediation whatever. The beatific vision is perfect intellection with regard both to its object and to its mode of operation; on this account we must study it here; otherwise it would be impossible to have an exact idea of what intellection is in itself.
This text supports my analogy above. "The intuitions of personal consciousness" are the felt qualia I referred to. These are "created knowledges" Writ Very Small, paltry sublunary analogs (e.g., the smell of burnt toast) of the ultimate coalescence of subject and object in the visio beata. But in both the sublunary and beatific cases, Being (esse) is seized and possessed directly, not via abstract concepts and without the mediation of epistemic deputies and mediators. Being is grasped itself and not via representations. The little mysticisms of sensation prefigure the Big Mysticism of Ultimate Beatitude.
My prose is starting to 'flow French,' but I trust you catch my drift.
Some of us hear the call to perfect ourselves morally, or at least to better ourselves. Whence the call? The Whence is cloud-hidden, and what is hidden may be doubted. And yet conscience intimates a reality absolute and complete that sustains and envelops this vale of transience. The love of truth and the love of beauty do the same. One is free to ignore these intimations of an Order Unseen, but this mysterious freedom is itself a pointer beyond. For the one who seeks a way out from behind the veil of Ignorance, the Good cannot be on a par with Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
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"Was für eine Philosophie man wähle, hängt sonach davon ab, was für ein Mensch man ist." Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, 1794 §5
"The kind of philosophy a man chooses depends on the kind of man he is."
I have a question for my theistic readers. How do you reconcile the devastation wrought by the tsunami with your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being? If God could have prevented the tsunami but didn’t, then God’s omnibenevolence is called into question. If God wanted to prevent the tsunami but couldn’t, then God’s omniscience or omnipotence is called into question. You can’t explain away the evil by citing free will, for no human being brought about the tsunami. (Surely you don’t believe in fallen angels.) Do events like this shake your faith? If not, why not? If death and destruction on this scale don’t make you doubt the existence of your god, what would?
1. The parenthetical material is puzzling. If someone can see his way clear to accepting the existence of a purely spiritual being such as God, then the belief in angels, fallen or otherwise, will present no special problem. Given the existence of fallen angels, the Free Will Defense may be invoked to account for natural evils such as tsunamis: natural evils turn out to be a species of moral evils.
2. Of course, the argument can be turned around. If someone argues from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God, that person assumes that there is indeed an objective fact of evil, and thus, an objective distinction between good and evil. A sophisticated theist can counterargue that there cannot be an objective distinction between good and evil unless God exists. I could make that argument as rigorous as you like. That is not to say that the argument would be compelling to every rational consumer of it, but only that it would logically impeccable, plausibly premised, and sufficiently strong to neutralize the atheist's argument from evil. I distinguish between refuting and neutralizing. It may be difficult to refute a sophisticated interlocutor since he will not be likely to blunder. But he can be neutralized by presenting counterarguments of equal but opposite probative force. The result is a stand-off: you battle the opponent to a draw.
3. In a separate argument, a theist could make the case that the very quantity and malevolence of the moral evil in the world — think of the 20th century and the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, the 100 million murdered by Communists, etc.) — cannot be explained naturalistically. This would be another way to argue from the fact of objective evil to supernatural agents of evil. See my The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence.
4. There is no denying that evil presents a serious challenge to theism. Should it shake the theist's faith? Only if the objections to atheism/naturalism shake the atheist's/naturalist's faith. We seem to have doxastic parity. There are reasons both for and against theism. But there are also reasons both for and against atheism/naturalism. It would be special pleading to suppose that the reasons against theism are much more weighty that the reasons against atheism/naturalism. See my companion post on the naturalist's version of fides quaerens intellectum.
5. At the end of the day, after all the dialectical smoke has cleared, you simply have to decide what you are going to believe and how you are going to live. The decision is not a mere decision, but rationally informed, and subject to revision after the consideration of further arguments; but at some point ratiocination must cease and a position must be taken.
Note: Most atheists are naturalists, hence my conflation of them in this post. But one could be an anti-naturalist and an atheist (McTaggart) and I suppose one could be a theist and a naturalist.
1. The gist of your posts seems to be that we can never know for sure that an evil is pointlessly evil, therefore no evil rules out definitively the potential existence of an omni-loving God.
Yes, that's the gist of it, but strike 'potential.'
So in your view does that imply that there is no amount of evil that could rule it out? If the entire planet were like Auschwitz would that still not rule it out? (And it is estimated that roughly 150 million animals are slaughtered per day for human consumption, so it could plausibly be maintained that for animals the world is a kind of Auschwitz.)
