Argument vs Problem and What it Means for the Problem of Evil to Succeed

Point 1: Argument vs Problem

 

You hear about the problem of evil and perhaps problems of evil. You also hear about arguments from evil. Is 'problem' just a synonym for 'argument'?

 

The short answer is no, these two ideas come apart though they are closely related.

 

‘The problem of evil’ refers to the idea that there is tension between evil and God. This tension is a rational tension; the problem is a problem for rational belief in God. So you could call it the threat of evil, because evil threatens to render belief in God irrational. 

 

'Arguments from evil' refer to arguments that attempt to show that the tension between God and evil is real, and attempt to spell out the logic causing the tension.

 

Problems correspond to questions, so you could also call it the question of evil: Why does God allow evil? If the theist doesn't have a satisfying answer, but the atheist does ("Because God doesn't exist."), then atheism scores the point. The question reveals the tension, and the theist's poor answer (if their answer is poor) fails to nullify the tension.

 

(A theist might argue that while there is no satisfying answer to the problem of evil, denying God leads to no satisfying answer to other problems, such as contingency, the beginning of the universe, the beginning of life, or consciousness. So it's a matter of which bullets you're willing to bite.)

 

We can speak of problems of evil because there are multiple tensions between God and evil. For example, there's the problem of unjustified evils (How can a good and powerful God allow the horrendous evils we see?), the ontological problem (If God created everything, then did God create evil?), and the problem of perfection (If the state of the world was perfect prior to creation, then how could a perfect being change the world from perfect to imperfect? Alternatively: If God is the perfect foundation of reality, then how could a fundamentally perfect reality contain imperfections?).

 

Point 2: What does it mean for the problem of evil to succeed?

 

To say "the problem of evil succeeds" then is to say "One or more arguments from evil successfully demonstrate the irrationality of the belief in a perfect being." (You can replace 'perfect being' with a descriptor of your target model of God. Typically perfect being theism, a God of maximal love and power, is the target for problems of evil, though I'm sure there are problems of evil adapted for classical theism, neo-classical theism, and so on.) In other words, if the problem of evil succeeds then the threat of evil to rational belief in God is fully credible.

 

Theists must, therefore, say either 1) Evil is evidence for God, not against God; 2) Evil is neither evidence for nor against God (i.e. maybe evil is evidence against God, but so far attempts to show this have failed); 3) Evil is evidence against God, but is outweighed by counter evidence. And of course no theist will consider evil to be a proof against God.

 

Theists who opt for Options 1 or 2 will say that the tension between God and evil is merely apparent and based on some confusion. Theists who opt for Option 3 will say that the tension between God and evil is real, but isn't as bad as tensions between naturalism and other data (again, the "biting bullets" approach, also known as a Moorean Shift).

 

However, there are a number of available interpretations on what it means for the problem of evil to succeed, such as:

 

Basic success: The problem of evil is successful in that one or more arguments from evil are valid with true premises, and belief in the truth of the premises is justified.

 

(You can fill in the justification requirement according to your preferred theory of justification. An explanationist, for example, would say that "...are valid with true premises, and the truth of the premises is what explains someone's being convinced of them.")

 

Success as a proof: The problem of evil proves beyond reasonable doubt that there is no perfect being. All belief in God hinges upon either ignorance of the problem of evil or an inability to understand the problem of evil.

 

Success as a defense of permissive agnosticism: While it's still rational to believe in God, the problem of evil proves that it's also rational to withhold belief. The problem of evil does not by itself allow someone to conclude with any confidence that God does not exist.

 

Success as a defense of permissive atheism: While it's still rational to believe in God, the problem of evil proves that it's also rational to deny that God exists. It's also rational to simply withhold belief and be agnostic.

 

Success as a refutation of theism (non-permissive agnosticism): The problem of evil proves that theism is irrational. The problem of evil does not by itself prove that one should deny that God exists.

 

Success as a refutation of theism (non-permissive atheism): The problem of evil proves that both theism and agnosticism are irrational. The person who grasps the force of the problem will be confident that God does not exist 

 

Sociological success: The problem of evil has a significant sociological impact and is well-regarded as a formidable problem for theistic belief.

 

Partial convergence: Many agnostics and atheists explicitly cite the problem of evil as justification for their agnosticism / atheism.

