Project: Problems of Evil

The arguments go from weakest to strongest, or easiest to argue to hardest.

1) The Problem of Hell: A perfect being is logically incompatible with worst possible evils. The best possible being can't create a worst possible evil.

2) The Problem of Unjustified Evils, Failed Theodicies, and Skeptical Theism.

 

Fifteen Theodicies (add Justin Mooney's and Sam Leben's)

3) The Problem of Unbearable Suffering: A perfect being is logically incompatible with the rejection of consciousness.

 

4) The Ontological Problem of Evil: A perfect being is logically incompatible with any imperfection whatever. Define imperfections as imaginable improvements. There should be no imaginable improvements over the best possible world; everyone should be living their best life imaginable. But what would such a perfect life look like? Plausibly, it will involve creating, building, expanding, and... improving! Making the world better by adding more people to it and by creating beautiful things to be enjoyed by people.

 

So imperfections (as imaginable improvements) are not the problem. An imperfection is something deeper. Something like: an imaginable improvement that is impossible to work toward. Our world is full of imaginable improvements that are impossible to work toward. So, really, you could say imperfections are pessimism-causing evils. The imaginable improvements of the ideal world do not cause pessimism, because we always know that we can work toward them and will eventually succeed. So if God exists, there should be no pessimism. 

 

We might say: Just as a perfect being rules out consciousness rejecting itself, a perfect being rules out consciousness rejecting the world it finds itself in. (In fact, doesn't rejection of the world you are in entail a rejection of your consciousness?) 

 

And yet, pessimism is a rejection of our world. (With full pessimism being a full rejection, and mitigated pessimism being a mitigated rejection.) So a perfect being rules out pessimism.

 

A perfect being rules out imperfections (thus, any degree of pessimism) because perfection can only beget perfection. And perhaps a perfect being rules out imperfections (any degree of pessimism) because even the slightest degree of pessimism implies a degree of rejection of the world, and thus a rejection of consciousness, and a perfect being is incompatible with a rejection of consciousness.

5) Bonus: The Nightmare God of Love

An analysis of love reveals a contradiction in the Nightmare God of Love: God regards members of the nightmare world as wellsprings of value and also regards members of the nightmare world as not wellsprings of value. If this God fails to accurately regard members of the nightmare world as not wellsprings of value, then there are other aspects of love that he violates. Love to some degree is a success term. Love requires understanding. Plus, for a God to not recognize the members of the nightmare world as suffering, this God would have to be hopelessly confused.

If theists say there are relevant differences between the nightmare world and our world, they must answer 1) What those relevant differences are, and 2) At which point would our world feature those relevant differences were we to imagine our world to steadily get worse over time until it resembled the nightmare world. If the theist cannot do this, and in turns out that the basic analysis of love is correct, along with the analysis behind unbearable suffering, and if it turns out that its these analyses that allow us to see that the nightmare God is necessarily not loving, then we will be able to see that the God of the actual world is necessarily unloving as well.

React: WLC on Abortion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQdya6etl1I

1) How do you reconcile the doctrine of hell with the idea that humans (including the damned, presumably) have intrinsic value? Wouldn't damnation be treating humans as a means to an end, that end being God's justice, instead of as an end unto themselves? (Craig, rejecting universalism, backs himself into a corner from which he cannot escape.)

2) When you say humans have intrinsic value, what does the word 'intrinsic' mean here? What would be lost if we simply said humans have value? If you mean that humans are _instantiations_ of value, then this is clearly false. We can imagine a world where God sends every human to hell where they are tortured forever. How can humans be instantiations of value when all they do is generate misery? A nightmare world full of infinite pointless suffering is infinitely worse, more disvaluable, than a world with nothing in it. Not only do humans not add any value whatever to the nightmare world, but they drive its disvalue through their pointless suffering.

Ah, so it's positive experiences, or happiness, not persons, that are instantiations of value, and negative experiences, or pains, that are instantiations of disvalue. Humans are extrinsically valuable, and the value states they generate are intrinsically valuable.

3) How does forced birth treat pregnant women as an end unto themselves and not as a means to an end of reproduction?

