If there were no God, there could be no Problem of Evil, for in that case there could be no such thing – no such thing really – as evil.
There is a Problem of Evil.
QED.
++++
There is of course in reality no logical or ontological or moral problem of evil; for as the Good per se, God cannot logically be the source or cause of evil, but can rather be only the source and cause of goods. To think otherwise would be to misunderstand the denotation of “God.” And, what is not a problem logically cannot be a problem ontologically or therefore morally.
But notwithstanding that, there is certainly for every life under the orbit of the Moon an emotional and phenomenal problem of evil (evil hurts, after all); and the latter sort is generally mixed up with the former, so as to muddle the wits. Muddled wits can Fall into the error of misunderstanding the denotation of “God.”
God himself corrected this misunderstanding in the oldest book of the Bible; in what are I suppose the most sublime words ever written; nay, the most superlime:
Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it, and brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed? Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place; that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it? It is turned as clay to the seal; and they stand as a garment. And from the wicked their light is withholden, and the high arm shall be broken. Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the depth? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death? Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? Declare if thou knowest it all. Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof, that thou shouldst take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldst know the paths to the house thereof? Knowest thou it, because thou wast then born? Or because the number of thy days is great? Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war? By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth? Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder; to cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; to satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? Hath the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the drops of dew? Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are? Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? Or who hath given understanding to the heart? Who can number the clouds in wisdom? Or who can stay the bottles of heaven, when the dust groweth into hardness, and the clods cleave fast together? Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion, or fill the appetite of the young lions, when they couch in their dens, and abide in the covert to lie in wait? Who provideth for the raven his food? When his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat.
Job 38
The Problem of Evil is really just a purblind sinner whining about the fact that life is not perfect. What did he expect? What did he think was his due? What made him think that he should expect better? Where did he get the idea that there might be something better?
That the purblind sinner can possibly suppose that there is something better he might have had, if only the world were more just, or were nicer, is all the evidence we should need that there is God. Only on God might it be possible to think that there is something better than this world, that as better for us is just simply better per se, and thus more befitting a being such as God.
The Orthosphere 
@Kristor
“God cannot logically be the source or cause of evil, but can rather be only the source and cause of goods. To think otherwise would be to misunderstand the denotation of “God.” ”
Surely this is “begging the question”?
Logic, after all, can only tell us the consequences of our assumptions; and if one has already assumed that God cannot be the source of evil and only be the cause of good – then there is nothing to discuss.
I would suggest that the reason that people may, quite rationally, regard the presence of evil as a problem is that they have Not made the assumption that God, (who such people regard as the creator of every-thing from no-thing) is wholly good/ incapable of evil.
The problem is that such a God is the *ultimate* cause of every-thing that happens in reality, including everything that we humans regard as the most evil.
So far as I can see, the only way out of this problem is to assert that every single thing that appears to us as evil, is actually good (from God’s ultimate perspective); and that therefore our human sense of values and morals are defective to the point of being worthless. In other world; everything we may think is evil is only apparently so, and there are no real evils in this world or universe.
But – while this is rational, at least broadly so – and preserves both God’s goodness and total-creator status; this does Not seem like a good fit with Christianity. It seems to me that Islam (or maybe Judaism, if one is Jewish) is a better fit for such assumptions concerning the nature of God as both ultimate and total creator/ cause and also wholly Good (but not human comprehensibly good) than is Christianity.
Because if Men have no validity to their discernment of evil, such that even our most sure and extreme ideas of evil are actually/ ultimately good – then God is a being *primarily* to be obeyed – and obeyed utterly regardless of our wholly unreliable human opinions about value or morality.
(Of course; there are still, of course, secondary and human problems about humanly knowing what actually *is* God’s will that must be obeyed – but ideally obedience to God’s will still remains the primary virtue – in a sense it is the only necessary virtue.)
Note: As you know; I personally do Not assume that God is the creator of everything from nothing, nor that God is the ultimate cause and sustainer of everything that happens. Therefore I have no logical problem in assuming that God is wholly good And Also that there are *real* (not just apparent) evils in this world.
Agreed that Job is one forceful answer to the “problem of evil,” but this issue is a bit more complicated. For one thing, the existence of the book of Job is itself evidence that this “problem” has been on people’s minds for many centuries; it was apparently already crying for an answer when the book was written.
Second, the big stumbling-block for many believers (and former believers) isn’t evil in general, but specific events that seem like rewards for evil and/or sadistic punishments of the innocent. A major shock to the faithful, helping accelerate the Enlightenment, was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which struck right when churches were packed for All Saints’ Day and buried thousands of the most faithful Christians in the rubble. Likewise, I recall reading once about a guy who said he lost his faith after hearing about rats attacking and killing a baby. Stuff like that.
Third, human beings’ moral intuitions are not proof of God’s existence, assuming such a thing were even needed. An atheist would explain it as an evolved trait of higher primates with human cognitive capacities for organizing their social lives. Sociability demands reciprocity, which gives rise to moral rules and systems. Having thus arrived at a “knowledge of good and evil,” and having posited the existence of God by way of reassurance in a mysterious and frightening universe, people (in some cultures) would project ideal qualities onto God: God must be all-good, and also all-knowing and all-powerful. Only then would they discover that this combination of postulates raises a new question, i.e. why such a God allows — presumably, in some sense, wills — so many horrible things to keep happening.
So at most, the question doesn’t prove there IS a God, it proves that human beings have active minds that look for answers and explanations, and can get themselves tangled up in their own logic. What the book of Job seems to be telling us is: forget all that, you’ll never be able to fit Me (God) within your logical categories.
Thanks for an engaging and thoughtful comment. I agree with your first and second points.
As for the third, the argument doesn’t turn on our intuition that there is evil. It turns on the objective fact of evil, whatever our intuitions about it. On atheism, there is no objective fact of evil, but rather only just stuff happening for no reason, and without any inherent moral or aesthetic value; so that human moral and aesthetic evaluations are hallucinations, and what is more are fallacious. On atheism, pain is not in fact bad.
Are there true hallucinations? Sure: the paranoid who concluded from insufficient evidence that they are after him might be correct in his paranoid conclusion, despite his errors of thought: they might indeed really be after him, albeit not perhaps in the way that he thinks. In that case, he would be suffering a hallucination that happens to be veracious.
It is hard to see how fallacious hallucinations – which is to say, madness – might be adaptive. Moral and aesthetic intuitions can be adaptive only if they generate pretty accurate evaluations most of the time – if, that is to say, they reliably modulate moral and aesthetic fact. If there are such facts, the Good must be real; so, atheism must be false.
Yes. If we could fit God into logical categories – or if even God himself could do so – then the logical categories would be prior to God, and he would not be God.
I think you might be reifying the idea of “the good.” The non-theistic (I prefer that to “atheistic”) account I’m alluding to wouldn’t depend on rigid, ontological categories of “good” and “evil,” but just on the observation that social animals like human being gain from reciprocity and cooperation. It’s less dangerous and more sustainable to trade agreeably with your neighbor than to steal from him and have to defend against him stealing from you. So systems and moral codes are developed in human societies that praise and reward peaceable arrangements and punish or disfavor predation. For convenience, we *then* assign the term “good” to the favored / agreeable methods, and “bad” or “evil” to the predatory / disfavored. But that’s just a semantic convenience.
I think the non-theist would go on to say: having thereby developed some provisional concept of “the good,” we project that quality onto the God we’ve imagined as ruling the universe and controlling natural events. If we’re “God-maximizers” in the Judeo-Christian mold — that is, not polytheists, or Manichean or Gnostic dualists, but believers in one, sole, supreme God of everything — then we suppose the goodness of God to be infinite and unfailing. Which then raises the further question of why such a God lets the innocent suffer in ways we find so appalling and inexplicable.
God’s answer in Job is something like, “Look, people, if you’re going to assume that I’m infinite, all-powerful and all-knowing, well, then you’re further assuming that I know and see things you never could, and furthermore that I’m not accountable to you. So whether my ways fit within your moral schemes or not is neither here nor there.” That’s probably a good answer for believers. It’s apt not to work for those who are struggling and don’t yet believe, though, because it’s functionally the same as saying that God cannot be relied on to deliver what would look to human beings like goodness.
I appreciate your engagement with these topics; thanks for another meaty, intelligent contribution.
