On replacing pain

 Doctors have actually tried to replace pain in the human body with some other kind of warning system. It doesn't work. The philosopher David Hume said that God could have given us something less unpleasant than pain in order to warn us the way pain does but is less unpleasant. I remember talking to someone who did pain research but who was going into philosophy, and he told me that the work of pain can't be done without the awfulness of pain. 

Who are you, O man? The eliminativist response to the problem of evil

The idea that we have no duties to that which we create seems counterintuitive to me. That is why I'm not an eliminativist with respect to the problem of evil.
Yet, I sometimes I wonder how to argue with someone who is. And there is a Bible verse to support their view:

Romans 9:20 But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?'"

Does it follow from this that if A is the creator of B, then B cannot make any moral judgments concerning A's treatment of B?

Could it be Satan?

A redated post.

My daughter is writing a paper on the problem of evil, and asked me what I thought of the attempt to explain natural evil as a species of moral evil. In the literature on the problem of evil, moral evil is thought to be the result of the actions of creatures do wrong. Examples of this would be Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews, the party purges of Stalin, the murders of Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper, but also would include less dramatic evils such as the sins I have committed today. Natural evil is evil that does not result from the actions of creatures, such as earthquakes, floods, being struck by lightning, illness, old age, etc.
In the case of moral evil, a solution looks to be available. God, it seems, has an interest in free obedience, and by free I mean that obedience that is not determined or controlled by God himself. (See my discussion of Star Trek in a previous entry). But in order for God to open the way obedience that is free in this sense, God must refuse to control the outcome of our choices, but if he does that, then he risks the possibility that disobedience. I realize this involves rejecting the claim that free will and determinism are compatible. If freedom and determinism are compatible, then God could have created the World of Mr. Rogers, the world in which everyone freely does what is right.
Plantinga’s Demon Scenario
For the sake of this discussion, I will assume that the problem of moral evil is answerable in terms of human free will. This still leaves the serious problem of explaining natural evil. In Alvin Plantinga’s The Nature of Necessity, he mentions the idea that all evils are broadly moral evil, because while some evils are the result of human free choices, other evils are the result of the free choices of non-human creatures. He writes:
But another and more traditional line of thought is pursued by St. Augustine, who attributes much of the evil we find to Satan, or to Satan and his cohorts. Satan, so the traditional doctrine goes, is a mighty non-human spirit who, along with many other angels, was created long before God created man. Unlike most of his colleagues, Satan rebelled against God and since has been wreaking whatever havoc he can. The result is natural evil. So the natural evil we find is due to free actions of non-human spirits.1

Now, Plantinga points out that for Augustine, this appeal to Satanic agency is an attempt to provide a theodicy, that is, to provide a true explanation for why God permits suffering. A defense, on the other hand, is an attempt to refute some version of the argument from evil. That may involve providing the actual explanation for the existence of evils, but it may not. The argument from evil Plantinga is discussing here is often called the logical problem of evil; it involves the claim that theists, in believing both that there is a God and in also being a realist about the evils in the world, the theist is implicitly contradicting himself. All we need to refute this argument is to provide a possible scenario according to which God and the evils in this world co-exist. Plantinga therefore claims that the demon scenario meets this requirement, and therefore, he claims the logical problem of evil stands refuted.

Over the years, and largely due to the work of Plantinga, attention has shifted from the logical problem of evil to the probabilistic or evidential problem of evil. The idea is that while it is possible that God existence is compatible with the suffering and evil we find in the world, nevertheless, it can be argued that evil in the world makes God’s existence improbable, or that that evil and suffering is strong evidence against the existence of God. In response to this argument, Plantinga says:
(The demon scenario), for example, involves the idea that the evil that is not due to free agency, is due to the agency of other rational and significantly free creatures. Do we have evidence against this idea? Many people find it preposterous; but that is scarcely evidence against it. Theologians sometimes tell us that this idea is repugnant to “man come of age” or to “modern habits of thought.” I am not convinced that this is so; in any case it does not come to much as evidence. The mere fact that a belief in unpopular at present (or at some other time) is interesting, no doubt, from a sociological point of view; it is evidentially irrelevant. Perhaps, we do have evidence against this belief, but if we do, I do not know what it is.2

I recall a conversation in my office with Plantinga when I was a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame in which Plantinga told me that even though he presented the scenario as a possible scenario, he considered demonic influence to be the real explanation of many of the evils in the world. Certainly this explanation has biblical support, as is evident from reading Job or the Gospels. It also has the support of an obscure popular British theologian from the middle of the past century, a guy by the name of..uh..uh..Lewis. (See the Animal Pain chapter of The Problem of Pain).