 

Total convergence: All or virtually all professional philosophers believe that the problem of evil succeeds in some sense.

 

Personal success: You find yourself committed to the premises of one or more arguments from evil, and, given that the argument(s) is/are valid, find yourself committed to their conclusions. You make no claims about what others should or should not believe or what they are or are not committed to.

 

With the exception of "basic success" I wrote these out in terms of the problem of evil being successful when it's really a specific argument that will succeed in demonstrating the tension. The reason for talking about the success of the problem of evil in general terms is because it is a convenient simplification, and because you might think that there are multiple successful arguments (perhaps ranging across the multiple tensions mentioned between God and evil). Someone might think an argument from perfection succeeds while all arguments from justification fail, and someone else might think several different arguments from justification succeed and one version of the argument from perfection also succeeds, and so on. Not only are there many variations of the problem of evil across different tensions, but there's also the sense in which the argument from evil in question succeeds (whether it's a refutation of theism or something weaker). So there is no limit to the number of ways someone might mix and match their exact views on the success or failure of the problem of evil.

 

To complicate things even further, there are different senses of the word rational. If the problem of evil shows that belief in God is irrational, what does that mean, exactly? There is the internalistic notion of rationality where, if the problem of evil succeeds, the theist is in some way guilty of committing one or more epistemic sins. There is something wrong with the theist.

 

This view of irrationality, it seems to me, is very unpopular. The reason why is very obvious: No one chooses their ignorance or their intelligence at any given moment. And so, no one chooses what arguments they are exposed to or what arguments appeal to them at any given moment. So, you can't fault anyone ever for believing how they do at any given moment.

 

As someone who argues in favor of free will skepticism, I accept this. There is no irrationality in the sense of epistemic fault.

 

However, this still leaves room for external rationality. While no one is at fault for believing wrongly, they still believe wrongly. While it's true there is nothing wrong with the person as a person for believing wrongly, it's still the case that there's something wrong with what the person has, that is, the person has mistaken beliefs. There may also be something wrong with the person in the sense that this person has an inability to believe what's true due to bias or misunderstanding. But you are not what you have.

 

Keeping this bifurcated view of blame in mind is essential to understanding what we are committed to when we accuse someone of irrationality. Due to how strongly we associate who someone is with what they have, any critical comment on what someone has will often be viewed, incorrectly, as an insult to their personhood. 'Irrational' is often used and received as an insult, and no intellectually civil person wants to insult those who disagree with them. But 'irrational' in the philosophical sense need not be used or received as an insult, but instead viewed as a necessary description, and constructive critique, of the quality of what someone has. 

If you're playing piano and struggling and someone says "You suck," then that's an insult (notice the you statement... insults always personalize). But if they instead say, "Your tempo is off; try again with a metronome," it's no longer an insult despite the acknowledgement of mistake (notice how the you statement turns into a your statement). For the person who wants to be good at piano, there is a pressure to get it right. 

 

So in productive philosophical conversations, 'irrational' will never be used as an insult, but the pressure provided by the threat of irrationality will certainly be in the background, playing its role of pushing us toward getting things right.

 

Following the pattern of "basic success", we arrive at basic rationality:

 

Basic irrationality: If a person affirms premises that logically entail a conclusion, but rejects that conclusion, then this person is irrational. The rational person will either accept the conclusion or change their mind about one or more of the premises (either by withholding belief in or denying the truth of).

 

Notably, failing to accept a conclusion that follows from accepted premises is not necessarily irrational, because there are many, technically infinite, conclusions that follow at least trivially from what we believe. We don't consciously accept all of them and for good reason: it's impossible to be aware of all that you are committed to at any given moment. It takes a serious and prolonged conscious effort to discover what it really is you are committed to. (Arguably it's perfectly rational for someone to cease pontificating about the coherence of their beliefs given more urgent matters of survival. But someone else might think that placing too great an emphasis on one's survival leads to atrocities like Nazi Germany, where Nazi soldiers were happy to place their survival above doing what's right.) It's only when a conclusion is brought to your attention, a conclusion you are committed to, when your rationality causes you to understand the logical consequence and subsequently update your belief.