I’m using it the way Plato did, as a Name of God. But that is not ipso facto to reify the Good, inasmuch as God is not a res among res, but is rather reification itself (whether in thought, word, or deed). He is not a being, but rather *just is* being (notice that ‘being’ is a gerund; it denotes an *activity*; so, God is the way all things happen). Dionysius the Areopagite and the other Neo-Platonists – and for that matter Aquinas – are quite clear about this. To think that, like all other things we know, God is but a thing among other things is to misconstrue God. It is to construe him as less than ultimate.
Excursus: NB, in passing: to construe God as incapable of being a being among other beings – as to be sure he is, in the Trinity, in the Incarnation, in the Great Angel and the King of Angels, in the consecrate host, and in the Church – is another way to construe him as subultimate, and so to err about him. He is ultimate, so he is both beyond being and also capable of being among beings. But tace re that for now.
But while I would not reify the Good, I do think that goodness is a real aspect of things; that concrete actualities are all truly more or less good. If goodness is *not* truly an aspect of concrete actualities, then it is simply false to call some things good and others bad (i.e., less good). In that case, you would be correct to say:
But notice that in writing this, you have engaged in a dormitive virtue “explanation.” You could have written instead, just as accurately, and just as informatively:
Or, likewise:
The gist of your statement: there is no such thing really as favored, agreeable, disfavored, etc.; rather, all such concepts are just stuff we make up for the sake of convenience. But it is hard to see how it could be convenient to believe false propositions.
Then also: what good is a convenience, and why is there such a thing, if there is no such thing really as good or bad? If there is no good or bad really and truly, then can there be no such species of goodness as convenience; in which case, the stuff we do for the sake of convenience (which is to say, at bottom, *all* the stuff we do) we do for no real reason at all; our “convenient” acts in that case are just random noise, no “better” or “worse,” really, than any other things we might do. They make no sense. They are utterly unintelligible.
The dormitive virtue explanation collapses into vacuity, and total ignorance.
If there is no such thing really as good or bad, then it is just silly to describe anything as favored, agreeable, successful, adaptive, convenient, and so on; or as maladaptive, disfavored, unsuccessful, inconvenient, and so on. How could – why would – an organism of any sort disfavor something that it did not find was somewise bad? How could such findings, iterated, have resulted in reproductive success if they were not veridical?
Let’s face it: if it were not better *in fact* to discern solids from liquids and gases by way of occlusion of the visual spectrum, we’d all be blind thereto. The visual system tells us about reality. That’s why we have it; that’s why it is advantageous to us that we have it. So likewise then for the moral and aesthetic systems. To suppose otherwise is to suppose that enormous physiological resources are consistently, pervasively wasted, by all animals. It’s a mad notion. It calls into question the entire animal kingdom.
Plants, too, for that matter. If phototropism were not better than the alternatives – really and truly better – why would plants engage in it? If it were not better that plants survive and reproduce – really and truly better – why would they engage in it?
This question pertains really to all living things. And not only to them, but to atoms and molecules: if it were not better that electron shells should be complete, why would atoms and molecules tend to complete them?
So we begin to see that all cosmic order hangs upon discernment among their available potential options by concrete actualities of the good and the less good.
I have since at least 2009 been pointing out that evolution via natural selection on variation cannot alone make sense except on a presupposition that success is a species of the goods that the natures of real things always seek. Ateleology is just chaos. On ateleology, there is no such thing as regularity in nature, or therefore as causation (Hume saw this clearly).
In 2009, I wrote:
All life hangs on game theory. But game theory is vacuous without winning; without, i.e., a good that things – including the virtual competitors of experimental game theoretical contests – all seek. If there is no such good to seek, there can be no game, nor therefore any success or failure thereat (nor, for that matter, any experimental game theoretical contests).
NB: game theory is a department of maths. Its truths are absolute, so eternal. Ergo, the very notions of winning and losing – which is to say, of teleology, and so of the urge to win implicit inherently in all beings – are absolute values, prior eternally to all their contingent creaturely instantiations. Winning and losing – good and bad – are absolute categories, logically prior to all creaturely actuality.
Which is all to say only that the Good is prior to all things.
Yes. It’s the other way round. Matthew 16:24. That’s the nature of war.
CS Lewis writes about this frequently, but there is a nice summary in Mere Christianity. https://www.epm.org/blog/2012/Sep/24/c-s-lewis-good-and-bad
If there were not some sort of Source Goodness that we are quite certain exists outside our individual frame of reference, how would we know that something was evil at all? In Dualism, such as the Zoroastrians, there is no grounds for saying one equi-powerful god is good. It would be a mere preference, like preferring beer to cider, in Lewis’s words.
See also The Abolition of Man, in which he details the remarkable unanimity of what things are good across what each religion says are its own highest forms. We order them differently in different cultures, yet they are remarkably similar lists. I would put forward the caveat – which he does not – that primitive hunter-gatherer tribes often have no full conception of good an evil other than “family.” Beyond that there are only spirits and forces to be manipulated for one’s own advantage. Yet it doesn’t take much to start rising above that. Just a touch of nomadism or agriculture seems to set folks a-thinking.
Unsurprisingly, the bible itself disagrees with the christians who need to pretend it doesn’t have this god claiming it creates evil.
and it’s always entertaining when a christian quotes Job, a classic bit where this pathetic god has to brag about how great it is, when this god just allowed its supposed archenemy to murder a family, and at the end of the story, has to pay off Job for what it did.
So much for this god being “good”.
Job is indeed tricky for minds confused about the correct denotation of “God.”
Job isn’t tricky at all. It’s the story of your rather pathetic god needing to show off to satan, and then having to pay off Job at the end.
Unfortunately for chrsitians, the bible has this god saying it creates evil.
Adam Lee has a very good analysis of this verse: “Although these alternate translations wouldn’t seem to solve much, they are still not as faithful to the original Hebrew than the KJV’s unflinching translation. The Hebrew word translated by the KJV writers as “evil” in Isaiah 45:7 is “ra“, and from textual evidence, it is clear that in the Bible this word does mean evil in a moral sense. Here are some of the other contexts in which it is used:
In Genesis 2:17, God instructs Adam and Eve not to eat from “the tree of good and ra“. The tree of good and disaster? The tree of good and calamity? Clearly not: it is the tree of good and evil.
In Genesis 6:5, God resolves to destroy humankind in the great flood because “the wickedness (ra) of man was great in the earth”.
In Genesis 13:13, the men of Sodom were “wicked (ra) and sinners before the Lord exceedingly”.
In Deuteronomy 1:35, a furious God threatens the Israelites, “Surely there shall not one of these men of this evil (ra) generation see that good land, which I sware to give unto your fathers.”
In Judges 2:11, “the children of Israel did evil (ra) in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim”.
In 1 Kings 16:30, the wicked king Ahab (husband of the infamous Jezebel) “did evil (ra) in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him”.
These and many other references make it clear that the primary meaning of ra is indeed evil in the sense of wickedness or sin. For believers who hold to the textual inerrancy of the Bible, therefore, there is no choice but to admit that God created evil. And in a way, this makes a great deal of sense. If an all-powerful, all-knowing god created everything, what other explanation for evil could there be, other than that he caused it?
Even the Bible’s theology bears this out. The text offers numerous occasions where God could have intervened to turn events to good and chose not to. He could, for example, have obliterated Satan and the rebel angels entirely, or at the very least confined them to Hell and not allowed them to escape, so that they could never have escaped to lead humanity into temptation. And God’s behavior in the whole Eden affair, in any case, smacks strongly of either extreme incompetence or deliberate malice – not least, his choice to transmit the curse of original sin to all subsequent generations rather than letting every human start off with a morally clean slate.”
Good stuff, thanks (although Lee misunderstands original sin). But, salient to your point only on an incorrect understanding of “God.”
every christian claims that only they have the “correct” understanding of their god, and have yet to show this is true.
and it’s rather hilarious that you claim Lee “misunderstands’ original sin since every word he wrote about it is true. “nd God’s behavior in the whole Eden affair, in any case, smacks strongly of either extreme incompetence or deliberate malice – not least, his choice to transmit the curse of original sin to all subsequent generations rather than letting every human start off with a morally clean slate”
Any concept of God that treats him as subultimate is a contradiction in terms just as egregious as defining a circle as a polygon with 4 equal sides.