4) What are rights? Are they abstract entities floating in a Platonic realm somewhere? (Craig rejects Platonism, so no). How does having intrinsic value (which humans do not have, as that makes no sense) transfer one of these magical rights to you? Rights are social, legal constructs granted and revoked by states, nothing more.

5) Practically speaking, let's say you force millions of unwanted pregnancies [over the years. In the US there are roughly one million abortions a year. At least, that was the rate prior to the overturning of Roe v Wade]. How does that work out? Are pro-lifers forced to pay for childcare costs and build and volunteer at foster homes, since they are the ones who believe in forced birth? If you force those who vote pro-life to put their money where their mouth is, I guarantee you overnight nearly everyone would vote pro-choice.

Persevering through loss of faith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD2Hbq04oa8

 

In this talk, Alex Pruss discusses an argument for God's existence.

 

Whatever force the argument may have had though seems to instantly evaporate when at the very end he is asked about the problem of evil.

 

He responds by saying the greatest things in life are virtues, especially moral virtues like forgiveness, generosity, perseverance, and so on. But these virtues require suffering.

 

There are many ways one can respond to this, but here is a unique way. There's a very special virtue that Christians cannot possibly access, which is the virtue of persevering through loss of faith.

 

Let's imagine two people, Alice and Bob.

 

Alice is raised Christian and she never changes her worldview. She lives a normal, basic life of marriage, children, and so on.

 

Bob is raised Christian, and comes to a deep certainty in God and Jesus, and loves God and Jesus with all his heart, mind, and soul. But slowly, doubts creep in. At first, he pushes them away, because his love for God is so great that he cannot bear the thought that God might not exist. But over the years, he develops an obsession to prove that God exists to shut up those evil atheists who clearly just want to sin guilt-free. But in Bob's pursuit of truth, he discovers philosophy and philosophical methodology. He ends up pursuing a degree or two in philosophy. Very slowly, over many years, and in large part due to personal experiences of evil, tragedy, and unanswered prayers, the intellectual challenges to belief in God and Christianity eventually weigh heavily enough on Bob that he just can't believe anymore, despite how badly he wants God to be real and for Christianity to be true.

 

Bob wrestles with truth, with his own self-identity, his view of humanity and the world, the meaning of life, the nature of morality, everything. By losing his faith, life in many ways has suddenly become much harder. Before, he could trust in God, and let God guide him through life. Now, there is no God to protect Bob or validate Bob's existence through divine love. There is no God-given purpose to Bob's life.

 

Bob is in a terrifying place.

 

And yet, bravely, through seemingly miraculous strength, he picks himself up and builds a worldview that can account for morality, the meaning of life, the origins of religion, and so on. He humbly accepts his newfound worthlessness. (Bob smartly believes in a mitigated cynicism, so he doesn't view himself as entirely worthless. But he no longer sees himself as the immortal soul he once did.)

 

Bob bravely accepts that death is the end. There is a kind of ego death in accepting the fact that you are a limited, mortal being with no eternal God to love you or keep you alive. Instead of cowering behind comforting beliefs, Bob follows the truth where it leads, even when it leads to conclusions Bob so badly wants to be able to reject. Bob allows the truth, not desire, to guide his beliefs, and as excruciating as it was to give up his dreams of being with God forever and face the infinite disappointment of life, he perseveres through, through sheer strength, determination, and rationality.

 

Question: Is Bob a virtuous person? More virtuous than Alice? Not only is it true that he is, but he seems to capture some very special and powerful virtues, virtues inaccessible to a person of faith.

 

So Christianity has a problem. It probably relies on some kind of story like the one Pruss gives. The sheer good of perseverance through suffering gives the suffering a purpose and beauty to it. (Of course, as I've written on, I'm skeptical of virtues as being able to justify evils. I think I gave the example of a 9/11 first responder being asked whether he would rather have 9/11 and all the bravery of the first responders and the perseverance of the survivors, or to lose all of that virtue and prevent 9/11 from happening. The answer is so obvious that he's insulted.) 