Atheist philosopher Keith M. Parsons, in his book God and the Burden of Proof, however, offers two criticisms of the demon scenario as a defense against the problem of evil. He writes:

But how is this even possible? What would it be like to bring about natural evils? Natural evils are caused, so far as we can tell, by the same fundamental laws of nature that explain all other natural phenomena. Earthquakes are caused by the same tectonic processes that produce majestic mountain ranges; pathogens and parasites evolved according to the same kittens and butterflies, weather systems that bring balmy breezes to one region bring tornadoes to another. The causes of natural evil are thus so intimately involved with (and often identical to) the causes of all other natural phenomena that to cause natural evil, it would seem necessary to cause nature.
But in that case, what becomes of the doctrine of God as creator? At best we would seem to have a kind of dualism reminiscent of Manichaeism—a heretical movements in the late Roman Empire that viewed the cosmos as the creation of eternally opposed good and evil principles. If the demon scenario is thus inconsistent with the doctrine of God as creator, it cannot be of any use to Plantinga, not even as a bare possibility.3

He goes on to say:

A further difficulty with Plantinga’s argument is his assumption that free will could have the sort of absolute value he thinks it might have. As we saw earlier, ordinary moral judgments do not grant such a value to the possession or employment of free will. For instance, if I knew that a terrorist, of his own free will, planed to plant a bomb on an airliner, I would feel obliged to do everything in my power to inhibit him from exercising his free will in that way. How then is it possible that God could be justified in allowing Satan to run amok? How is it consistent with the goodness of God not to have placed greater restrictions on Satan’s freedom?4

So I’m going to put the question to my commentators, having presented both sides of the argument. Are at least some natural evils due to the influence of Satan and his minions? Or not?

1 Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) p. 192. He references “The Problem of Free Choice”’ in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 22 (New York: Paulist/ Newman Press), pp. 71ff.; and Confessions and Enchiridion tr. and ed., by Albert C. Outler (Philadelphia: Westminister Press), pp. 341-6.
2 Plantinga, p. 195.
3 Keith Parsons, God and the Burden of Proof (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989) pp. 123-124.
4. Parsons, p. 124.

Human benevolence and the problem of evil

A redated post.

As for how it is possible to believe that humans ought to alleviate suffering but God may be justified in permitting it, it is to be remembered that humans have a far narrower purview of considerations than God does. We do the best we can with no knowledge, for example, of how our actions will affect the free choices of people living 50 years from now, but God knows how those choices will be affected and may choose to do something that seems bad now in order to improve the situation with respect to the situation 50 years from now and 100 years from now.

If we eliminate certain diseases, we cannot be absolutely sure that they will not make the world a worse place in the long run. But to the best of our knowledge, they will cause an improvement of human life. Would you cure smallpox if you knew that if you didn't cure it, Hitler's mother would die of smallpox and the world would be spared the Holocaust? You don't have those things to think about, because you are a human with limited knowledge. God's knowledge is not limited (unless you're an open theist, in which case God's knowledge is still a whole lot less limited than yours is!)

The IEP on Skeptical Theism

The evidential argument from evil

On the basis of these results it can be seen that Rowe’s argument has a strongly resilient character, successfully withstanding many of the objections raised against it. Much more, of course, can be said both in support of and against Rowe’s case for atheism. Although it might therefore be premature to declare any one side to the debate victorious, it can be concluded that, at the very least, Rowe’s evidential argument is not as easy to refute as is often presumed.- Nick Trakakis

Talbott's Original Reply to Beversluis on the Problem of Evil

Originally published in Christian Scholar's Review in 1987. One of the first replies to Beversluis's book to be published after the first edition was published, and one that connects Lewis's The Problem of Pain to more recent developments (as of the time the paper was written), with respect to the argument from evil.

Thomas Talbott replies to John Beversluis

Tom Talbott wrote one of the critiques of John Beversluis's critique of Lewis shortly after Beversluis's book came out in 1985. Beversluis responded in his revised edition, but Talbott thinks Beversluis missed his central points. Here is his response.

Theodicists and Job's comforters

A redated post.

Charles Williams was a great friend of C. S. Lewis who died prematurely in 1945. Lewis edited a set of essays in his honor in 1947, entitled Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Eerdmans, 1974, originally Oxford University Press, 1947) (one year before the Anscombe exchange), and included the following in the preface. p. xiii.