It is not unusual for even the most brilliant thinkers to employ such concepts, and thus fall into error. Viz., Arius, Russell.
Most atheist thinkers make that same mistake. So for that matter do many devout Christian thinkers.
Evidently you, too, fundamentally misunderstand the doctrine of original sin. Humans *do* all start off with a morally clean slate. It’s just that they are born into an already defective world, that then corrupts them; which can happen because they are vulnerable to malign influences and the pain and confusion that malign acts cause.
None of that is going to cut any ice with you, though, I feel sure.
Kristor, as usual, christians can’t define what “ultimate” even is. That’s why the ontological argument always fails. Anyone can always imaginary something “greater”.
Christians also can’t agree on original sin, with you inventing that humasn start with a clean slate, and its the world that is defective, and, thus, this god allows corruption to happen rather than fixing things. It’s hilarious how you make your god more and more idiotic with each excuse.
Do you believe there is anything Christians can do? Other than fail to make sense, commit elementary blunders, and give you occasions for derisive belly-laughs, that is?
Hello, JM. When it comes to their religion, no. They have no evidence for their claims, their apologetics fail miserably, and not one can do what their supposed messiah promised.
All christians have are the remains of power left over when people believedin their nonsense and they had the power to harm people who didn’t.
I mean, do you think our minds are incapacitated by our false beliefs, so that when we open our mouths only babble and gibberish come out? You have here and on previous visits said that Christians as a class are incapable of the most basic functions of reason–defining words, framing arguments, drawing inferences. We are, in short, quite mad. Perhaps this is so. No one is perfect. But what is your aim in talking to us lunatics?
So far, that’s all that has come out, JM. My aim is to show how your claims fail. your nonsense gets countered.
You know your arguments are hundreds of years old and have been more capably stated. Most of us have read them in the words of the freethinkers and infidels who originally framed them. As I said, our minds may be crippled by religious imbecility, but if the masters of your creed could not cure us, your ministrations are unlikely to do the trick.
Club Schadenfreude has not gone so far as to offer any arguments of his own. All he’s done is tell us we can’t prove this, we haven’t defined that, we have no evidence for the other thing, and so forth – but without any showing of why this is so. In previous visits here, he has shared his intimate knowledge of our inward states of mind and of our deceptive intentions.
So far as he has yet shown us, he’s all splutter and handwaving, but no substance at all. I think it would be great if he would volunteer us a valid argument or two, that we could chew on. But he doesn’t seem to be into that.
This is for us a salutary penance. To be pestered by an earnest neophyte of infidelity helps us sympathize with infidels pestered by earnest neophytes of Christianity. But our pestering is worse because utterly pointless. The Christian neophyte at least believes he may save a human soul. CS believes he is talking to jibbering lunatics in a meaningless void.
I know my arguments are hundred of years old and have never bee countered by christians or other theists. That I restate them is something I enjoy doing. Unsurprisingly, you can’t show them wrong, JM.
I’m glad you admit that you are willfully ignorant, JM, and evidently think you are an imbecile. It’s the first step in gaining knowledge.
“You know your arguments are hundreds of years old and have been more capably stated. Most of us have read them in the words of the freethinkers and infidels who originally framed them. As I said, our minds may be crippled by religious imbecility, but if the masters of your creed could not cure us, your ministrations are unlikely to do the trick.”
I’m embarrassed for your sake, Schadenfreude, but find myself nevertheless obliged to correct your howlers in this public forum, lest you lead any readers astray – a low probability event, I admit, given the execrable quality of your rhetoric, and your utter failure to engage in dialectic, but still.
From the fact that we can imagine a number yet greater than any number we imagine, it does not follow that there is no such thing as infinity; nor does it mean that infinity is undefined, or that it is not commonly understood under its proper definition. Likewise with the ultimate. The ultimate is that than which no greater can be conceived by any mind whatever. This is quite a clear definition. From the fact that you can think of something greater than anything you can think of it simply does not follow that there is nothing than which no greater can be conceived by any mind whatever.
This is easy to see. If the logic of it surpasses you, well, sorry; you must be swimming in waters over your head.
Let me put it as simply as possible, and in operational terms: if you can think of something greater in any way than x, then x is not ultimate.
As for original sin, I’m not making anything up:
The Catholic Encyclopedia elaborates:
You would not find yourself so prone to public embarrassment if you did your homework well enough that you truly understood the doctrines you would critique.
This stuff is not easy, I admit. It requires more even than careful study. It requires careful thought, and careful thought requires intelligence. Ay, but there’s the rub, no?
Gratuitous evil is probably redundant, but there does seem to be some remainder of gratuitous evil in this world. I take evil to mean undeserved suffering, and desert to encompass punitive and educative deserts. I’ve been thinking of this lately with respect to the fortunes of Joseph at the end of Genesis. He suffers the apparent evil of being betrayed by his brothers, thrown into a pit, and then sold into slavery. I expect Joseph was a smug and irritating twerp, but he did not deserve this punishment. But the apparent evil was educative in the broad sense that it introduced Joseph into Egypt. There he of course suffers the apparent good of rising to stewardship over Potiphar’s household, and then the apparent evil of exciting at first lust and then scorned fury in Potiphar’s wife. In any case, the hypothesis of God solves much of the problem of evil by resolving apparent evil into punitive or educative deserts.
Theodicy is hard, but some of its problems seem to arise from a false conception of God as a cosmic hotel manager. If we view the cosmos as a hotel, it is obviously a substandard hotel about which there is much for the guests to complain. It does not solve every problem of theodicy, but I think a better conception is God as a cosmic general. We are soldiers, not guests. Our general does not blunder, but he does of necessity send many soldiers into suffering they do not personally deserve.
Yes. He can’t win the war without keeping it going all the way to victory.
The hardest of all, for this person groping toward faith, is the suffering of innocent children by natural calamity – in particular, by the agonies of terrible diseases. The only way through that one is, I think, just to hang on to the axiom that God is good, and that in some mysterious way these tormented little ones are part of His design for the general movement toward the good, and that how that could be possible is simply beyond our understanding (which is of course the point of the passage from Job above).
But it’s a mighty difficult thing to accept, when we are confronted with so much pain endured by so many who could not possibly deserve it — and I can certainly understand why it blocks the path to belief for so many people.
Sure; agreed. I myself began struggling with the Problem of Evil only in response to a very great evil that befell my young son through no fault of anyone. I concluded my struggle about ten years later, with the realization that the goodness of creatures is impossible unless they are actual, that that they cannot be actual unless they can act, and that they cannot act unless they have options – one of them perfect, all the others more or less defective – among which they must at each moment decide. Creation then – goodness of and for creatures – cannot logically transpire except at great risk of evil of and for creatures. God intends goodness. But he cannot open ontological room for it except by creating the possibility, and indeed the overwhelming probability, of a creaturely Fall.
What is more, he cannot unmake evil that creatures have done. He can’t unmake the Fallen Satan, e.g., because Satan is by definition sempiternal: he can’t be unmade, any more than a circle can be squared. Nor can he wipe out creaturely evil by unmaking the world, for its achieved evil is a sempiternal fact. Indeed, to destroy the world on account of its present evil would be itself a local maximum of evil, for it would destroy all the mundane beauties already actually ingredient in it, and foreclose all the possibilities of future good implicit in it, despite its defects.
His Providential response to creaturely evil is to rescue from it as many creatures as are willing to be rescued. He keeps the world going coherently – which of course logically entails creating potentials for both good and evil – while saving souls. We can’t readily see how that is all going to work, so it is possible for us to despair of him and his plans. But then, we are pretty stupid. He can see how it is all going to work out well, because he is omniscient.
The bottom line is that yes, as you say, God must be doing the right thing in creating – even in creating evil by creating creatures that can do it – because on the correct understanding of “God” – i.e., that than which no greater can be conceived by any mind whatever – he must be both omniscient and perfectly good. Thus it is reasonable for us to be confident in him, and in his plan of salvation; reasonable for us to hope.
On atheism, per contra – which insists that there is no such thing as that than which no greater can be conceived by any mind whatever – hope of any sort is simply madness.