 

Rationality in this case refers to a mental power, and thus to a component of intelligence, that involves one's ability to understand logical consequence and to believe accordingly. There is 1) the understanding aspect and 2) the follow-through aspect of rationality. An irrational person is someone who 1) Fails to understand the logical consequence or 2) Understands but fails to update their beliefs.

 

I suspect that it's impossible to be rational enough to understand logical consequence while at the same time not rational enough to follow through on it. If that's right, then rationality is (perhaps among other things) the ability to understand logical commitments. Someone with that understanding will update their beliefs when presented with a conclusion they do not consciously believe and yet are committed to by prior beliefs. That's just what it means to understand.

 

Rationality is, in addition to the above, associated with "sensitivity to reasons."

 

Reason-based rationality: A rational person has good reasons for their belief and behavior, and an irrational person has no reasons or poor reasons for their belief and behavior.

Reasons are (perhaps among other things) 1) Answers to why questions and 2) related to mistakes.

 

Good reasons, then, are good answers to why questions. (To have a good answer, the question itself must be good, as it's hard to give a good answer to a bad question. Such an answer will require rephrasing the question in a helpful way, or rejecting the question outright.)

 

A rational person is a reasonable person, meaning that a rational person is someone who is disposed to have good reasons for their beliefs and behaviors, meaning that a rational person is someone who is disposed to give good answers to why questions. (Clearly, someone can be rational in one area of life and quite irrational in another, able to answer one set of why questions impressively and yet founder on another set of why questions.)

 

The sense of 'good' here is not clear. One sense of good/bad is phenomenal, rooted in experience. Another sense is in terms of success/failure.

 

These two senses of good/bad can come apart. For example, someone might be much happier believing in God. But believing in God could be a mistake relative to the goal of believing what's true about God, because God doesn't exist. In that case belief in God would be undeniably good (phenomenal) for this person, and yet undeniably bad (mistake).

 

To avoid confusion, you could reserve the terms 'good' and 'bad' for phenomenal goods and bads (intrinsic, extrinsic, and depriving), and reserve the terms 'right' and 'wrong' for successes and failures, which are always goal-relative and not necessarily phenomenally relevant. Another example: A bad (wrong) chess move is a mistake relative to the goal of winning the chess game or drawing if a win is unlikely. Even if there were no intrinsic, extrinsic, or depriving evils associated with the bad chess move, the move would still be bad in the failure sense, a mistake.

 

Reasons are related to mistakes in this way: If someone has the goal of winning the chess game, then that person has a reason (an answer to a why question) to make moves that improve their chances of winning, and has a reason to avoid making blunders. Mistakes are those things you have reason to avoid; they are failures to achieve a goal. If someone's goal is to make beautiful music, then they have reasons to follow principles of music theory when composing, and reason to avoid composing randomly. If someone's goal is to maximize their true philosophical beliefs, then they have reason to follow those principles of epistemology that when followed maximize one's true philosophical beliefs, and reason to avoid disregarding evidence, etc.

 

If someone makes a chess move, it makes sense to ask, "Why move that piece there?" There are right (correct) and wrong (incorrect) answers. If my answer is "Because this move develops my pieces", with the underlying implication that the move develops my pieces without creating an exploitable weakness, then my answer is simply incorrect in the case that the move does create an exploitable weakness. Chess moves are described as being more or less accurate, reflecting the fact that there are degrees to how right or wrong an answer can be. When someone has a goal, their actions can contain a mix of failure and success in pursuit of that goal.

I'm not sure how useful the "internal vs external" distinction is for reasons. It's perhaps better to talk of motivating vs justifying reasons. The chess player was motivated by some reason to play the move they did (clock was running out; it intuitively seemed like a good move, etc.), but that reason did not necessarily justify the move given the goal of winning.

 

This matter is complicated further still by the fact that there are different, competing logics. While classical logic is the "default", there is controversy surrounding the correct system of logic. This is relevant because if someone "fails" to spot a logical entailment or spots the logical entailment but "fails" to follow through because "success" in that context would require an adherence to classical logic, and this person adheres to a different logic (subclassical, intuitionistic, etc.), then whether these failures are real depends on which logic is the one true logic. So in the background we are relativizing logical success and failure to logical systems, again with classical logic as the default. There are undeniable mistakes relative to classical logic, but it's not undeniable that classical logic is the one true logic.