But that was only one side of him. This scepticism and pessimism were the expression of his feelings. High above them, overarching themn like the sky, were the things he believed, and they were wholly optimistic. the did not negate his feelings; they mocked them. To the Wiliams who had accepted the fruition of Deity itself as the true goal of man, and who deeply believed that the sufferings of this present time were as nothing in comparison, the other Williams, the Williams who wished to be annihilated, who would rather not have been born, was in the last resort a comic fugure. He did not struggle to crush it as many religious people would have done. He saw its point of view. All that it said was, on a certain level, so very reasonable. He did not believe that God Himself wanted that frightened, indignant, and voluble creature to be annihilated; or even silenced. If it wanted to carry its hot complaints to the very Throne, even that, he felt, would be a permitted absurdity. It was true, Williams added, that the Divine answer had taken the surprising form of inviting Job to study the hippopotamus and the crocodile. But Job's impatience had been approved. The weight of the divine displeasure had been reserved for the 'comforters', the self-appointed advocates on God's side, the people who tried to show that all was well--'the sort of people', he said, immeasurably dropping his lower jaw and fixing me with his eyes--'the sort of people who wrote books on the Problem of Pain'.
In his essay "De Futilitate," (William B. Eerdmans, Christian Reflections, p. 70), which was a presentation given during the Second World War but written after the Problem of Pain, he seems to echo Williams' comments:

I cannot and never could persuade myself that such defiance is displeasing to the supreme mind. There is something holier about the atheism of a Shelley than about the theism of a Paley. That is the lesson of the book of Job. No explanation of the problem of unjust suffering there given: that is not the point of the poem. The point is that the man who accepts our ordinary standard of good and by it hotly criticizes divine justice receives the divine approval: the orthodox, pious psople who palter with that standard in the attempt to justify God are condemned. Apparently the way to advance from our imperfect apprehension of justice is not tot hrow our imperfect apprehensions aside but boldly to go on applying them. Just as the pupil advances to more perfect arithmetic not by throwing the multiplication table away but by working it for all it is worth.

So is Lewis pleading guilty to the charge of being a Job's comforter in PP? In one sense he could plead innocent; he could point out that the book is designed first and foremost to prevent us from drawing the conclusion, which Williams also does not draw, that God does not exist. The book frequently offers possible, rather than actual solutions to the problem of suffering, and is not designed to allow someone to go to someone undergoing immeasurable suffering: "Look, this is why you are having such a hard time now."

But while not condemning his previous book, Lewis seems to think that Williams had a point that he ought to have taken more seriously when he became "the sort of person who writes a book about the Problem of Pain."

In much of Lewis's work, he allows a considerable constructive role to be played by what I like to call the believer's "inner atheist." He remained firmly convinced that actual atheism was self-refuting (see Reason, Argument From) and undermining to the very moral foundation of the criticism directed at God. But even so, Lewis would, I think, have to agree that a lot of people died and suffered because of Hurricane Katrina who did not deserve to and that we really don't know, specifically, why God allowed this to happen. This response to Charles Williams, I think, is an excellent lens through which we can better understand A Grief Observed.

Evil and compatibilist free will

Could God have created Adam (technical term for whoever the first human was) and given him free will, meaning by that that Adam could usually perform the action that he most wanted to perform. At the same time, God "wires Adam up" in such a way that his desires are always to do what serves God. If God does that, then Adam is free (in the sense that he is able to do what he truly wants to do) but nevertheless all of his actions are sovereignly determined by God in such a way that Adam freely does what is right.

If this picture of free will is accurate, then it seems pretty clear that the atheist philosopher Antony Flew is right. God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right. Flew concludes that if God could have done this, and if he were truly perfectly good, then he would have done it, saving the world all the heartache that it has gone through these thousands of years.

Otte on Draper's Evidential Argument from Evil

Partial Theodicies

•While it is too much to know why some evil did happen, it might be a good idea to have some ideas as to why a good deal of the evils in the world might have happened. These are partial theodicies that offer possible answers to the question of some evils, rather than comprehensive theodicies which give a full and sufficient account of why God permits any and all evils.

Why unnecessary evil is necessary

If it appears to us as if God will constantly act to minimize suffering, then it will also not appear to us as if our actions will be decisive in determining whether suffering will occur or not occur.

Hence, if we are to live in a world in which meaningful choices are made and in which our choices have serious consequences, it must appear to us that there are many evils which are not necessary for any greater good. Therefore apparently unnecessary evil is in fact a necessary for the existence of truly significant human choices.

This is an based on some arguments by William Hasker.