No. The idea is that the existence of evils that are necessary for a greater good are logically compatible with the existence of an all-good God. So the goods have to outweigh the evils. It follows that there has to be a limit to how much evil there is.
And let's leave out of the present discussion the human slaughter of humans and animals, for that belongs under the rubric 'moral evil,' whereas the topic under discussion is natural evil. One question for a separate post is whether natural evil is itself a species of moral evil, namely, the evil perpetrated by fallen angels. But for now I will assume that natural evil is not a species of moral evil; I will assume that it is not the result of free agency.
To put it more formally: is there any state of affairs, call it X, that would rule out the existence of God?
Yes. Just one case of pointless or unjustified evil would rule out the existence of God.
I am uncomfortable with the idea of saying yes, as I suspect it pushes the notion of an omni-God toward the brink of meaninglessness. We generally think that if a proposition cannot be proven or disproven then it is in a certain sense meaningless or at best useless. The Theist will reply that the existence of God is a unique case and fine, but I still feel that we are within our rights to ask for some form of verification without having the whole concept of God becoming meaningless.
I rather doubt that a proposition is meaningful iff it is verifiable. Consider the following proposition
a) My grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on 1 January 1940.
By Bivalence, (a) is either true, or if not true, then false. And this is so even though it is impossible now to determine (a)'s truth value. Since (a) must either be true or false, it must be meaningful, despite its unverifiability. Similarly for
b) The execution of Sophie Scholl (of White Rose fame) was not a pointless evil.
(b) is meaningful but not empirically verifiable in the present life.
Note also, that if one is a verificationist, there is no need to mess around with the problem of evil: one can put paid to all (synthetic) claims about God, such as the claim that God exists, by maintaining that they are meaningless because not empirically verifiable in the here and now.
2. You push the pragmatic, Pascalian line about the benefits of believing in God quite regularly. But isn't there a sort of question-begging to this, in that it assumes only beneficial consequences? What if someone reads the Quran, sees the lines about killing non-believers and thinks "I may as well, because if God exists, he'll reward me, and if he doesn't, it doesn't matter anyway." Or if someone adopts a religion that promotes the total subjection of women?
My Pascalianism is not blanket; it kicks in only in specific circumstances. Islam is "the poorest and saddest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), It is clearly an inferior religion as compared to Christianity (morally if not metaphysically) if it (Islam) is a religion at all as opposed to a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a Christian heresy (Chesterton). It was founded by a warrior who was arguably a fraud and it enjoins immoral practices such the genital mutilation of girls, the subjection of women, and the slaughter of 'infidels.' . So if one exercises due doxastic diligence one excludes Islam and other pseudo-religions from the Pascalian option.
The Pascalian move is made in a situation like the following. One is a serious and sensitive human being who cares about his ultimate felicity. One is alive to the vanity of this world. One is psychologically capable of religious belief and appreciates that God and the soul are Jamesian live options. One is intellectually sophisticated enough to know that God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. One appreciates that not to choose to live as if God and the soul are real is to choose to live as if they are not real. One understands that it is prudentially irrational to suspend judgment. At this point the Pascalian reasoning kicks in.
By the way, my Pascalian move is merely reminiscent of he great Pascal; I am not concerned with accuracy to the details of his view. I write as a kind of 'existentialist.' What matters is how I live here and now and what helps me here and now. I borrow what is useful and appropriable by me here and now; I am not committed to the whole Pascalian kit-and-kaboodle.
Vito Caiati, to whom I responded earlier, replies:
In your excellent response to my email on animal suffering and theism, you write, “If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might help with the existential-psychological problem.” This is precisely the sort of help that you have provided me, and I sincerely thank you it. I have struggled with the problem of animal pain and suffering most of my life, and it has long poked into my theistic beliefs like a sharp thorn. In considering the empirical fact of the baby elephant’s atrocious death, I now see that I assumed what instinctively horrified me was objectively evil and hence pointlessly evil. I now understand that, although I continue to hate the empirical fact, this assumption is unwarranted.
I am fortunate to have attracted Dr. Caiati as a correspondent. The attraction of the like-minded is one of the beauties of blog. The formulation in the penultimate sentence above, however, is not quite right. If a state of affairs is objectively evil, it does not follow that it is pointlessly evil. It may or may not be. As I see it, the pointlessly evil is a proper subset of the objectively evil. Everything pointlessly evil is objectively evil, but not conversely. Evils can be justified by greater goods that they subserve. They remain evils, however, even if justified. It could be — it is possible for all we know — that predation is justified by a greater good unattainable without predation. And this is so whether or not we can know, or even imagine, what this greater good might be. The main point here is that there is reason to doubt whether an event or a state of affairs that is objectively evil is also pointlessly evil.