 

Where I am at in my journey:

• a) There is no successful proof from evil, which is why there is no strong convergence. At least, if there is a successful proof from evil out there, it's not well-understood or disseminated enough to cause such a convergence.
• b) The problem of evil enjoys a great deal of sociological success, which is why we see a partial convergence where the problem of evil is a very common reason for loss of faith and for confidence in one's agnosticism or atheism. This is also why theists routinely admit that the problem of evil is the greatest problem facing belief in God.
• c) Note: This is an empirical question and I have no empirical data to support an answer. Someone might cite studies that show the high rate of church attendance or religious belief in the US to indicate that the problem of evil does not enjoy much sociological success, at least in the US. You might suggest, given the very low rates of religiosity in countries in northern Europe, that the problem of evil might hold more sway in those populations, but even that is speculation. The reason why belief in God is rare in those countries might have very little to do with the problem of evil and more to do with basic factors of culture and tradition. There is a further question of what percentage self-described Christians in the US are true believers versus nominal Christians, and whether survey reports capture the difference. We also don't necessarily see what percentage of Christians are currently struggling with faith and we don't see what's causing that struggle. I imagine a fairly high percentage of Christians struggle with doubts and I imagine a high percentage of those doubts are caused by the problem of evil. Again, I'm just speculating here, and I'd need sociological data to have a good answer. It may be, for all I know, that even philosophically studied atheists and agnostics tend to reject / withhold belief in God for reasons other than the problem of evil (not enough evidence, theoretical costs, etc.)
• d) I'm aware that Graham Oppy, a leading defender of atheism within academic philosophy, does not believe that any argument from evil succeeds (meaning something like: succeeds in establishing the irrationality of belief in God). He instead uses theory analysis to defend atheism.
• e) Anecdotally, it nonetheless seems to me that the problem of evil is widely considered a formidable problem for belief in God. Often philosophers, including Oppy, will say that an accumulative case argument is the right kind of argument to give for and against God. But I see the problem of evil as driving the show when it comes to that accumulative case. It provides something of a limit or a ceiling. I'm aware that Nick Trakakis makes this point in his 2006 book The God Beyond Belief, that even arguments for God, like the design argument, are compatible with problem of evil, because strictly speaking the problem of evil doesn't say that God doesn't exist, only that a loving and powerful God doesn't. So there could be, as far as the problem of evil is concerned, a creator God, it will just turn out that this God is not loving and powerful.
• f) I'm convinced that there is at least one argument from evil that is sound and that my belief in its premises is justified.
• g) Here's where I take issue with Oppy's permissivism: I don't see how Oppy can say that there are no good arguments for God and yet say that belief in God is rational. Oppy might have in mind that what I refer to above as internalistic rationality is something theists have. I would agree with that. But I feel like I'm committed to (and I would say any confident atheist like Oppy is committed to) some kind of external irrationality of theism (in my case, in light of evil). When the theist says, as they must, that evil provides evidence for God, or does not provide any evidence against God, or provides merely outweighed evidence against God, I'm committed to the view that these are all mistakes. The problem of evil provides at least enough evidence to render belief in a perfect being irrational in the external sense. To my mind, it sounds like Oppy is saying something contradictory: there are no good arguments for God, and so there are no good reasons to be convinced that God exists, and yet it's rational to believe in God, and so there are good reasons to be convinced that God exists. Which is it? If I'm not mistaken Oppy would say (and Peter van Inwagen would say basically the same thing) that for an argument to succeed you need a neutral, rational, impartial person who is aware of all pertinent facts to be convinced of the argument. But a neutral, rational, impartial person who is aware of all pertinent facts need not be convinced of any argument from evil nor any argument for God. And so these arguments fail in that sense. But I take three issues with this: a) William Lane Craig's objection might succeed, which says that this standard of argument is so strong that it's self-refuting. Any