A review of Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil

From the Evangelical Theological Society

Michael Peterson's Evil and the Christian God

This is an old book on the problem of evil.

Joe Markus on Van Inwagen on the Argument from Evil

A redated post.

Hello Professor Reppert,

Peter van Inwagen has an interesting approach to the problem of evil in his new book. He makes an initial argument that we should be suspicious of the argument from evil simply because it is a philosophical argument with a substantive conclusion. He argues that because no philosophical argument with a substantive conclusion has been successful in the history of philosophy, we should doubt that any argument for God's nonexistence could be successful.

He says:

Now if it is indeed true that no philosophical argument for any substantive conclusion is successful in the sense that I have proposed, it immediately follows that the argument from evil is not a success in that sense---given, at any rate, two premises that I don't think anyone would deny: that the argument from evil is a philosophical argument and that the nonexistence of God is a substantive philosophical thesis. If we think of what I have just said as an argument for the conclusion that the argument from evil is (in my sense) a failure, I don't think it's a bad argument. But even if it's a good argument, it has an important limitation: it doesn't really tell us anything of philosophical interest about the argument from evil; it doesn't interact with the content of the argument from evil. I might have offered essentially the same argument for the conclusion that the private-language argument or the ontological argument or the analogical argument for the existence of other minds was a failure. It is my project in these lectures to try to convince you that the argument from evil does not have the power to turn ideally rational and serious and attentive and patient neutral agnostics into athesits. And, of coursee, I mean to do this by actually coming to grips with the argument. Even if it's true (as I believe it is) that no philosophical argument for a substantive conclusion has the power to convert every member of an ideal and initially neutral audience to its conclusion, I don't mean to argue from that premise. I mean to show how Theist can block Atheist's every attempt to turn the audience of agnostics into atheists like herself. I mention my general thesis about the inability of philosophical argument to produce uniformity of belief even among the ideally rational simply because I think it is a plausible thesis, and if you agree with me on this point, your agreement will predispose you to accept a conclusion that I will defend on other grounds. (The Problem of Evil p. 53)

JM: It seems to me that there are problems of self-reference here. Is van Inwagen's argument here an instance of an argument with a substantive philosophical thesis? It seems to be. If so, then we should doubt this argument.

Granted, his only purpose in presenting the argument is to predispose us that arguments from evil aren't successful. But should we grant even that much to him?

Also, I'm not so sure about his criterion of success for a philosophical argument. He states it as:

PVI: An argument for p is a success just in the case that it can be used, under ideal circumstances, to convert an audience of ideal agnostics (agnostics with respect to p) to belief in p---in the presence of an ideal opponent of belief in p. (p. 47)
I don't think the criterion is unreasonable. But I'm not terribly enthusiastic about it either. Something about the word "ideal" bothers me.

Anyway, that's one of the many topics of van Inwagen's new book. Have you had an opportunity to check it out? You might be interested in some of his themes which resemble arguments from C.S. Lewis' Problem of Pain.

Regards,

Joe

This brings me to one of the most interesting topics in philosophy, something I call argument metatheory. What can arguments do, and what can they not do? First of all, maybe something is gone wrong when we start talking about the problem of evil as opposed to the argument from evil.

I have been criticized by some people who otherwise like my arguments because I make too modest of claims on behalf of my arguments. The problem is that any argument concentrates on one relevant factor in understanding the whole question of God, and kind of puts all the other factor in neutral, when in the real world these other factors have a whole lot to do with why we make the world-view choices we do. So I will say "Look at the fact that we draw rational inferences, think about what that entails, and ask yourself if that fits better in a theistic universe than an atheistic universe. What is the probability that it will arise given theism, as opposed to the probability it will arise given atheism." But I don't think any argument is so good that it could undergird the claim, for example, that atheists are all intellectually dishonest.

An argument in world-view controversy is often of the form "You can't explain this!" And the problem here is that, of course, logically no world-view, however good, is going to put you in a position where you can explain everything. Still, some explanatory failures seem more devastating than others.

In the absence of that silver bullet argument, how do we proceed? I use a Bayesian metamodel to help me here. It shows how an argument can be modestly successful in a world-view debate.

Is the logical argument from evil a dead parrot?

Or just pining for the fjords. An essay by Dave Armstrong.

A secular outpost discussion of some of my objections to the argument from evil

A redated post. I should say that I don't endorse the claim that "if no one gets unjustly damned then whatever God dishes out is OK." At least not in my present state of mind. But if I held to such a theory, how would you refute me?