 

But what better story of perseverance than one like Bob's? Persevering through loss of faith seems to me to be just about the greatest kind of persevering there is (I say with a hefty amount of bias), given how existentially deep it is and how it demands you to be radically open-minded and to be so radically open to not only changing yourself to match up with reality, but to change yourself completely and absolutely. To go from someone who wants God more than anything to a person who is at peace with the godlessness of the world, and at peace with his own mortality, and to go from viewing oneself as a divine, everlasting creature to a creature of limited value, is frankly an achievement so great that it's hard to comprehend.

 

In fact, there's a kind of dual virtue taking place. Bob has the sensitivity, love, blamelessness, empathy, and compassion needed to love God and to desire ultimate justice for all people, and needed to recognize just how much we lose when we lose God. At the same time, Bob has the love of truth, open-mindedness, humility, discipline, bravery, and patience to follow the truth where it leads.

By promoting the value of virtue to save Christianity from the problem of evil, the Christian ironically promotes the value of the virtues involved in persevering through loss of faith. And if existential perseverance is one of the greatest virtues there are, then it's not clear that the Christian has any advantage over the non-Christian when it comes to capturing the goodness of virtue. If anything, the ex-Christian who demonstrates dual virtue has the advantage.

 

If I'm not mistaken, Richard Swinburne once evinced a kind of regret over not changing his worldview, because doing so is such a strong demonstration of intellectual virtue (assuming you're changing your worldview for the right reasons).

 

Edit: Found it: YouTube: Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press), "Has your worldview changed since you started doing philosophy? | Richard Swinburne" --  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxlYAssgD58

 

"I often feel guilty about this because I greatly admire people who had a certain worldview and then come to have certain important life experiences or been exposed to certain arguments and suddenly abandoned it and given up that view and adopted a different one, and I think these are highly rational people . . ."

David Bentley Hart on Hell and Autism

Taken from the preface to the Paperback Edition:

My friends' son is now old enough to grant me permission to tell this story, but it happened more than a dozen years ago, when he was only seven or eight. The year before, he had been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome. He was an extremely intelligent child, shy, typically gentle and quiet, but occasionally emotionally volatile—as tends to be the case with many children classified as "on the spectrum." They are often intensely sensitive to, and largely defensive against, extreme experiences: crowds, loud noises, overwhelming sensory stimulation of any kind, but also pronounced imaginative, affective, or moral dissonances. So perhaps it should have surprised no one when he fell into a state of panic for three days, and then into an extended state of depression, after a Dominican homilist who was visiting his parish happened to mention the eternity of hell in a sermon. . . . his reaction was despair. All at once, he found himself imprisoned in a universe of absolute horror, and nothing could calm him until his father succeeded in convincing him that the priest had been repeating lies whose only purpose was to terrorize people into submission. . . . As a result, they have not gone to mass since that time . . . Now, to me it seems obvious—if chiefly at an intuitive level—that this story is more than sufficient evidence of the spiritual squalor of the traditional concept of an eternal hell. After all, another description for a "spectrum" child's "exaggerated" emotional sensitivity might simply be "acute moral intelligence." As difficult as it sometimes makes the ordinary business of life, it is precisely this lack of any very resilient emotional insulation against the world's jagged edges that makes that child incapable of the sort of complacent insensitivity that permits most of us to reconcile ourselves serenely to beliefs that should, soberly considered, cause us revulsion.

Richard Swinburne on metaphysical necessity

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhJ2XaGbYZ4, 15m

I've asked the question whether there is anything meaningful about the idea of 'metaphysical impossibility', and concluded that it can be reduced to logical impossibility. https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2024/10/physical-possibility-vs-metaphysical.html

Swinburne says before the 1970s, the only notion of necessity was logical necessity where denying the truth of something entails a contradiction. Then Kripke and Putnam presented the example of denying "Water is H2O." Water is necessarily H2O, but denying that water is H2O does not entail a contradiction. So here you have something that is necessary but not logically necessary, and here is where we need the notion of 'metaphysically necessary.' Facts of essences, or essential facts, are metaphysically necessary. We can think of it in terms of possible worlds. In all possible worlds, water is H2O. It's impossible for water to not be H2O. And yet, there is no contradiction in saying water is H3O or some other chemical composition.