The following two propositions cannot both be true:
1) God (defined in terms of the standard omni-attributes) exists.
So if (2) is true, then (1) is false. But how do we know that (2) is true? Is (2) true? What the skeptical theist will point out is that we cannot directly and validly infer (2) from
3) Objective evils exist.
This allows the theist 'doxastic wiggle room.' He is not rationally compelled to abandon theism in the face of (3). (1) and (3) can both be true. And this is so even if I cannot explain how it is possible that they both be true.
Vito continues:
I had thought to place my instinctive reaction on a different plane than St. Paul’s declaration that one can see “that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the things that have been made,” in that the latter involves a two stage intellectual process, that of (1) the perception of an empirical fact, the existence and nature of the universe, and (2) the attribution of this fact to the action of some conscious cause, that is, to the action of a predefined concept of a Creator God, as understood in the Judaic and early Christian traditions. In the case of the baby elephant, I believed that the additive [additional] conceptual stage was not involved, since my emotional reaction was akin to what most of humanity feels when encountering a horrendous evil, such as a pointless cruelty or murder. In other words, I took it as an instinctive moral reaction that preceded any conceptualization. As such, I assumed that its source was inherent in my moral essence as a man and hence prior to discursive argument. From what you write, I now see that I was probably wrong in making this assumption, since the empirical event gives me only the right to my emotional reaction and not to any larger philosophical claims as to the nature of God that I would care to derive from it.
Vito understands me quite well.
To give the Pauline two-step a Kantian twist: I am filled with wonder by "the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." That is the first step. The second step is to infer straightaway that there must be a transcendent Creator of the universe who is also the Source of the moral law within me. One can reasonably doubt the validity of that immediate inference. (And if you try to mediate it by the adducing of some further proposition, then the skeptic will train his sights upon that proposition.) By the same token, one can reasonably doubt that the extremely strong, pervasive, and obtrusive appearance of unjustified natural evil is a veridical appearance, and thus that the objective evil of predation is a pointless or unjustified evil.
Malcolm Pollack, responding to my first response to Caiati, and targeting my claim that in the end one must decide what to believe and how to live, writes:
"One must decide.” Well, yes — but how? Bill shows us that reason alone has insufficient grounds for a verdict; neither case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Upon what do we fall back, then? [. . .]
So — if reason is helpless to acquit, and conscience votes to convict, then what is left for the believer? Only the persistence of his sense of the transcendent, and the yearning to believe. If we are to let God off the hook, the problem of “pointless evil” must simply be set aside as a mystery beyond our comprehension. Can we do it? Ought we do it?
I am not sure that Malcolm understands quite what I mean when I say that "one must decide what to believe" in the final analysis and with respect to a matter like this. He wants to how one decides. Answer: You just do it after having reviewed all the considerations pro et contra. It's a free decision. There is no algorithm. There is no decision procedure that one can mechanically follow. The considerations pro and con do not decide the matter. What you "fall back upon" is is your own free choice to either believe that (1) or to believe that (2). You stop thinking and perform an act of will. Thought is endless and its conclusions are inconclusive. Thought goes around and around. To take a stand one must jump of the merry-go-round.
"But isn't that arbitrary?" Of course, in one sense of 'arbitrary.' But not in the sense of being random or uninformed by rational considerations pro and con that precede the decision. The necessity of action, the necessity of an abrupt shift from the plane of thought to the plane of action, ought to dawn on one once one sees that (i) one must act, and that (ii) reasons, taken singly or collectively, do not necessitate a course of action. This is most obvious when one is in a state of 'doxastic equipoise,' that situation in which the considerations pro and the considerations con cancel out. But even if one set of reasons strikes one as stronger than the other, opposing, set, one still has to stop thinking and decide to act on the stronger set of reasons. For if one continues thinking, one will almost certainly modify if not reject one's initial assessment.
There are all these considerations that speak for God and all these others ones that speak against God, the loudest being those having to do with evil. The Leibnizian "Gentlemen, let us calculate" cuts no ice in a situation like this. As I said, there is no algorithm. There is no rational procedure that does the work for me. The work is done by an act of will, informed, but not necessitated, by the reasons that the intellect surveys. It would be nice if there were reasons the contemplation of which would force me this way or that in a matter like the one before us. The truth, however, is that I am forced, not to believe this or that, but to take responsibility for what I believe whatever it is.
Seeing as how I cannot achieve the fixation of belief by continuing to mull over reasons pro and con, I achieve said fixation by an act of will.