argument in favor of this standard of success for arguments would itself not be able to convince a neutral, rational, impartial person who is aware of all pertinent facts, and so this argument for the standard would fail according to the standard. b) If it really is the case that a neutral, rational, impartial person who is aware of all pertinent facts would be convinced of no arguments for or against God, then I don't see why Oppy wouldn't consider himself an agnostic and why he wouldn't consider agnosticism the correct position. c) I don't think this theoretical person exists. There is no neutral, rational, impartial person who is aware of all pertinent facts. So it's an irrelevant standard of success. I would think that a better standard of success is the more basic kind, something like: an argument is successful when it is valid, has true premises, and belief in its premises can be justified. (Given Oppy's affirmation of truth as basic, I would think he would be attracted to a basic notion of success like this.) I imagine Oppy would say something to the effect of "theories precede arguments," meaning that atheism (and theism) is defensible first by theory analysis. Arguments are irrelevant until theories have been articulated. It's only once you have a theory that you can then analyze that theory and use arguments to show that the theory in question contains a contradiction and needs work done to restore its coherence. My reply to this would be that it's very difficult to articulate theories, and arguments are an essential tool that we use to build theories. Someone might not realize what their theoretical commitments are until they see an argument and realize that this argument forces them to update their commitments. On this view, there's a back-and-forth relationship between arguments and theories and it's not really true that one or the other comes first. Maybe we start with pre-theoretic concepts and use those to understand arguments we encounter, and then use those arguments to build a theory, and then use further arguments to refine the theory and build upon it. On this view, saying there are no good arguments for or against God just is to say there are no materials with which to build a respectable worldview that includes either atheism or theism at its center, which again would be to affirm a kind of agnosticism.
• h) I feel committed to this in part because I lost faith, and it's mysterious how I could have lost faith unless there were reasons causing me to do so. So I'm committed to the realness of these reasons. Even while I had faith, these reasons existed; I just wasn't fully aware or appreciative of them. (So this does sound like reasons-externalism. This makes sense: Good answers to why questions are good independent of anyone's awareness of the answer. The point of science and philosophy is to discover what's true, which involves discovering which theories have good or bad reasons for believing in them, which means discovering which answers to why questions are, given the goal of believing what's true about the world, accurate and devoid of mistakes.)
• i) When I really reflect on what caused me to lose faith, I suppose it's a combination of 1) I think the only two interesting worldviews are some kind of Christianity and some kind of naturalism, leaving the Christian God as the only God that interests me (in large part due to my past religious experience), and 2) I become convinced that the challenges to Christian belief were too numerous and severe, and that it's far more likely that some kind of evolutionary story about religion is true. The problem of evil is absolutely part of my conversion. (I call it a conversion and not a deconversion because I never converted to Christianity; I was Christian as soon as I could form memories, and I was from the start absolutely certain that God was real and that Christianity was true. But that certainty went away when I had an epiphany at age 12 that 1) I want God to exist and for Christianity to be true more than anything and 2) I never get what I want.)
• j) Life experiences first convinced me, by intuition, that the problem of evil succeeds through unanswered prayers and apparently gratuitous evils. When I started reading books and papers on evil and first approached the issue with an open mind, I concluded that the argument was successful – the intuition became more concrete.
• k) While I've been aware of the problem of evil as an argument against God since age 13, I didn't consider it to be a serious problem until I experienced evil first hand, and even then I defended my faith through various theodicies. I didn't officially lose faith until around age 26. The point is that if the reasons to be convinced by one or more arguments from evil are real, their reality is not obvious, and there can be all sorts of psychological barriers, or just simple ignorance, preventing someone from being convinced. My aforementioned desire for God to be real formed a deep bias in my case.