Swinburne rejects this. If by 'water' we mean 'H20', then denying 'H2O is H2O' does entail a contradiction. It is logically necessary for everything to be identical to itself. If by water we mean 'blue stuff in our rivers and oceans,' then 'water is blue stuff in our rivers and oceans' is not necessary. There are possible worlds in which water is not (perceived to be) blue or not in our rivers or oceans.

So the confusion arises from equivocating on essential vs non-essential properties. If we define water in terms of essential properties, then denying that water is H2O is a logical contradiction. If we define water in terms of non-essential properties, then it's not necessary for water to be that. So we do not have an example here of something that's both necessary and yet not logically necessary.

This reminds me of a very similar confusion, if not the very same, that motivates the Water/H2O / Superman/Clark Kent response to the objection against identity theory that identifying thoughts with brain states immediately violates Leibniz's Law. Joshua Rasmussen explains things nicely here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhJ2XaGbYZ4

Swinburne reduces metaphysical necessity to logical necessity too. Neat!

The Problem of Salient Suffering: Saving vs preventing

In this post (https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-argument-from-salient-suffering.html) I argue from salient suffering to the non-existence of God.

 

When a person is in fact suffering from a max salient evil, then the best thing for them – a max salient good – is to save them. This faces the following objection:

 

How does salience transfer from intrinsic goods to depriving evils, or from intrinsic evils to saving goods? If saving / depriving means preventing, then unborn creatures suffer a max evil by being deprived of max goods. But intuitively, unborn creatures cannot suffer at all, and certainly not maximally. Maximal suffering is salient, and salient suffering depends on consciousness.

 

(I guess you could try to cash things out in terms of the consciousness of God. God is consciously aware of how much better it would be for non-existent creatures to become conscious and enjoy max goods. Indeed, wouldn't that be the basis for God's motivation to create other creatures? But intuitively to suffer (in the worst way) is to suffer consciously. So if the unborn are suffering (in the worst way) from deprivation, then they are suffering consciously. But non-existent persons cannot suffer consciously. Whether salience transfers may depend on whether there are modal facts and whether God, being omniscient, is aware of all the creatures that would exist and what goods they would enjoy were God to create them. If there are no modal facts, then God is off the hook. If there are modal facts, then perhaps facts of would-be consciousness provides the conscious facts needed for salience.)

 

Certainly there is a self-evident conscious difference between suffering consciously and not. So does God need to allow someone to suffer from a max salient evil for a moment to transfer salience from the intrinsic suffering to the saving good? That seems silly. Surely it's even better to not suffer maximally for even one moment.

 

It's not that God is ever rescuing people from worst possible fates, it's that he's preventing these fates from occurring, because even the one moment is unjustified. But then how does salience transfer? If there is no actual suffering, only "modal" suffering, then does that commit one to modal facts? This person would suffer a maximal evil if God doesn't intervene, so God has to intervene? I don't want to commit myself to modal facts, in case the grounding objection, and other objections, prove too powerful.

 

If a single person suffers a single moment of max evil, then it will have been the case that God is not perfect. Obviously, God cannot allow this. So it can never have been the case that God is not perfect. So it can never be the case that someone will suffer a max evil.

 

So it's not modal facts, but future facts (facts of the closed future) that allow salience to transfer from intrinsic goods/evils to preventative goods/evils. It cannot be the case that intrinsic evils are salient without it being the case that future intrinsic evils are salient.

 

But maybe even open future facts can do this too. If there is a 10% chance for a person to experience unbearable suffering, then there's a 10% chance for God to not exist. Obviously, that's absurd. So open future facts about unbearable suffering are impossible; it's always 0%.

 

If someone is enjoying a max good, it can never be the case that this person will cease to enjoy this max good, as this would be a max depriving evil, with salience transferring from the max good to the depriving evil by way of direct comparison. So it can never be the case that someone will enjoy a max good only to cease enjoying it. Max depriving evils enable max saving goods – being saved from the depriving evil. So once someone is in heaven, God cannot possibly take them out.