You are right that the undeserved suffering of children is hardest to swallow. Theodicy can explain some of this as the perverted freedom of the adults who have power over those children, but this leaves the physical evil of disease and disaster. The Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne suggests that disease and disaster are the price we pay to live in a nature that is bound by laws. A flood or avalanche must do what it is going to do, but their necessity is also their achilles’ heel, since men who learn their laws can avert or avoid them. But these are arguments for men whose children are safe and healthy. Their plausibility with me is entirely contingent on their remaining academic arguments. I find some consolation in the idea that, on the hypothesis of God, no suffering is meaningless. Any amount of suffering may be undeserved, but this undeserved suffering serves some end or has some meaning. Once again, this is easy to believe until one gets a toothache, but I do think it helps. I’m willing to suffer for a good cause. I like to think I am willing to die.
It is hard to be a good soldier in combat. There is for every such man a strong temptation to desert – especially when orders from headquarters seem wrongheaded or confusing. It helps to have great confidence in the commander in chief.
Absolutely. In this sublunar world, a soldier may very well suspect that his commander is mad, drunk, inept, or suborned by the enemy. Which seems to be pretty much the way clubshaddenfreude thinks about God.
Hah! LOL!
The Problem of Evil is really just a purblind sinner whining about the fact that life is not perfect. — Kristor
This is more or less my experience. But, there is also this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy going on. There is a flat out denial of Perfection (here understood as He who wills ALL Right) and this denial then takes the form of “this world is not perfect” and so God (as Ultimate… As Perfection) cannot exist. Yet, this is basically claiming that man’s imperfection (sin… desire for annihilation) falsifies God’s Perfection and Creation. And so, in my interactions with the anti-Christians, there is this assumptive rejection of Perfection which just does necessarily lead one down a wrong path which in the context of the West, seems to be this desire for self-annihilation and oblivion.
Thordaddy, just a personal message in passing: I have in the last 2 weeks only just realized that there is happening right now in the reactionary web a widespread crystallization of the notion you’ve been pounding at for … what, a decade or more now? I.e., the notion of self-annihilation.
Props to you, brother. I hope to post something about this in the next few days.
Well… Thank you, Kristor. Although, I cannot claim to be aware of such discussions having pared down my favorite internet reads to just a few these days. Hopefully though, a growing awareness shakes some out of this damning “inevitability.”
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I’m happy to reply, and thanks for raising the issues, but there’s probably a limit to how far we’re going to get because, fundamentally, I don’t think we can logic our way to proofs of God, and I think trying to do that invites the same rebuke that God gives to Job: I’m beyond all human categories, so give it up. I’m the Creator; you’re the creature. I will reveal what I choose to, and the rest you just have to take on faith — which, as the book of Hebrews puts it, is the substance of things HOPED for, the evidence of things NOT seen. Faith is part of the test we’re put to in our creaturely existence, and it wouldn’t be called for if some kind of proof or logical demonstration were available.
I do not think a concept of the “good” as an ontologically substantial reality is needed to explain anything. We judge things good or bad all the time even where no moral questions are involved at all, or where there’s no objective reason for choosing between those judgments. I might say artichokes on pizza are “good” even while others wouldn’t go near them. If I’m moving a heavy refrigerator and someone offers me a hand truck with wheels, I would say, “Yes! Good!” without thinking I was announcing some new ontological reality. It wouldn’t be “evil” to try to lift or slide the fridge, but it’s harder; the wheels save me effort and lower the risk that I’ll throw my back out. When I train a dog, I teach it that peeing in the yard is “good” and peeing in the house is “bad.” A dog is able to distinguish those words, recognize thereby when I’m pleased or displeased, and behave accordingly. But the words are just conveniences. I don’t think a dog can even formulate a concept of an absolute or ontological “good.”
As to evolution, those concepts are central to the work of biologists all over the world, and if there were some obvious error in them regarding “thermodynamics” it would already have been discovered. So, one layperson is not going to persuade another on this. In my own layman’s understanding, there’s no teleology: living things are not trying to achieve any particular state. And there’s no “efficiency” at all — in fact, it’s all extremely wasteful and chaotic. Billions of plants, animals and microbes come and go every day, with only a relatively few surviving to reproduce. The reason the world isn’t “dead” is sheer profusion: A human being who ends up producing only two or three children in her life has begun with hundreds of thousands of eggs and ovulated several hundred of them. Most, by far, are just flushed away. The ratios with some other species are vastly higher even than this. The only reason all this randomness adds up to a biosphere that looks relatively coherent is that the processes involved have gone on for millions upon millions of years. Some individual organisms have traits that are “better” for their survivability, and those that don’t probably die, but there’s no *moral* value in any of that, any more than there is in moving a refrigerator with or without wheels. Indeed, from the human point of view, a lethal microbe’s ability to survive and spread to infect and sicken people is a BAD thing, not an example of the “good” at all.
So yes, from the standpoint of “thermodynamics” and non-theistic evolution, a dead planet is just fine. It just so happens (the non-theist would say) that on Earth, early conditions conduced to the forming of complex organic molecules that started multiplying and dividing, and they’ve had conditions that have enabled them to continue doing so ever since, in ever more complex and finely articulated assemblages, and in enough profusion that some small fraction has always managed to survive (so far). Didn’t have to be that way, and undoubtedly has not been on most other planets. (But there are likely *trillions* of planets, so perhaps it HAS been happening on some others too.)
I think you might also be over-applying terms like “winning.” Your bring this up in connection with game theory, but it applies to evolution too. Organisms don’t “win” or “lose” a “struggle for existence.” Those are just metaphors based on human experience. The organism has capabilities for ingesting and metabolizing nutrients, so it just does this until something stops it. It also has a capability for reproduction, so it does that too if it reaches the right stage of development. Then whatever happens, happens. Some of the offspring also survive to reproduce — or if they don’t, that species goes extinct. But there are so many millions of species of such great variety, most not even identified yet, that we’re apt not to notice this in most cases. At any rate, there’s no morality to it at all. The dodo bird didn’t do anything “wrong.”
Likewise, you speak of game theory as if it’s limited to actual games, like chess or parcheesi, i.e. organized sequences of rule-delimited actions leading to an end state where one side wins and the other loses. But as I understand it, game theory is just a mode of analysis meant to identify which of various possible decisions will maximize one’s advantage in a given situation. There may or may not be any ultimate victor, and again, we would assign terms like “good” and “best” to various moves based on the observation of advantageousness, not as a moral judgment. The game-theoretical analysis, in itself, is neutral with regard to what *good* might be served if a given “player” achieves a better or worse outcome. If the two prisoners in a Prisoner’s Dilemma, for instance, are (A) a vicious criminal mastermind and (B) his hapless getaway driver, and (A) makes the “good” move and gets sprung earlier, that’s obviously NOT a beneficial outcome for the rest of us.
In Genesis, God calls the Creation “good,” but we’re also told that it was originally not what we experience of the world today. It was ALL good: there was no disease, death, suffering, shortage or need for hard labor. There was no “Knowledge of Good and Evil,” and the tree that provided this was explicitly set off-limits. People were not supposed to have that knowledge at all, but they gave in to temptation and acquired it anyway. Thus they gained the ability and the urge to order things in moral categories, but, like everything else in their fallen state, we do this very imperfectly and unreliably. Our moral judgments come to us “as through a glass, darkly.” Perhaps we could conclude something about God from the original creation, the prelapsarian state, but we have no access to that — we were barred from it with a flaming sword. The much more contingent, partial and inconsistent notions of “good” and “evil” that we’re left with now are not guides to anything about God, and to try to make them so, I think, is to fall into Job’s error.
Wow, this was a great comment. Thanks, Professor JA Smith; you do us all great honor by writing it. I find myself in agreement with almost all that you in it say – which, I must say, wafts the distinct odor of wisdom. A few responses only, then. Well, but: I say now, having not yet begun, “a few;” we shall see how that turns out.
Allow me to say just that engaging with such a mind as yours is one of the chief benefits to me of my work at the Orthosphere.
We’ll have to disagree about the possibility of natural theology. I think it essential, if at the least as a fit basis for a humble pragmatic apophasis. I think we can indeed reason our way to several sorts of demonstrations of God and his attributes, if only because the other options are incoherent. I would add that such demonstrations of God are nowise sufficient to an understanding of him; that, indeed, an understanding of him is not possible to finite minds. But the idea that understanding God is not possible to finite minds – that, i.e., the warning of the whole book of Job is correct – is after all a deliverance of the deliberations of finite minds. In no other way might it have found its way into the writings considered by all our forefathers – all of them, mind, even before there was such a thing as Israel – to be inspired by God.