Jeff Lowder responds in this and in a previous post to some discussion of mine on the argument from evil. It seems to be a matter of figuring out the "scope" of arguments. I suppose you can have one argument that says that consciousness itself is more probable on theism than on naturalism. You might have another that says the fact that consciousness depends on the brain as much as it does confirms naturalism over theism. And then you have another argument that says that, given that it exists, the degree to which our conscious life is unpleasant and painful is more probable on naturalism than on theism. I still maintain that important phenomena that give rise to the problem of evil are themselves deeply problematic for naturalism, including consciousness, objective moral values (and yes I know all about running it as a reductio without presupposing objective moral values--I still think subjectivism undercuts the argument), and rational inference (we couldn't argue from evil if we can't infer). I'm agnostic as to whether an argument from evil can be made that disconfirms theism to some extent. What I object to is the claim that the argument from evil is a single, overriding reason for rejecting theism, that justifies irrationality charges against believers in God. At best it's one piece of the puzzle that goes the naturalist's way. Why is it supposed to me more important than all the other pieces?

How subjectivism undercuts the argument from evil

A redated post from 06.

I have been arguing 1) that there are arguments from naturalism to moral subjectivism ( I have more to say about that later) and 2) moral subjectivism undercuts the argument from evil. Now I agree that if the atheist can show that his theist opponent is a moral objectivist who somehow implicitly accepts the moral premise of the argument from evil, then he would have a reductio ad absurdum argument against that theist. But once the reductio is done, the theist may not reject theism, he may just deny the moral premise of the argument from evil, in order to make his position consistent. What you actually have to show is that theism, or Christian theism entails that moral premise, but showing that would be a tall order.

It's not true that no theists defend moral subjectivism; I got the impression that Marilyn McCord Adams, a leading Christian philosopher first at UCLA and later at Yale, is a moral subjectivist of some kind. Her husband Robert Merrihew Adams (making the two of them the philosophical Adams family) is a moral objectivist, (see, a philosopher couple can disagree about a few things!) but in a paper originally published in Philosophical Review which later appeared in his book The Virtue of Faith, entitled "Must God Create the Best," argued that God did not have the obligation of creating the best of all possible worlds, or even the best world that he had the power to create. In that essay, and in another essay entitled "Existence, Self-interest, and the Problem of Evil" Adams argues " that ethical views typical of the Judeo-Christian tradition do not require the Judeo-Christian theist to accept the view (that this is the best world God could create). He must hold that this world is a good world. But he needs not maintain that it is the best of all possible worlds, or the best world that God could have made." Now if you're a moral objectivist, you can argue that this position is morally unacceptable based on a moral standard you share with Adams and other theists. If you are a subjectivist, you're out to lunch in the face of an argument like this.

William Lane Craig, in a debate with Keith Parsons, argued that since God had created the Amalekites, he had the right to have them slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child. Parsons expresssed "outrage" at this position. I don't buy Craig's theology here at all, but as a subjectivist, I would have no right to complain about it. I could not argue that Craig was being irrational in accepting this kind of a moral position. I don't know if Parsons is a subjectivist or not, but if he is, his outrage is just his personal feeling, and there is no way he can make it binding on Craig.

So I think that even though it is theoretically possible to use the argument from evil as a subjectivist, the theist has some counter-moves which look awfully difficult to stop, consistent with moral subjectivism.

Reply to Ron on the problem of evil

Ron wrote: The AFE is a 'defeater' argument designed to show that there are internal contradictions in the theistic position. So while Lewis is correct technically, he misses the point that the AFE is concerned only with the rationality of the theistic position. The position of the atheist (or anyone else who uses the AFE) is not relevant. I think this is a mistake I've seen Christian apologists make.

VR: It is quite true that you can advance the argument from evil as a reductio against one's Christian opponent. What that entails is showing that as a Christian one must accept the moral premise of the argument (typically, a perfectly good being will prevent unnecessary suffering if possible, unless that suffering is necessary for a greater good), even though the atheist objector considers it subjective. But can you count on the Christian theist to accept that premise? Even if the theist accepts that premise in human contexts (and even that's not clear) it doesn't follow that the theist is inconsistent in not applying it to God.

In his debate with Keith Parsons William Lane Craig says that God is justified in ordering the Amalekites to be slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child, because God is the author and giver of life and therefore can take life as he chooses. Of course, Parsons found this shocking, and I personally find it counterintuitive. But I don;'t find Craig's position inconsistent. I don't see how an atheist can object to Craig's position without appealing to an objective standard that both the atheist and the theist share.

I've covered and discussed this point on here quite a bit, as the link should show.