"Why not suspend belief?" One is free to do that, of course. One might just take no position on the question whether God exists or not and whether there are pointless evils or not. But the taking of no position is itself a free decision. One decides not to decide. Not to decide is to decide. Now this might be theoretically reasonable, but for beings like us, interested (inter esse) beings, this is practically and prudentially unreasonable.
Consider the question of the existence of the (immortal) soul. Can one prove its existence? No. Can one prove its nonexistence? No. Are there good arguments on both sides? Yes. Is the cumulative case on the one side stronger than the cumulative case on the other? Possibly. But you still have to decide what you will believe in this matter and how you will live.
Suppose you decide to suspend judgment and forget about the whole matter. You will then live as if there is no (immortal) soul and not attend to its care or worry about its future well-being. You will not have committed yourself theoretically, but you will have committed yourself existentially. Should the soul prove to exist, then you will have acted imprudently. You will have acted in a prudentially irrational way.
If, on the other hand, you live as if God and the soul are real, and it turns out that they are not, what have you lost? Nothing of any value comparable to the value of what you will gain if God and the soul turn out to be real and you lived in the belief that they are real. I put this question to an atheist a while back and he replied, "You lost your intellectual integrity." Not so! For both belief and unbelief are rationally acceptable.
So I will say the following to Malcolm. Not everyone is psychologically capable of religious belief, but if you are, and if you agree that it could be the case for all we know that God and the soul are real, and that the pro arguments have weight even f they are not rationally compelling, then I say: go ahead and believe and act in accordance with the beliefs. What harm could it do?
And it might make you a better man. For example, if you believe that you will be judged post-mortem for what you did and left undone in this life, then this belief might contribute to your being a better man than you would have been without this belief — even if the belief turns out to be false. Religion does not have to be true to be life-enhancing and conducive to human flourishing. If, however, you believe it not to be true, then you won't live in accordance with it, and it will not have any life-enhancing effect.
A Catholic reader of this blog is deeply troubled by the problem of animal suffering. He reports his painful recollection of a YouTube video that depicts
. . . the killing of a baby elephant by 13 lions. They first attacked the little elephant in the open, but he was saved when several water buffalo intervened and drove the lions off. The baby then ran to two large bull elephants nearby, but rather than protecting him from the lions, they were indifferent. The lions, seeing this, rushed the baby, which helplessly ran off into the bush, where the lions, 13 in all, caught him, and began to devour him. You probably know that because of an elephant’s trunk, a lion’s bite to the neck does not kill, so I assume that the baby was eaten alive.
I find the thought of this killing and the myriad other killings like it very hard to accept. How does a theist explain such acts in nature? I know something of the various theodicies and defenses of theistic philosophers, but when confronted with this scene of terror and horrendous death, I find them all unconvincing. Something in the depths of my being rejects them all as over-sophisticated attempts to mask what is truly terrible so as to defend at all costs the first of Hume’s four options, that of a perfectly good first cause. I am not saying that I am abandoning my theistic beliefs, but I think that for too long, theists have not taken the matter of animal pain and suffering seriously enough.
Leaving philosophic theism aside, there is glaring indifference to this matter in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where the fixation on humanity’s fall, faults, and need for salvation. Without denying whatever truth may be found in this long theological reflection on human misery, what of the animals, those here millions of years before man walked on the earth, and all those who have shared and do share the earth with him? (Your posts on animal sentience, from which I have greatly profited, form part of the background to this question.)
[. . .] You often speak of choosing, and I agree that we must choose what we believe, but there is something at the very heart of reality that undermines our choices, and we find ourselves, if we are honest, doubting what we have chosen and thrown back on uncertainty, or if perhaps less honest and more fearful, falling into elaborate intellectual defenses to fend off what is unpalatable. As I wrote to you last year, I still believe that our ignorance is perhaps the greatest evil that we must confront.
Again, I had to share this with you, since I have no one here who would understand what is troubling me . . .
The horrors of nature "red in tooth and claw" cannot be denied. Sensitive souls have been driven by their contemplation to the depths of pessimism and anti-natalism. (See my Anti-natalism and Benatar categories). The notion that this awful world could be the creation of an all-powerful and loving deity who providentially cares about his creatures can strike one as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable. As my old atheist friend Quentin Smith once put it to me, "If you were God, would you have created this world?" To express it in the form of an understatement, a world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, and must do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged. If you were the architect of the world, would you design it as a slaughter house?
If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might help with the existential-psychological problem. I will now suggest how a theist who is also inclined toward skepticism can find some peace of mind.
Theological Premise: Necessarily, if there is a God, there are no pointless evils.
Empirical Premise: There are pointless evils.
Conclusion: There is no God.