In short: we can from natural theology know enough about God to know that we cannot for any other epistemological purposes know enough about God. Cataphasis then becomes the basis of apophasis.
Taking all this back to brass tacks, it seems to me after decades of study upon it that Anselm has in his epochal Argument – perhaps the greatest in the whole history of philosophy – cracked the code of logical demonstrations of God. He has done it. God bless and keep the man. I cannot think of another who has climbed so far. Aquinas and Boethius come to mind, and Dionysius. But Anselm somehow or other – I can’t quite put my finger on it – has penetrated to the inmost core of the logic, and seen its clear implication.
With Clement of Alexandria, he’s my chosen saint. I pray to the man, now and then! Not enough, alas.
All that said, I freely gladly admit that the first – second, third, fourth – encounter with Anselm’s Argument of any mind at all philosophically educated is almost certain to be scorn, indeed contempt. One must grapple with it, deeply, to ascertain its depths, and so to suffer its massive cogency.
OK, so; you think natural theology a bust, whereas I think it a good beginning. It’s a venerable and so an honorable disagreement. Saints can and have lived on either side of it. Let’s agree to live with it, then.
As to faith, I have great faith in the existence and honesty of this fellow Professor JA Smith. I can muster any number of arguments for him. But I have not met him. So: would I bet my life upon him? Indeed, would I bet *everything* upon him? Would I volunteer to die for the sake of my belief in him? This is the test of faith. None of us who now live have yet met Jesus in the flesh. So …
Would I volunteer to die for the sake of the truth of the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4? I hope I would. I hope I would rather die than aver that there is no truth. I hope I would rather die than repudiate the Lógos.
You see what I am getting at here, I hope.
I’m going to leave aside all the stuff about evolution, except to point out that if nature does not seek certain ends, those ends cannot end up predominantly expressed in her instances, and so cannot ever come to pass; so that there cannot then be such things as natural regularities. They do thus end up, and do come to pass. So, we find that the happenings of nature are all regular, and intelligible. We can understand them all, at least a bit.
Or, to put it another way; if nature sought only the least thermodynamic path – as mere materialism cannot but suppose – there could then be no such thing as life, or as us (regardless of the quintillions of random instances one threw at the situation). For, in that case, everything would be just dead. All of the quintillions of alternatives that generate life would have been ruled out ab initio, before they even got started. The Hamiltonian cannot then alone be all there is to it. There must rather be a least path – a most economical path, a “best” path (according to whom?) – to a non-zero end, which is to say, a positive end, which nature seeks. And this we find is just the way nature behaves, in fact.
Cutting to the chase: if nature sought *only* the least thermodynamic path, then no other path – such as that of the life we all live – could *ever* by her have been sought. But we do in fact live; so, our mother Nature sought a path that offered something greater than the least. So is it that we live.
NB: “least,” “best,” “non-zero,” “positive,” and “most economical” are different ways of saying “good.” When it comes down to it, there is just no way to parse reality other than by presupposing that some sorts of events are – really and truly – better than others. There’s just no other way to account for things happening as they do. To assert otherwise is just and only to assert that there is no way to account for things. Why do things turn out as they do? There are only two possible sorts of answers: either they turn out as they do because it is good that they do so, ceteris paribus; or, they turn out as they do for no reason whatever. The latter option is a counsel of chaos, of despair, and so of stupidity. I doubt you really want to take it, in your heart of hearts.
Bottom line: the Hamiltonian is incoherent, and bootless, except as a notional path to some end that is better than the alternatives. The least path can mean nothing, apart from some end, of which the Hamiltonian is a good – NB, “good” – solution.
NB the importance in the foregoing of the notions of optimality, better, and so on.
The least path presupposes some end thereof. This is implicit in the notion of the path as such: no end, no path thereto. This should suffice to demonstrate teleology as an ontological sine qua non.
OK, sorry, more about evolution. You write:
It has been discovered. The least thermodynamic path cannot explain life. Life homeostatically seeks ends that are not thermodynamically minimal. This is the essence of the problem of all systems that seek anything other than nonexistence.
That evolutionary biology cannot yet explain the homeostatic tracking by all living organisms of system states far from raw thermodynamic equilibrium is not an error of biological science. It is, rather, only a lacuna. We may hope that it shall someday be illumined.
If survival is neither here nor there, then sure. But, if survival is good, then the dodo did indeed do something wrong, vis-à-vis his world. He was not aggressive enough, or profligate enough, or – to paint the situation with the broadest possible brush – adaptive enough.
It is easy to see that this is so: reality deleted the dodo, so somehow he failed to measure up. QED.
On materialism, this follows without possibility of contravention. Except that, on materialism, there can be no such category as failure to measure up; as, i.e., failure. On materialism, there is rather only just stuff happening for no reason, so that there is nothing to be learned; no way to be wise, or good.
On your analysis: the dodo is just something that happened for no reason, and then after a while stopped happening, again for no reason. So, there is nothing to be learned from or about the dodo.
Organisms don’t “win” or “lose” a “struggle for existence.” Those are just metaphors based on human experience.
Since when does human experience count for nothing? What else, pray, have we to go on, than our own experience? Should humans all die, humans could not but count it a loss, and a defeat. Would they be all wrong in that? How?
How would it be different for dogs, if they could conceive of the fortunes of their species? Would dogs be just wrong in supposing that – from the perspective of dogs per se, and so of all dogs by their very nature – the deletion of dogs as such was an outcome to be deplored? How could dogs think such a thing, and go on with being dogs?
The struggle for existence is just the struggle to be something good, that is therefore worthy of being.
Identifying which of various possible decisions will maximize advantage is just a way of identifying winning strategies. Again, this is a dormitive virtue “explanation,” that wants and fails to explain a thing in terms of itself by different high sounding words: “maximizing advantage” is only another way of saying “winning.”
Sorry, there’s just no way to evade optimality; no way to avoid evaluations of good and evil.
“Good” and “best” – and “advantageousness” – *just are* moral categories. Taking aesthetic evaluations to be sorts of moral evaluations, there is simply no other way to account for them.
An outcome “better or worse”? You see the difficulty, I’m sure.
It’s that dratted dormitive virtue “explanation” again, don’t you see?
There can be no game theoretical analysis that abjures altogether from any evaluation of the goods that might or might not be served for players of this or that outcome. Whether our perspective is of one of the players of the game, or of an observer of the game, it is clear that for the players, *who, as being the only ones who suffer the game, are after all the only ones who count,* some outcomes are better than others, some worse.
Game theory simply cannot be done except in virtue of a prior supposition of a spectrum that leads from total disaster – from total non-being, i.e. – to total moral and aesthetic victory – i.e., to creaturely perfection. There is no other way to construe winning, or losing; or advantage, or disadvantage.
You are too kind. 🙂 I am just another seeker, and a layperson with respect to both theology and the natural sciences, groping toward whatever understanding I might be able to stumble upon, most likely inadvertently. 🙂
I’m also a Christian who does not by any means accept a completely materialist explanation of the cosmos. That said, I respect what the materialistic sciences are doing and how much they’ve helped us understand things. I am grateful that I live in an era when smallpox has been effectively defeated, after many centuries of sickening and killing people, and when a pandemic like Covid is confronted not just with anxiety and prayer but with laboratory-developed procedures based on an understanding of microbiology, viruses, antibodies, the immune system, etc. I respect both faith and science. I think both are gifts from God.
I suppose I see a bigger gap between the two than you do. Materialist explanations can be powerful, but they work only by “bracketing” questions about God, the good, and ultimate things. They focus on material, demonstrable causes and effects, without moral judgment. That doesn’t mean we can’t ALSO make moral judgments, but it’s a separate undertaking, and will only confuse us if we mix it up with our attempts to understand the material processes.
You should really be discussing your objections to evolutionary theory with somebody actually trained in it, which I am not. My best assessment as a layman is that you are overstressing the word “seek”:
“Life homeostatically seeks ends that are not thermodynamically minimal. This is the essence of the problem of all systems that seek anything other than nonexistence.”