Summary:

• The problem of evil refers to the general idea that there is a rational tension between belief in God and evil.
• Arguments from evil attempt to demonstrate that this rational tension is real, and attempt to uncover the logic causing this tension.
• This rational tension can be explained in at least two different ways.
• In the first way, the tension consists in true premises that logically entail that God does not exist. Example: If God exists, there are no unjustified evils. But there are unjustified evils. So God doesn't exist. The person who affirms the two premises (and affirms the principles of propositional logic) but denies the conclusion would be irrational, meaning that they fail to understand that the conclusion follows from the premises by modus tollens. Relative to the goal of affirming truths and not affirming falsehoods, it's a mistake, a logical mistake, to affirm the premises but deny the conclusion of a valid argument. If someone affirms the truth of the premises, then this person is, apparently, in the business of affirming truth, in which case this person should affirm truths whose truth are preserved by a logical structure like modus tollens. 
• In the second way, the rational tension between God and evil can be described in terms of reasons. Reasons are answers to why questions and always begin, at least implicitly, with a reason marker, which is by default the word 'because' in English (though 'since' and 'for' are also used as reason markers). Reasons are connected to goals, successes, and failures. To meet a goal is a success while failing to meet a goal is a failure. Goals give us reasons for acting and believing. ("Why did you do that?" – "Because it furthered my goal.") Good reasons are correct answers to why questions. Bad reasons are incorrect answers to why questions. You can also simply lack a reason. The answer "Because it furthered my goal" can be true or false. Insofar as it's true, then it's a good reason. Insofar as it's false, it's a bad reason, a mistake.
• This notion of 'good' and 'bad' are in the sense of success and failure and not in the sense of leading to phenomenal goodness or badness. Someone could have a good reason in terms of success that is a bad reason in terms of maximizing happiness and avoiding pain. If someone has an evil goal, then success in that goal entails a failure with respect to the goal of making the world a better place. Often, success towards one goal means failure towards another goal (opportunity cost).
• Good reasons (correct answers to why questions) lead to success while bad reasons (incorrect answers to why questions) lead to failure (having no reason at all also leads to failure). To have a reason to do or believe something is to have an answer to a why question.
• Given the question "Why don't you believe in God?", the problem of evil provides an answer: "Because evil makes it highly unlikely that God exists." If it's true that evil makes it highly unlikely that God exists, then it's a good (correct) answer. The goal in this case is to believe what's true, or at least to believe what's true about the existence of God.
• In the first way, the rational person is the person who understands logical entailment and updates their beliefs accordingly. In the second way, the rational person is a reasonable person, a person disposed to give good answers to why questions.
• Both of these senses of 'rational' fit together, because a true answer to a why question obviously depends on truth, and the ability to see truth depends on one's ability to understand logical entailment.

Challenge to Christian Belief: The Problem of Relationship

Angel: God, the human is ready. How shall you customize their behavior? Their likes and dislikes? What will they want, and what will they do?

God: I am a God of relationship. As such, I will make them relational beings. They will be social in nature, and their greatest desire will be for love, and love will be their greatest virtue.

Angel: I am in awe of the beauty of what you say. How will they love? How will they know that they are loved? As relational beings, how will they relate?

God: You speak of what humans will one day call "love languages." Their love languages will be as follows:

They will love by sight.

They will love by sound, especially the sound of voice.

They will love by conversation, both written and auditory.

They will love by touch.

They will love by sensation, hugging, cuddling, shaking hands, and what humans will one day call "dapping."

Angel: What is that?

God: It is like a hand shake, except you clap your hand with theirs and try to make as loud a sound as you can.

Angel: Okay... Hands... those are the ends of the tubes at the top?

God: That's right. You will see what it's like when I send you to earth with a human body. You will freak out, but just tell yourself to not be afraid and you will calm down.

Angel: Got it.

God: Where was I? Right, how humans will relate.

They will love by giving compliments, advice, encouragement, and making each other laugh.

They will love by giving each other gifts.

They will love by spending time with each other and feeling each other's presence.

They will love by sacrificing for one another.

They will love by sharing knowledge.

They will love by sharing experiences and forming memories together.

They will love by supporting each other during hard times.

They will love by opening up to one another and displaying vulnerability and trust.

They will love by acts of kindness.

They will love by building things and working together on meaningful projects with a common goal.

Angel: How wonderful it is to hear you say these things! And as a God of love and relationship, will you love them, or only have them love each other?

God: Of course as a God of love I will love them.

Angel: Do you want them to know you love them?

God: As a God of relationship, of course I want them to know that I love them.

Angel: Given your desire for them to know that they are loved by you, and given their understanding of what it means to be loved, an understanding you yourself have given them, will you love them accordingly?

God: Of course, it will be as you say.

Angel: So if they love by sight, then they will be able to see you?

God: No, I will be invisible to them.

Angel: So if they love by sound, especially the sound of voice, will they hear your voice?

God: No, they will never hear me so much as say their name.

Angel: So if they love by conversation, both written and auditory, will you converse with them, either by writing or speaking to them?

God: No, I will hold no extemporaneous, back-and-forth conversation through text or speech with any human.