A pointless evil is one that is unjustified or gratuitous. Suppose there is an evil that is necessary for a greater good. God could allow such an evil without prejudice to his omnibenevolence. So it it not the case that evils as such tell against the existence of God, but only pointless evils.
Now the lions' eating alive of the baby elephant would seem to be a pointless evil: why couldn't an omnipotent God have created a world in which all animals are herbivores?
But — and here the skeptic inserts his blade — how do we know this? in general, how do we know that the empirical premise is true? Even if it is obvious that an event is evil, it is not obvious that it is pointlessly evil. One can also ask, more radically, whether it is empirically obvious that an event is evil. It is empirically obvious to me that the savagery of nature is not to my liking, nor to the liking of the animals being savaged, but it does not follow that said savagery is objectively evil. But if an event or state of affairs is not objectively evil, then it cannot be objectively pointlessly evil.
So how do we know that the so-called empirical premise above is true or even empirical? Do we just see or intuit that an instance of animal savagery is both evil and pointless? Suppose St. Paul tells us (Romans 1:18-20) that one can just see that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the the things that have been made, and that therefore atheism is morally culpable! I say: Sorry, sir, but you cannot read off the createdness-by-God of nature from its empirical attributes. Createdness is not an empirical attribute; it is an ontological status. But neither is being evil or being pointlessly evil.
So both the theist and the atheist make it too easy for themselves when they appeal to some supposed empirical fact. We ought to be skeptical both about Paul's argument for God and the atheist's argument against God. Paul begs the question when he assumes that the natural world is a divine artifact. The atheist too begs the question when he assumes that all or some evils are pointless evils.
Will you say that the pointlessness of some evils is not a direct deliverance but an inference? From which proposition or propositions? From the proposition that these evils are inscrutable in the sense that we can discern no sufficient reasons for God's allowing them? But that is too flimsy a premise to allow such a weighty inference.
The dialectical lay of the land seems to be as follows. If there are pointless evils, then God does not exist, and if God exists, then there are no pointless evils. But we don't know that there are pointless evils, and so we are within our epistemic rights in continuing to affirm the existence of God. After all, we have a couple dozen good, but not compelling, arguments for the existence of God. One cannot prove the existence of God. By the same token, one cannot prove the nonexistence of God. One can bluster, of course, and one can beg the question. And one can do this both as a theist and as an atheist. But if you are intellectually honest, you will agree with me that there are no proofs and no objective certainties in these sublunary precincts.
This is why I say that, in the end, one must decide what one will believe and how one will live. And of course belief and action go together: what one believes informs how one lives, and how one lives shows what one believes. If I believe in God and the soul, then those beliefs will be attested in my behavior, and if I live as if God and the soul are real, then that is what it is to believe these things.
If you seek objective certainty in these matters, you will not find it. That is why free decision comes into it. But there is nothing willful about the decision since years of examination of arguments and counterarguments are behind it all. The investigation must continue if the faith is to be authentic. Again, there is no objective certainty in this life. There is only subjective certainty which many people confuse with objective certainty. We don't KNOW. This, our deep ignorance, is another aspect of the problem of evil.
Making these assertions, I do not make them dogmatically. I make them tentatively and I expose them to ongoing investigation. In this life we are in statu viae: we are ever on the road. If rest there is, it is at the end of the road.
My correspondent seems to think that I think that deciding what to believe and how to live generates objective certainty. That is not my view. There is no objective certainty here below. It lies on the Other Side if it lies anywhere. And there is no objective certainty here below that there is anything beyond the grave. One simply has to accept that one is in a Cave-like condition, to allude to Plato's great allegory, and that, while one is not entirely in the dark, one is not entirely in the light either, but is muddling around in a chiaroscuro of ignorance and insight.
The following entry has been languishing in the cloud for going on ten years. I think I'll post it now, warts and all.
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I argued earlier that there can be instances of evil that do not involve suffering. Now I consider the converse question: Can there be instances of suffering that are not instances of evil? As I read the following passage from a 1978 article by William Rowe, Rowe is claiming that every instance of intense animal or human suffering is an instance of evil. It seems to me, however, that there are instances of intense human suffering that are not evil. In The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism Rowe writes:
In developing the argument for atheism based on the existence of evil, it will be useful to focus on some particular evil that our world contains in considerable abundance. Intense human and animal suffering, for example, occurs daily and in great plenitude in our world. Such intense suffering is a clear case of evil. Of course, if the intense suffering leads to some greater good, a good we could not have obtained without undergoing the suffering in question, we might conclude that the suffering is justified, but it remains an evil nevertheless. For we must not confuse the intense suffering in and of itself with the good things to which it sometimes leads or of which it may be a necessary part. Intense human or animal suffering is in itself bad, an evil, even though it may sometimes be justified by virtue of being a part of, or leading to, some good which is unobtainable without it. What is evil in itself may sometimes be good as a means because it leads to something that is good in itself. In such a case, while remaining an evil in itself, the intense human or animal suffering is, nevertheless, an evil which someone might be morally justified in permitting.