The materialist-Darwinian account, as I understand it, is that life isn’t seeking anything, nature isn’t seeking anything, there’s just stuff happening. There are logical reasons why some stuff happens rather than other stuff, but it’s not a logic of intentionality or “seeking,” but of the happenstance of whether given organic traits make survival more or less likely. We happen to live on one of the planets — possibly the only one, though I doubt it — where conditions were such that life, i.e. self-replicating, complex organic molecules, could arise through the interplay of natural forces, and these then proliferated and began to “evolve” via this happenstance logic into the living world of today. There was no “seeking” and no design or conscious input into this. There was also nothing “good” or “bad” about it — except that in retrospect, as later products of these processes who have achieved consciousness, we might be grateful that they happened and therefore choose to label them “good.”
Further, none of this was a violation of anything “thermodynamic.” Organic processes have been consuming energy all along, since lightning in the early atmosphere zapped the first amino acids into existence (or whatever started it all). But given the proximity of our planet to a nearby star, plus heat from the volcanic geology of the planet itself, there’s been more than enough energy to suffice.
As I say, I think it’s been of great benefit to humankind that we developed this frankly pretty banal way of thinking about things. It has given us powerful means of combatting major predators, like the smallpox virus, the plague bacillus, typhus, cholera, polio, etc. etc., and now Covid. It does not answer ultimate questions, does little to help us distinguish good from evil (though it equips us against a bunch of things we *regard* as evils), and does suggest that the universe is ultimately cold and indifferent to us — *unless*, in addition, we believe in a good and merciful God. I don’t think that theistic belief requires logical demonstration, but if that’s what we’re looking for, I would say that nature and the cosmos give us grounds to argue either way. I suppose that’s why we live in a world that includes both continuing major theistic traditions AND very active and well-institutionalized non-theistic sciences: they both “work” for their respective (but different) purposes.
Yes, that seems to be their argument. The problem with this notion is that the stuff that happens then – *all* the stuff that happens – just doesn’t make sense, because – being stuff that just happens for no reason – it *can’t* make sense. It is not possible to understand a phenomenon that is in no way itself reasonable; that is happening for no reason. A thing that has no internal ration cannot be understood. For, it is no more than a specimen of chaos. So, this argument of the materialists eliminates the very possibility of science as such. It is the zero of science. It is the zero of knowledge, and so is it the zero of understanding. Thus is it the zero of wisdom; it can therefore lead only to dyscatastrophe.
What must be borne always in mind is that the naturalist, materialist account of nature is only – and (because it repudiates consideration of any reason for the way things turn out as they do) can by definition be no more than – a *description* of the way things behave. It cannot presume to an *explanation* of why things behave as they do. Why is this so? Because the naturalist, materialist account of nature has rejected reason ab initio.
The naturalist notion of reality avers that she seeks no ends. OK. Given that, what is there about her that we might hope to understand?
Fortunately for all of us, nature everywhere seeks ends. She is throughout teleological; which is to say no more than that she is rational, ergo intelligible; so that we can infer things about her, and so, order our acts properly in respect to her. On that basis then might we live, and reproduce.
On any alternative, right action – nay, action per se – is impossible.
This is a weird reading of Job. The whole point, made explicitly at the very start, is that Job was “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.” After his troubles began, “In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.”
Your point seems to be something like: given that there is any concept of good at all, that proves the existence of god, and everything else is mere noise. Job suffers, but since he owes his very existence to god, he should shut up and stop whining.
I can’t say that you are wrong; everybody is free to draw their own meaning from such texts. You say God’s declaration of his awesome power is sublime, and it certainly is, but it is also a denial of Job’s request for justice. It is God saying that he has power (or is power) and has no obligation to demonstrate even the most basic righteousness to mere humans. You want justice? Cower before me, worm! It’s not the only instance of God not only being a complete asshole, but being significantly less righteous than his creations.
Taking God’s side in this confrontation doesn’t seem very Christian to me. One thing Christianity has going for it is a very direct acknowledgement of the reality of human suffering. You are dismissing it, which to me seems like a failure of imagination and empathy. The normal and proper reaction to the story is outrage (or despair) at gods seeming amorality. Jung felt that way, and also thought that the Christian incarnation was a direct consequence of God’s display of moral inadequacy in the Job story, his attempt to do better.
Are you saying that evil doesn’t exist? Or it exists, but God (the ultimate foundation of all reality) is somehow not responsible for it as he is everything else? Either one of those seems problematic.
A.morphous, how great to hear from you! I had just been thinking of you in re this post and the comments thereupon, as a happy contrast to the stupidity of Club Schadenfreude, so it is doubly great that you have chimed in. Happy New Year, my old friend.
These topics are to be sure vexed, so I would not make light of them.
Yes. Just so. Righteousness is no guarantee of good fortune, although it does undeniably tend thereto. Indeed, it may be that the most righteous are given under Providence to suffer extraordinarily, for the sake of the edification – the salvation – of the many. Viz., Job; and Jesus. Not to mention the many others, Apostles and disciples, who suffered death for the sake of the truth, and so for our sake. The saints often say that the demonic attacks increase with increase of holiness.
If God were a vending machine, we could insert righteousness to him, and reasonably expect that happiness would ensue. But it doesn’t work that way. Reality is more complicated than a vending machine. This would be so a fortiori in the absence of the God whom we can be sure will rescue all things at the end, in a way known only to him that will thereafter appear to us as wholly integral and agreeable with all the things we have so far rightly thought were true. Job will enjoy his just reward. On God, we can be sure that this is true. Otherwise – on atheism – the question of righteousness and the just deserts thereof is just moot, silly, inapposite to reality.
Yes. But it’s not only just my poor point. It’s the whole gist of Job 38.
Only if God is God can Job expect or hope for anything like justice. If God is not God, then justice is entirely vain, as nonexistent; as no real factor of things. On God, per contra, justice might be obscure to us, but it is nevertheless certain – for, God is God. Job ends by relying on this; on God.
Evil is not a substantial thing in its own right, but rather a defect of being that is otherwise good. God is the cause of evil only inasmuch as he is the cause of being per se, of which evil being is one sort open to all beings, by definition. But God is not the cause of defect of being that was caused by his creatures.
“So, this argument of the materialists eliminates the very possibility of science as such. It is the zero of science. It is the zero of knowledge, and so is it the zero of understanding. Thus is it the zero of wisdom; it can therefore lead only to dyscatastrophe.”
Again, I strongly suggest that you discuss this with an actual scientist sometime. I think they’ll tell you that you’re getting tangled up in semantics, but they might have a better way to put it than I can. Would you say there’s no “science” behind weather forecasting? Or epidemiology? Air molecules and germs don’t have intentions, but reasons can be given why masses of them form and move here rather than there, and why this might be good or bad for certain reasons, like flying a plane on a given route or growing crops in a particular location. In common English, most people would call that “explaining” and would say it’s based on “knowledge” of things like particles, microbes, energy forces, etc. They would call the people who study and warn of such movements “scientists,” and might agree that what they’re delivering is not “wisdom” but, nonetheless, that their reports might prompt us to do something wise, like dress warmly, carry an umbrella, get our kids vaccinated against childhood diseases that used to kill lots of children, etc.
True, predictions and material explanations don’t reveal the “meaning” of weather or disease. Or cosmic events, like planets, stars and galaxies. Still, it’s odd to say they don’t contribute to “understanding.” To recognize that a disease might arise from microscopic organisms invading bodily tissue, and that washing your hands might help avert this, seems like at least some degree of helpful understanding. Ben Franklin proved that lightning is a discharge of static electricity; this helped people “understand” it and also protect against it with lightning rods. The higher meaning of things is a separate question. Science doesn’t propose to deliver that, which is why we turn for it to religion.
Sorry to intrude on a discussion that is probably over my head, but I think Kristor is saying that the possibility of science is undermined by materialist metaphysics. This does not mean that science is not possible, because materialist metaphysics is false. It just means a materialist scientist can discover truth in spite of his bad philosophy. Materialists often marvel that there are scientists who profess Christianity. I think Kristor is flipping that argument on its head. I think you used the phenomenologists’ term “bracketing” earlier in this exchange. We might use that word to state the question this way: Does a Christian scientist bracket his Christianity when he does science? Or does a materialist scientist bracket his materialism.
