Part 2: Unbearable suffering
The data to be explained is our conviction that NGL is certainly not loving and that we should be able to see this. I suggest that it’s the maxed out suffering (I use ‘maxed out suffering’ and ‘unbearable suffering’ interchangeably) of the inhabitants of the nightmare world that lies at the center of the explanation. This can be seen intuitively by considering the relevant differences between increasingly better versions of the nightmare world. If God tortured his creatures for only a trillion years, instead of infinity, would he still fail to be perfectly loving? Clearly, yes. What about a trillion years minus one second? And minus another? There’s no non-arbitrary stopping point as we approach zero seconds spent in the nightmare world. What if God tortured only a trillion souls instead of infinite souls? Or a trillion souls minus one? Again, there’s no non-arbitrary stopping point. If God tortures even a single soul for a single second, this is enough to tarnish God’s perfect love.
However, once we reduce the intensity of the suffering, immediately it becomes less and less clear, as we approach zero suffering, that the God of the nightmare world is unloving. While fewer sufferers and shorter durations of suffering improves the nightmare world, we can reach all the way to the end—a single sufferer and a single moment of suffering—and it’s still clear that the nightmare God is not perfectly loving. But the same isn’t true when we compare nightmare worlds with reduced suffering. Far before we reach the equivalent end of next-to-no-suffering, we may hit a level of suffering low enough to be offset by justifying goods. So what’s principally driving the ‘nightmare’ of the nightmare world appears to be the maxed out suffering of the inhabitants.
Why would unbearable suffering be driving our certainty in the nightmare God’s lack of love in this way? My explanation is found within the following account of goodness and badness.[*2] For something to be intrinsically good is for something to be good in and of itself. To be good in and of itself is to be that the goodness of which is directly accessible. The only thing the goodness of which is directly accessible is an intrinsically positive conscious state, i.e. happiness. Conversely, the only thing the badness of which is directly accessible is an intrinsically negative conscious state – pain. Goods come in three varieties: Intrinsic goods are those goods the goodness of which is directly accessible; extrinsic goods are those goods that give rise to intrinsic goods; and saving goods are those goods that directly or indirectly prevent intrinsic evils. The evil equivalents are intrinsic evils, extrinsic evils, and depriving evils that directly or indirectly deprive one of intrinsic goods that otherwise would have been obtained.
Questions rise immediately. Are people intrinsically good? What about virtue, justice, and autonomy? Do we deprive the unborn every moment we forgo procreation? What about evil happiness, such as delighting in the suffering of others? Is that intrinsically good?
On the account of good and evil under consideration, people are not intrinsically good. While that might sound bad, it really shouldn’t once we understand what it must mean for something to be intrinsically good. We should avoid the mistake of using the word ‘intrinsic’ as an intensifier. When people say that something is intrinsically good, often they mean that it’s really good. Or they mean that its goodness is readily available. It might be tempting to think chocolate is intrinsically good because the chocolate itself can be eaten and enjoyed then and there. But chocolate is extrinsically good; only the goodness of the taste of chocolate is directly accessible (for those who like chocolate). It’s also a mistake in thinking that intrinsic goods must be of greater magnitude than extrinsic goods. Compare the goodness of the experience of a hot shower to the goodness of a dream job. Dream jobs are “only” extrinsically good, and yet their goodness dwarfs the intrinsic goodness of the experience of a hot shower.
Likewise, persons are “only” extrinsically valuable, but their value is immense and primary. Without people the intrinsically good states they generate would not be possible. People are loci of value – wellsprings of value – without which the greatest goods we know of would not exist, and indeed goodness itself would not be possible without the consciousness to cash it out. The value of virtue and justice is like this too – extrinsic but essential and primary, for one cannot live a good life without virtue.
Evil happiness is intrinsically good, which explains the motivating reasons for why people are tempted by it. But it’s extrinsically evil, leading to intrinsic evils down the line, which is why evil happiness is not worth pursuing. Consider a relatively innocent case of evil happiness: you know you shouldn’t have the extra dessert, but you succumb in a moment of akrasia and give into gluttony. This leads to intrinsic evils of guilt, dissatisfaction with your weight, and self-disappointment. Not all happiness is created equal; higher, more sophisticated forms of happiness carry far greater extrinsic goods than baser forms of happiness.
We do not harm the unborn by not bringing them into being, as we do not cause them pain nor do we take away any pre-existing capacity to flourish. While we might deprive the unborn of goods they otherwise would enjoy by not reproducing, we also save them from evils they might have otherwise endured. Not to mention there are the risks of misery to yourself and others to consider as well. This is why bringing a child into the world is the great responsibility we consider it to be. While bringing a person into the world comes with great benefits, it comes with great risks as well. Presumably, a loving God would create people exactly because doing so adds more wellsprings of value to the world.
This is only a sketch of an account of good and evil. But if this account of good and evil is able to address questions such as these sufficiently well, as I think it can, then we have independent reasons for thinking this account, or something close enough, is right, and we needn’t appeal to it in an ad hoc fashion just to explain our conviction that the nightmare God cannot be loving. With that said, if this account also explains our conviction that the nightmare God cannot be loving, then that is further support for the account.