Suppose that to be restored to health a child must undergo an extremely painful medical treatment. So the parents of the child allow the treatment to be administered. We will agree that the infliction of the suffering upon the child is morally justified by the fact that the treatment is necessary to prevent a greater evil which we may assume to be the child's death. Now what Rowe is saying above is that in a case like this, the suffering is (morally) justified but evil nevertheless.
I find this difficult to understand. It sounds like a contradiction. For if the infliction of the suffering is morally justified, then the infliction is morally permissible. But if the suffering is morally evil, then its infliction is also morally evil, which is to say that its infliction is morally impermissible. But surely it is a contradiction to affirm of any action A that A is both morally permissible and morally impermissible.
If the suffering is morally justified in that it leads to a good unobtainable without it, then the suffering, though certainly unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc., is not under the conditions specified evil. In the situation we are imagining, it is not only morally permissible but also morally obligatory for the parents to allow the painful treatment to be administered. This implies that the treatment ought to be administered. Therefore, if you say that the child's suffering remains evil despite its leading to a greater good, then you are committed to saying that the infliction of evil upon the child is morally obligatory, something that ought to be done. But this smacks of absurdity since it is hard to understand how any infliction of evil could be morally obligatory. Since in our example the infliction of suffering is morally permissible, I conclude that (intense) suffering is not in every case evil.
What Rowe is saying is that (intense) suffering is intrinsically evil, and that its evilness remains the same whether or not the suffering is instrumentally good. What I am suggesting contra Rowe is that whether or not suffering is evil depends on whether or not it is instrumentally good. For me, suffering that is instrumentally good is not evil. I concede of course that such suffering remains unpleasant, disagreeable, repugnant, awful, excruciating, etc. But I do not understand how suffering in itself, or intrinsically, can be said to be evil.
Perhaps the problem is that there are two senses of 'evil' in play, one non-normative the other normative, and that Rowe is appealing to the former sense. Accordingly, the non-normatively evil is that which elicits aversion. In this sense, mental and physical suffering is evil in that beings like us are prone to shun it. The normatively evil, on the other hand, is that which ought not exist. So perhaps my puzzle can be resolved by saying:
1. Every instance of suffering is evil in the non-normative sense that, as a matter of empirical fact, beings like us are prone to shun it. (Being prone to shun X does not entail the shunning of X.)
2. Some instances of suffering are not evil in the normative sense that it is false that they ought not exist.
3. If an instance of suffering conduces to a good that outweighs it, and the good is unobtainable by any other means, then the instance of suffering ought to exist. Thus the child's suffering in our example ought to exist. Admittedly, this sounds paradoxical. But note that this 'ought' is not categorical but hypothetical or conditional: the child's suffering ought to exist given that, on condition that, the treatment that causes it is the only way to avoid the child's death, which would be an evil worse than the child's suffering from the treatment.
4. (3) is not paradoxical or incoherent.
5. The moral goodness of God is called into question not by the existence of evils in the non-normative sense, but by the existence of evils in the normative sense. Thus the mere existence of suffering, which is non-normatively evil, does not by itself cause a problem for the divine moral goodness. For it may well be that all instances of suffering are morally justifiable in the light of a greater good. This does not make these sufferings any less repugnant; but this repugnance is not a moral repugnance but the non-normative property of thwarting desire.
Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. They admit the reality of evil and the corruption of human nature. Liberals and leftists, by contrast, tend to believe that people are basically good and that it is only extraneous factors that corrupt them. Evil has no purchase in reality for them but is merely a word we apply to those whose beliefs and values differ from ours.
Immanuel Kant wisely wrote of the "crooked timber of humanity of which no straight thing has ever been made." For liberals and leftists, however, the warpage is not inherent in the timber but comes from without, from contingent social arrangements that can and must be changed.
People who live this delusion sometimes come to a very bad end. Performance artist Pippa Bacca is a case in point. She and a friend hitchiked from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East in wedding dresses to promote global harmony. Just three weeks into the trip she was raped and murdered in Turkey by a driver who offered her a ride.
The refusal to face reality is a mark of the leftist who prefers his u-topian view of the world to the world.
Today I preach upon a text from Karl Jaspers wherein he comments on St. Augustine (Plato and Augustine, ed. Arendt, tr. Mannheim, Harcourt 1962, p. 110):
In interminable discussions, men have tried to sharpen and clarify this contradiction: on the one hand, evil is a mere clouding of the good, a shadow, a deficiency; on the other hand, it is an enormously effective power. But no one has succeeded in resolving it.