Maybe it’s over my head too. Kristor said that things that happen for no reason “*can’t* make sense. It is not possible to understand a phenomenon that is in no way itself reasonable; that is happening for no reason. …. So, this argument of the materialists eliminates the very possibility of science as such. It is the zero of science. It is the zero of knowledge, and so is it the zero of understanding.” The issue seems to be some very narrow, highly unconventional definitions of words like “reason,” “for a reason,” “knowledge” and “understanding.” Obviously, when people speak of “scientific knowledge,” they have in mind the many explanations that materialistic sciences have given us of a great many phenomena: weather, lightning, diseases, chemical reactions, molecular bonding, mountains, earthquakes and ten thousand others. We can “understand” the material causes — the “reasons” — for these phenomena (on any normal meaning of “reasons” and “understand”) while recognizing that ultimately we’re talking about particles and masses in motion that have no spirits or wills or intentions.
This extends to organisms: germs don’t cause disease because they malignantly intend to harm anyone; in fact, when they kill their host, they probably kill themselves as well. If we assumed that diseases and other natural phenomena had intentions, we would just mislead ourselves, as people did for many centuries before science really got going. Materialistic science is a convenience that allows us to separate one type of question from others so we don’t get confused trying to find deeper meanings where there aren’t any. For its limited purposes, it works very well.
I can well understand and would agree with someone saying that there’s more to the cosmos than these merely material causes and effects. I could grasp what someone was getting at if he said, “We haven’t really ‘UNDERSTOOD’ a given thing, fully, if all we’ve explained are material relations and processes.” But the sentences I quoted, e.g. “It is the zero of science. It is the zero of knowledge, and so is it the zero of understanding,” seem like an argument with the dictionary and with the common meanings of words. If it’s some kind of “bracketing,” I am not following how it works.
Like most people, I use the word reason as a synonym for cause in everyday speech. For instance, holding up a mangled fork, I might tell my wife, “this is the reason the garbage disposal was making so much noise.” But the word reason implies intention when I am speaking carefully. To speak of reasons in the natural order therefore implies teleology, or more specifically what Christians call providence or God’s plan. I’m not the king of language, though, so I have no grounds to complain if others always use reason as a synonym for cause.
Natural science is of course very good at discovering casual relations. If you combine A and B, you will always, or probably, or never get C. Wonderful stuff, and very useful too. You will have to wait for Kristor to return to get the real answer, but I think he is asking what is implied by the fact that there are causal relations to discover. Why, for instance, do the same conditions always result in orogeny? or why doesn’t a dose of arsenic sometimes kill and sometimes not? Perhaps one way to say this is that necessity is not logically necessary, and so why is necessity so?
JM Smith got it just right: science is possible because materialism – taking materialism to be the notion that things just happen, and not for any reason – is false.
To clear up the terminological confusion, I take causes to be sorts of reason. Reason – ratio, in the original Latin from which philosophers in English take their use of “reason” – is the logic or order of things, in virtue of which each thing is just the thing that it is, and no other. To the extent that things happen for no reason, they have no logic or order, and so there is no such order or logic or ratio in them to understand. They are, simply, chaotic.
If the cosmos consisted of things happening for no reason, it would not be a cosmos – an ordered and coherent world system – in the first place. In fact, it would not be at all; for, to be is to be definite, and what is chaotic is indefinite: it is nothing in particular, so it is nothing at all.
Thus if things are just happening, for no reason, then they cannot be understood, and in fact don’t exist in the first place so as to be apprehended, let alone understood. We find that we do apprehend things, and then understand them a bit – all such understanding is scientific, properly speaking – so therefore it cannot be the case that the things we apprehend and understand are happening for no reason.
Empirical science presupposes that there is in nature a pervasive inherent order that we can hope to pick out and understand. Indeed, language, thought, and animate action in general all hang upon this presupposition. If there is no such order, then there is nothing that science can learn about it, and the entire scientific project is foreclosed. Science isn’t foreclosed, obviously. So, there is in nature an order that we can hope to learn about.
To say that things are ordered is to say that they happen for sufficient reasons; that there is no bit of anything real that is entirely chaotic. And this is to say – using the term employed first by the ancient Greeks – that there is for each thing a logos, and that there is for all things taken together a Lógos, in which the logoi of all particular things are integrated and comprehended. And that Lógos is what all men have (at least in part) meant by “God.”
A final note: to say that all things happen for sufficient reasons is not to say that they all happen intentionally – as, i.e., the intended outcome of a motion of some willing agent. Some things do happen intentionally, of course, but some don’t. Even the latter, however, must happen for sufficient reasons. And among those reasons – among the schedule of causes sufficient to specify any event – must be some that are intensional. Intension is the tendency of a thing to bring about some state of affairs. In Aristotelian terms, the intensions of a thing are its final causes. Oak trees, e.g., are an intension (albeit probably not an intention) of acorns.
Perhaps this is “terminological,” then, or as I said earlier, semantics. I don’t think any natural scientists would deny that the universe is “ordered” in the sense that it has structures and follows physical laws. To the contrary, science relies heavily on that assumption, so it seems they agree there’s a “cosmos.”
Where I expect the scientists would part company with you is over when (if ever) to apply some of your other Greek terms and concepts, like Aristotelian “final” causes. I think they would say that some *local* situations are chaotic, in the sense that the air and water molecules in a cloud just bounce around with no purpose. Their motions are in that sense “random,” albeit under the impetus of forces that can be studied, known, reduced to equations and to some limited extent predicted. There’s no intention, there’s no storm or wind god directing this like Aiolos or Tlaloc, and a rain dance will not have any effect one way or another.
Nonetheless, the eventual result of all those particle motions is a wind- and rainstorm. We experience and refer to that as an event unto itself, even giving capitalized proper names to the biggest of them, but the “reasons” the storm happens aren’t like the “reasons” a person might have for watering his garden or some other deliberate act. They’re just physical causes and energies acting on particles (material and efficient causes, I suppose, in Aristotle’s terms). If we assume storm gods and rain dances, then we understand the phenomenon LESS well rather than better.
Science advanced by breaking with such presumed agencies and purposes, and by discovering the incredibly tiny component bits of visible, “macro” phenomena. This changed our sense of which things are emergent properties of which other things. A rainstorm emerges from the underlying actions of air and water molecules, with no need for a storm god to unleash it. A disease might emerge from the invasion of a microscopic germ into human tissue. A pandemic emerges from the wide spread of millions of such invasions. We “specify” these events when we name them, though perhaps you mean something more than that? It does all happen within an overall ordered universe, but recognizing emergence and underlying causes probably limits the range of phenomena that scientists would see as having their own “logoi” — again, depending on exactly what that means; if it just means something like “explicable causes,” I can’t see why any scientist would disagree.
Alfred Russel Wallace wrote a letter to Charles Darwin objecting to the phrase “natural selection” because it implied that nature was selecting favored races for a reason. Darwin agreed and said Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest” was more scientific. I suppose “elimination of the unfittest” would be more scientific still. Alvin Plantiga argues that this line of thinking undermines itself because it implies that this line of thinking, like everything else, is caused and not reasoned. There is no search for truth, just random mental mutations that either survive or are eliminated. Darwinism (and natural science generally) appear to be mental mutations that nature selects against, since science appears to cause general infertility.
Survival of the fittest, natural selection, and elimination of the unfittest – all wonderfully fruitful and parsimonious notions – smuggle in to an otherwise ateleological analysis of nature a teleological criterion: fitness. Fitness according to what standard? If there be no such standard, then all of them reduce to selection of whatever happens to happen. They reduce, i.e., to utterly vacuous statements: “whatever; shit happens.”
This is the quintessence of modernity. It amounts to a renunciation of analysis; of, i.e., thought per se. So is it the surrender of responsibility, and a recusal from the obligation of all creatures, given with their very being, to act. It is the surrender of the will to the wisp.
Fitness can be evaluated – and, so, can be a factor of events (whether really, or in our models) – only in reference to a prior and purely formal fitness landscape. And that landscape cannot be defined in the absence of yet prior criteria of goodness; of value, aesthetic or moral, or ontological (NB: the moral and the aesthetic both reduce to each other, and likewise to the ontological: there is isomorphy of the good, the lovely, and the actual).