 

Of the non-existent persons who will never come to be, there are no future facts for them. Because future facts are what carry salience, and because there are no future facts for the non-existent persons that never come to be, non-existent persons that never come to be never suffer maximal salient depriving evils.

 

Or, we can scratch all that and say there are max modal depriving evils and a perfect being is obligated to create an infinite number of creatures who each enjoy max goods. Which, there's probably reason to believe this anyway – a perfect being must create the best possible state of affairs, and what else could be the best possible state of affairs except the maximum possible number of creatures living fundamentally good lives?

 

This also nicely explains away the brute fact of your existence. Why do you exist rather than some other person in your place? Because you literally have to exist – everyone does. Only impossible persons do not exist.

 

Of course, we are not living fundamentally good lives, which are lives where a person never rejects consciousness (i.e., never prefers non-existence to existence) and always lives. Some of us do reject consciousness, which entails unbearable suffering. So, this cannot be the best possible state of affairs, and there cannot be a best possible being.

What does it mean for something to exist? The data view

I've heard a few definitions of existence over the years:

1) To exist is to be the value of a bound variable.

2) To exist is to instantiate at least one property.

3) To exist is be an indispensable property. 

4) To exist is to explain at least one point of data; to explain our experiences.

The last one is interesting. To exist is to explain data. We have two kinds of data: privately accessible and publicly accessible. Both cry out for explanation. If I have a religious experience where I strongly feel the presence of God, then we broadly have two explanations for this data: 1) God exists. 2) God doesn't and something else is causing this feeling that is being misperceived as the presence of God.

There are two kinds of data, again: a priori data and a posteriori data, or data that depends on perception, observation, and science, and data that depends on concepts, language, meaning, and understanding.

To not exist is to fail to explain any data. Does God exist? That depends. Is there any data that God explains, that could not be explained otherwise? Theists say yes: The beginning of the universe, contingent facts, the advent of life (especially: life capable of feeling love from and for God), the advent of consciousness, and morality are five key data points theists say require God for explanation. Non-theists argue that we do not need God to explain the beginning of the universe (maybe because there isn't one), contingent facts, the advent of life, the advent of consciousness, or morality.

Do numbers exist? That depends. Is there any data that numbers explain that could not be explained otherwise? Nominalists will say we don't need numbers to explain numerical data, only ideas or thoughts about numbers. After all, we don't need unicorns to explain our thoughts about unicorns, we just need the thoughts! Just as fictional entities are explained by ideas in the mind, so too are numbers explained by ideas in the mind.

Realists can say that this doesn't cut it, because we can trace any fictional entity to real properties (or to real objects that have properties). We can trace fictions to an author's mind. While we cannot trace the unicorn to a single author, we can trace the unicorn to ideas of horse, horn, magic. We can further trace magic to real properties. So thoughts about unicorns are thoughts about <list traceable properties here>. If numbers don't explain data, and only thoughts about numbers do, then what are the traceable properties of numbers?

What is data if not experiential? And so to explain data is to explain our experiences. This includes direct data, like when we see a tree in front of us, and indirect data, like when we hear scientists talk about quarks and leptons. I experience scientists talking about these things. What explains this experience? Here is an explanation: scientists are talking about quarks and leptons as if they exist because the scientists have experienced reading experiment reports, or conducted experiments themselves, that cause them to experience data that cries out for explanation, and they have posited quarks and leptons to explain that. So we have degrees of "directness" of data. Some data is direct, most of it is inferential.

Moral data, therefore, in the form of intuitions, is absolutely data. Anything we experience is data. If someone wrongs me and I feel strongly that they have done something truly incorrect, what explains that feeling? Or when we hear about a dog owner locking her dog up in a room and then going on vacation for weeks so that she can get rid of her dog, and the dog slowly dies of thirst trapped in that room, and we feel so strongly that this was an evil thing to do that ought not be done, what's causing this strong feeling we have? Are there moral facts that cause us to feel these convictions, or is it just evolutionary programming?