The problem is genuine, the problem is humanly important, and yet it gives every indication of being intractable. Jaspers is right: no one has ever solved it. To sharpen the contradiction:
1) Evil is privatio boni: nothing independently real, but a mere lack of good, parasitic upon the good. It has no positive entitative status.
2) Evil is not a mere lack of good, but an enormously effective power in its own right. It has a positive entitative status.
A tough nut to crack, an aporetic dyad, each limb of which makes a very serious claim on our attention. And yet the limbs cannot both be true. Philosophy is its problems, and when a problem is expressed as an aporetic polyad, then I say it is in canonical form.
In Support of the First Limb
We need first to consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:
For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present –namely, the diseases and wounds — go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils — that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.
If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem — dating back beyond Hume to Epicurus — of reconciling the existence of God (as classically defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.
Without going that far, let us note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Call this the Anti-Manichean Intuition. What speaks for it?
In one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. The same goes for the evil of blindness and countless other examples. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.
The anti-Manichean intuition is that evil, while not an illusion, cannot be fully real. It is in some way parasitic upon the good. It cannot exist without the good, but depends on it, the way shadows depend on light and holes on perforated things.
Here is a second consideration. Manicheanism is deeply repugnant to the intellect. Suppose there are two coeval principles, Good and Evil, equal but opposite, neither derivative from the other, forever at odds with each other. This is intellectually repugnant because the mind's explanatory drift is necessarily toward unity. The mind seeks unity in the conviction that reality is ultimately one, not ultimately many, and that therefore the undeniable reality of the many must in some way derive from the the One. Ultimate reality cannot be Two. (Whether the tendency toward unity is only a transcendental presupposition of our intellectual operations, as opposed to a trait of the Real, is a difficult question I have addressed in other posts.)
The second consideration, then, is that our natural intellectual nisus finds ultimate dualism to be repugnant.
In Support of the Second Limb
But if evil is privatio boni, then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains, which are often far out of proportion in intensity of painfulness to their warning and protective functions, are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The Nagelian what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations. (And did it have to hurt that much to warn you not to slam your knees and other joints into hard objects?)
Now imagine the passion of Christ and his excruciating death on the cross. Try to convince yourself that what he experienced was a mere lack of well-being, that his horrendous sufferings were privations and deficiencies comparable to clouds and shadows and blindness in the eye.
The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a felt pain is a positive evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good. So the nature of evil cannot lie in privatio boni.
The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness. Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, despair, ordinary depression, clinical depression, anomie, the sense of abandonment in a meaningless universe, etc.
Christ on the cross did not merely experience the most horrific physical tortures, but also the worst spiritual torture, the sense of utter abandonment by God together with doubt in the reality of God. What Christ experienced in his passion was the reality of abandonment to evil agency with no consolation. (If you deny that he suffered in this way, then you deny that he was fully man.) Of course, Christ needn't come into this at all since I can make my point using other examples.
A Solution?
Much more can be said in support of the two limbs of our aporetic dyad. But let's consider a possible solution.
Solve the problem in the typical philosophical way by drawing a distinction. Distinguish evil effects from their source(s). Think of evil effects as evil deeds or the consequences of evil deeds. Think of the causal source(s) of evil effects as evil agents who freely (with the liberty of indifference, liberum arbitrium indifferentiae) bring about evil effects. It might then seem that there is a way between the horns of our dilemma. The positivity of evil derives from the reality of the agents of evil whereas the lack of the positivity of evil is due to the lack of reality of the evil effects.
Lucifer, the bearer of light, became a creature of darkness. His Fall came before the Fall of man in Adam. The angel Lucifer was created by the Good, i.e., God. Lucifer, qua creature, was good in virtue of his positive entitative status. To be is to be good. (Ens et bonum convertuntur.) But his will was free, and he chose to misuse his freedom, thereby bringing evil into the realm of creatures.
The solution, then, is that the reality of evil is the reality of free agents who freely do evil deeds whereas the unreality of evil is the relative unreality of evil effects. The responsibility for evil cannot be charged to the account of the Good principle. On the other hand, Evil is not pushed entirely out of the Good principle and hypostatized as on Manicheanism. For the agents, both demonic and human, who freely do evil depend for their existence and nature as free upon the Good principle, which is also the principle of Truth and Being.
The problem with the solution is that God or the Good must harbor within itself the possibility of evil wills and evil deeds.