Absent that prior landscape – absent criteria of fitness of this to that – fitness of this real event to that cannot be specified. Fitness then can characterize only what happens to happen, for no reason. So, it can furnish no real explanatory leverage whatever. It can furnish only specious explanatory leverage, as the dormitive virtue of morphine “explains” its power to engender sleep.
Yes, scientists do indeed rely heavily – as, being animals, they must – on the presupposition that they live in an ordered cosmos, which as such is a fit object of scientific study, and of scientific knowledge (not to mention, a fit milieu for animate life). But they cannot coherently think also that nature seeks no ends, or that she consists entirely of things happening for no reason, as many of them say that they do. The two notions contradict each other.
Storms are (probably) not agents, or even substantial entities, and so (like rocks or heaps) cannot have ends of their own, but are rather derivate sequelae of other substantial entities, that do have ends of their own. As for the atoms and molecules of which storms are constituted, they clearly do have ends of their own – ends pertinent only to them – such as the completions of their electron shells. Their collisions are – like storms (after all, each such collision is as it were a storm writ small) – sequelae of their inward ends: those collisions could not transpire quite as they do were not the atoms and molecules involved therein “trying” to complete their electron shells.
I wish there were a way to put the scare quotes I just put at either end of the word ‘trying’ in scare quotes of their own.
In short, there are all sorts of reasons for the things that happen, but most are not intensional; and all the unintensional reasons must derive from reasons that are intensional. Still, only substances can have intensions, or therefore, more rarely, intentions. But then, things that are not substances are not things in the first place, properly speaking, despite the fact that we often find it convenient to name them (as, e.g., Hurricane Stella, the Gilded Age, the Crusades, and so on); they are, rather, only mere temporary agglomerations of truly substantial things. Storms (probably) fall into the latter category, of temporary agglomerations of truly substantial things.
NB, in passing: this is by no means to say that rocks, or heaps, or storms, are chaotic. They must be ordered throughly, in order to exist. It is to say rather that the order of insubstantial agglomerations such as rocks, storms and heaps must be derived from the orders of their constituent substances.
We should bear in mind that there is room for uncertainty at the margins. Is Earth a being? Maybe. Is Sol? I find it conceivable; if a brain can be the manifestation of a mind, why not a star or a planet? If a star or a planet, then why not – thinking bravely – a storm? I have suffered weather that seemed to my mind altogether spookily like the outward aspect of some other mind. I am not proud enough to doubt that such apprehensions are simply specious. What walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is a duck, probably; likewise, what looks to a mind like a mind is not unlikely to be … a mind.
The specification of a thing is the set of formal properties needed to set it apart from all others; to define it as just the thing that it is, and no other. Such sets are infinite, for (on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems) there is no way to complete the specification of a thing under any finite logical calculus.
NB that there is no way for a thing to be real – to be, i.e., completely definite – except by a concrete realization of its entire formal specification. Thus every finite event is the concrete realization of an infinite set of specifications. This is why finite creatures cannot create finite creatures. Ergo, being per se can eventuate only on infinite being.
Another argument for God! Not sure, but I think this is the first time I have written about it. There are however other arguments from Gödelian Incompleteness – not all of them theistic – which we have written about here at the Orthosphere.
I appreciate the patient explanations from Kristor and JMSmith, but I am not the interlocutor you gentlemen need or deserve. I have no expertise in the philosophy of science, and moreover, no role or influence in the natural sciences (I’m in the humanities), so even persuading me 100% of everything you’re saying would have no real-world effect. As a general rule, I respect other disciplines and their practitioners and am inclined to assume they know what they’re doing. Cosmology, physics, biology and all their many adjacent and ancillary fields are massive enterprises at this point, conducted worldwide and with very large institutional and knowledge bases built up over many generations. If there are gaps or problems in the ways they’re going about things, it’s going to take insiders with much better knowledge of those fields than mine in order to discover them. All I can really do is wish them well.
In general, too, I don’t think any logical “proof” (or disproof) of anything about God is ever likely to be found after all these centuries of searching. This is why we’re called to have faith. By “proof / disproof” I mean a chain of reasoning that would be persuasive even to people who don’t start out already firmly committed to a theistic (or atheistic) worldview. Millions of things can be proved through logical reasoning — for instance, that Mt. Rushmore exists — or disproved: that the faces on it are natural formations. A great many questions can be put beyond serious dispute. But not all; if there were a way to generate that degree of agreement about God, it would long since have already been found.
I’m with you on your second point, and I’m also nothing but a slightly informed amateur when it comes to philosophy and the heavyweight sciences. My field is historical geography, and I have consequently read many explorer’s accounts. Identifying their routes on modern maps is often very difficult, but it has taught me (1) how multiple theories fit the data, and (2) how plausible a preferred theory becomes once you prefer it.
It is often said that there can be no cogent proof of God’s existence. But has that proposition been proved? I doubt it, inasmuch as I am myself a counterexample: having thought about them hard, I am convinced that at least 4 ontological arguments succeed: those of Anselm, Plantinga, Bonaventure, and of Lucas.
They are difficult to understand, I grant, even with much philosophical education; and are therefore seldom seriously entertained, much less studied. Plus, they are all formal proofs. They proceed from abstract concepts to an abstract concept. Their apparent bearing on quotidian life is therefore acutely attenuated. One can’t point to phenomenal examples of their truth, as is possible with many proofs of math, or the prima facie paradoxical principles of quantum mechanics. We can all see, e.g., that 2 + 2 = 4, and we can rely on the witness of physicists who have conducted the 2 slit experiment. But it is by the nature of the case almost impossible for us to cast about human experience and discern instances of that than which no greater can be conceived by any mind whatever. How is any finite mind to do such a thing?
Thus these ontological proofs seem to almost all people to be nothing more than contemptible word games. But, not to absolutely all people; viz., me. Thus it cannot be the case that there are no possible cogent proofs of the existence of God.
Faith is however needful even for those who find such proofs compelling, precisely because what the ontological proofs demonstrate seems so very far removed from our mundane affairs. Indeed, that than which no greater can be conceived by any mind whatever must in logic far outpass the powers of comprehension of any mind other than itself.
I note in the first place that we find faith necessary in respect to many of the more abstract discoveries – perhaps we should call them postulations – of modern science. Who after all has perceived a quark, let alone a Calabi-Yau manifold? Who has suffered an imaginary number, or accelerated to the speed of light?
We don’t usually notice that our faith in such things is just that. But it is.
As with that than which no greater can be conceived by any mind whatever, quarks, Calabi-Yau manifolds, the speed of light, and imaginary numbers are in principle accessible to us as aspects of *every possible instant of experience in our cosmos.* Thus it should hardly surprise us that we find it extremely difficult to pick out from the raw matter of daily experience any evidence of their reality: after all, *every* instant of experience must be one of their manifestations.
Faith in the constancy of things is needed to get on with life. We must perforce bet our lives on that constancy; such is faith – faith not as mere wan credence in an abstract notion only, but such as to warrant, aye and to motivate that bet, again and again, so that we might act upon it. And this faith must reduce in the end – which is to say, it must in the final analysis sum, or rather integrate – to faith in the constancy of that than which no greater can be conceived, which is – of course, obviously – the verymost difficult thing for us to think about.
Thus it is that even for those such as I who have plumbed the ontological arguments and come away satisfied of their cogency, and indeed convinced at heart, and converted, faith is still needful. For why?
I.e., things we see are not made of things we can see; the world does not, cannot generate itself; and so on. We cannot then hope for verification of our hope from the things of this world. We must, rather, rely upon – have faith in – worlds we cannot from our own see, but which we can understand must be real, as the sufficient reasons of our own.
This back-and-forth reminds me of something Lawrence Auster pointed out concerning “liberals” who would, unconsciously, use a language laden with supernatural expression. And so it is with “science.” The untrained Christian grants a “spirited effort” and “good faith” to the scientific endeavor while the God-denying “scientist” takes this undue and unprincipled attribution for granted.
The real issue is the Jekyll-Hyde nature of “science” and the archetype “scientist” who, more-often-than-not, keeps his fundamental assumptions private while making public those “truths” which do not cohere to his private assumptions. In other words, an honest, God-denying “scientist” would admit to no “spirited effort” behind his work nor any “good faith” to be found in what he does as it relates to “science.”
This kind of honesty and consistency would make for a much different “science” in the future.