Given the distinctions of saving goods and depriving evils, we see how goods and evils entail each other in the sense that wherever there is an evil, there is the good of being saved from that evil, and wherever there is a good, there is the evil of being deprived of that good. However, as an aside, if being deprived of a lesser good enables you to obtain a greater good, for example being deprived of an affluent childhood saving you from developing a vicious character, then what may first appear to be a depriving evil may turn out to be an extrinsic good.
Unbearable suffering enables the equivalent good of being saved from that suffering. But when suffering is unbearable, and thus at capacity, then by definition the equivalent saving good is at capacity in its goodness. The greatest possible good for the person trapped in the worst possible fate is to be delivered from that fate.
So members of the nightmare world needn’t rely on a noseeum inference whereby they infer that there are likely no goods that could justify their fate from the fact that they cannot see what those goods could be. Instead, members of the nightmare world can see, with the same intuitive certainty we started with, that no such goods are possible. Maxed out intrinsic evils entail maxed out saving goods. So when the Nightmare God of Love says there are goods beyond your ken that justify your being tortured day and night in a lake of fire for all eternity, you can see, with certainty, that this God is lying or confused. It’s impossible for any mystery good to reach the max goodness of being delivered from unbearable suffering.
This explains the intuition support given earlier when we considered ever-improving nightmare worlds. When maxed suffering is reduced below the max, a gap appears between actual suffering and suffering-at-capacity. This gap allows God to show his love by allowing high-but-not-maxed suffering to prevent maxed suffering, if God is stuck in a position where he lacks the power to do any better. Hence, why reducing the suffering of the nightmare world makes it immediately unclear that the God of that world is unloving when reducing the duration or number of inhabitants does not. As an aside, of course it wouldn’t make sense for a God powerful enough to create a world to not be powerful enough to do better than allowing near-max suffering to prevent maxed suffering.
A problem arises at this point. If God deprived us from maxed out happiness, then wouldn’t this generate a maxed out depriving evil? But we wouldn’t experience such a depriving evil. And yet evils, especially maxed evils, are supposed to ultimately cash out in conscious experience on my account.
This points to a general problem of how depriving evils derive their evil on my account. Extrinsic evils cash out their evil when they produce intrinsic evils. But depriving evils do not necessarily produce intrinsic evils. If all evil must be realized consciously eventually, when are depriving evils realized?
We can think of depriving evils as comparative evils, opportunity cost evils, or the evil of the lesser good. When invited to a party, you consider the intrinsic goods you would enjoy at the party versus staying at home. Fear of missing out on those goods kicks in and you go to the party. We perform these kinds of comparison tests all the time when making decisions for future actions. While deprivation is not experienced, we still know that depriving evils are evil in the same way that we know intrinsic evils are evil: through a test in conscious awareness. We introspect and compare two potential future experiences, such as going to the party or staying home, and we use our past experience to inform us of which is likely to be the greater good. The lesser good becomes an evil compared to the greater good. Depriving evils derive their conscious badness in the hypothetical conscious inferiority of one good, or an altogether lack of good, compared to a greater good that was missed out on. Saving goods derive their goodness in the same way, via the conscious difference between suffering more and suffering less.
I see two directions we can move in with respect to God and maxed happiness. One is to say God is obliged to grant us maxed happiness because if God doesn’t then God will incur a maxed out depriving evil, and God can’t afford to incur such massive evils multiplied over all creatures. Our lack of maxed happiness then becomes another problem of evil. Another approach is to say that happiness (intrinsically positive mental states) when taken to too great an extreme becomes incapacitating. If God gave us a never-ending max dose of pure pleasure, we wouldn’t be able to do anything other than lie still, overwhelmed by the experience. All capacity for relationship, creativity, exploring reality, or those activities that make life most meaningful would be lost. Under this conception, maxed out happiness would result in deleterious effects, and thus being deprived of it is not actually a maxed out depriving evil.
The argument thus far has been in two parts. Skeptical theism says that for all we know, God could have access to goods that justify the evils we see. The first part has us imagine a nightmare world in which it seems absurd that God could have access to goods that justify the unbearable suffering of endless people. The second part attempts to explain why this strikes us as absurd. It’s absurd to think God could have justifying goods in the nightmare world because the greatest possible good for victims of unbearable suffering is to be spared from unbearable suffering. Therefore, it’s not always the case that we rely on a noseeum inference when inferring that God likely does not have access to justifying goods. We can see for ourselves, in the case of unbearable suffering, that such goods cannot exist. In Part 3 I briefly argue that unbearable suffering exists in the actual world.
*2 - This account is broadly hedonistic. Epicurus alludes to the idea that goods and evils depend on awareness: "Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness . . ." Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, trans. Robert Drew Hicks, The Internet Classics Archive, accessed January 04, 2025, https://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html.
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