Enter the Pyrrhonian
Imagine a Pyrrhonian Skeptic making the scene. His precious tranquillitas animi is upset by this dialectical bickering back and forth. So he suspends judgment on the great question and pretends no longer to care. But is this any solution? Not at all.
The great questions are disputed, often bitterly. There is no agreement, and there is no reasonable hope for agreement. But could one reasonably suspend judgment on questions of great existential moment — especially on the paltry ground that thinking about these things is disturbing?
Either we have a higher origin or we don't. What is the truth? The answer you give will inform the way you live — and the way you die. The Pyrrhonist stops caring to save himself mental disturbance and anxiety. But is his a peace of mind worth wanting?
We cannot know the ultimate truth in this life (contra dogmatism), but we also cannot reasonably not care what the ultimate truth is (contra Pyrrhonism). We cannot know because of the infirmity of reason: our fallen state has noetic consequences. But we are also inclined not to care because we are fallen and so easily swamped by the delights of the senses and by social suggestions.
There is the complacency of dogmatic belief, but also the complacency of not caring. One succumbs to the temptation of thinking that none of this really matters — which is itself a sort of dogmatism, that of believing that it's all just a play of phenomena and that when you are dead, that's it. Call it the Great Temptation.
Exit the Pyrrhonian
Resisting the Great Temptation, and avoiding both the complacency of dogmatism and the complacency of the uncaring worldling, we must continue the search for truth which, as Jaspers remarks above, is the way of philosophy.
Here is an entry from my first weblog. It first saw the light on 23 June 2004. Don't say it is dated. The distinctions and truths it contains are timeless. The bit about courage is important and not widely understood.
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One night on Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity interviewed Al Sharpton. Sharpton had recently visited Fidel Castro in his island paradise. Hannity was quite shocked to hear all the fine things Sharpton had to say about the Cuban dictator. I had the impression that Hannity would not allow even one good thing to be said about Fidel. Fidel is an evil dictator, so there cannot be anything good about him!
That seemed to be Hannity’s (specious) reasoning. Here we encounter the phenomenon of demonizing one’s opponents, a phenomenon found on both the Right and the Left. Although Fidel is an evil dictator, it does not follow that he has no good attributes. The same goes for Adolf Hitler, who practically everyone cites as the personification of evil. But it is obvious to any clear-thinking person free of political correctness that Hitler had many excellent attributes. He was disciplined, idealistic, courageous, resolute, a great orator, etc. No doubt Hitler had the wrong ideals, but having the wrong ideals is not the same as lacking ideals. No doubt Lenin used his courage for the wrong ends, but using one’s courage for the wrong ends is not the same as lacking courage. It took courage to break all those eggs especially when there was no guarantee of an omelet. A bad man can have (some) good attributes, just as a good man can have (some) bad attributes.
Democrat party operatives thought they could smear Arnold Schwarzenegger by claiming that he had once praised Hitler. Suppose he had. That by itself does nothing to cast aspersions on Schwarzenegger. Qua instance of courage, discipline, etc., Hitler is surely praiseworthy. That is not to say that Hitler was a good man. To repeat, a bad man can instantiate (some) good attributes.
But people are so blinded by political correctness, so befuddled by uncritically imbibed speech codes, that they cannot wrap their minds around such simple points as I am making. People say that liberals don’t think, they emote. I would add that when liberals do try to think, they rarely do more than associate. “Hitler bad man! Schwarzenegger mention Hitler! Schwarzenegger bad man!” Another tactic used against Schwarzenegger was to claim that his father had been a Nazi. Suppose he had been. What does that have to do with our man? Do these lefties in their imbecilic group-think mean to suggest that the guilt of the father is inherited by the son?
Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor once got into a silly argument with Bill Maher. Maher had praised the 9/11/01 hijackers for their courage, which elicited howls of protest from O’Reilly, who called them cowards. Now surely my man O’Reilly, right as he is about so much, is in the wrong here. Muhammad Atta and the boys displayed great courage in the successful execution of their nihilistic acts. No doubt the acts in question were unspeakably evil; but courage and cowardice are (dispositional) properties of agents, not of their acts.
A courageous person is one who is typically able to master his fear and perform the difficult act that he envisages. It doesn’t matter whether the act is morally good or evil. So although courage is a virtue, hence something good, it does not follow that every act of a courageous person will be morally good. Equivalently, the performance of an evil act does not show that its agent is a coward. A cowardly person is one who is typically unable to master his fear, and is instead mastered by it, with the result that he cannot perform the act he envisages. It is clear that Atta and his crew were the exact opposite of cowards.
At the root of O’Reilly’s confusion was his demonization of the opponent. He could not allow that Atta and his gang had any virtues, so he could not allow that they were courageous, courage being a good thing.