Angel: So if they love by touch, will you touch them?

God: No, I will have no body.

Angel: So if they love by sensation, by hugging and cuddling, will you hug or cuddle with any human?

God: I will have no body with which to do so.

Angel: So if they love by giving compliments, giving advice, giving encouragement, and by making each other laugh, will you do so?

God: I will give no compliments, no advice, no encouragement, and I will not make anyone laugh.

Angel: So if they love by giving each other gifts—and, I imagine, gifts tailored to the specific needs, personality, and circumstances of the person to indicate your thoughtfulness and understanding, making them feel seen and understood—will you give such gifts?

God: I mean, they can pray and ask for stuff.

Angel: Will it work?

God: Not even once.

Angel: So if they love by spending time with each other and feeling each other's presence, will you spend time with people and have them feel your presence?

God: Actually, they will pray to me and I will never respond in any way, shape, or form, and they will hear deafening silence and wonder whether I exist at all.

Angel: ...Okay...

So if they love by sacrificing for one another, will you sacrifice something to make your love known?

God: Yes. I will send my son to die for humanity.  

Angel: Okay. How is that a sacrifice on your part?

God: He will be the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity.

Angel: What? Okay, so you will die for humanity?

God: No, my son will die... and that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

Angel: ...Right. How is that a sacrifice on your part?

God: I am God.

Angel: How can you have a son if you don't—Whatever, let's move on. So if they love by sharing knowledge, will you share knowledge with them, such as fundamentally important truths relating to the foundations of logic, math, and science?

God: No, I will let them figure that out on their own.

Angel: I see. And you will grant them great intelligence to help them figure things out?

God: No, they will be dreadfully wrong about most things most of the time.

Angel: *Sigh* ... So if they love by sharing experiences and forming memories together, will you share experiences and form memories with any of them? Let me guess, no?

God: No.

Angel: Of course.

God: I am God.

Angel: Yep. You... sure are. So if they love by supporting each other during hard times, will you support them through hard times?

God: What, like the death of a loved one, poverty, natural disasters, war, disease, things like that?

Angel: Exactly!

God: Nope, I will let them struggle and writhe in pain and die.

Angel: Gizes kraist.

God: What was that?

Angel: It's... an expression angels use to express shock, disbelief, bafflement, things like that.

God: ...I like the sound of that.

Angel: ...Anyway, so if humans love by opening up to one another and displaying vulnerability and trust, will you open up to humans and be vulnerable with them, or at least let them be vulnerable with you?

God: I mean, they can always pray to me, but nothing will ever come of it.

Angel: ...

*Heavy sigh, switching to monotone voice* 

So if they love by acts of kindness will you display kindness through actions?

God: Not in an everyday kind of way. But I will send my son to die for them.

Angel: For what, exactly?

God: To wash away their sins.

Angel: Their sins... what?

God: So you know how when someone does something wrong, they need to die to make up for it?

Angel: ...No??

God: It's for that.

Angel: ...??

God: If they die in their sins, then they go to hell. Forever. A place of torture. So I will send my son to die for them, so they don't have to go to hell.

Angel: To what?! You created a place of eternal torture??

God: Yes, for the sinners.

Angel: So I ask about acts of kindness and you mention... committing the worst crime imaginable?

God: Justice demands it.

Angel: Says who?

God: Says me.

Angel: Why? Why not say something else, something that doesn't require eternal torture? Why not just write off debt like every other business and avoid the needless violence of human sacrifice?

God: I am God.

Angel: We're done here. Why would someone create creatures who relate in broad and specific ways and proceed to relate to them in exactly zero of those ways all while claiming to desire relationship with said creatures, I have no idea.

Ad hoc model of hell

Here's a way a finite hell might be able to make sense, even on hedonistic terms.

-Problem: it feels unjust to just let a moral monster into heaven. There is no difference between the fates of culprits and their victims. There is no way to separate the evildoers from their deeds, leading to distrust, hatred, unforgiveness, inability for assimilation.

-God is maximally socially intelligent and would understand perfectly that this cannot work. If you're going to reintegrate moral monsters into heaven, there has to be a process for this, a grand ceremony, a special ritual involving the drama of forgiveness and repentance.

-(God could just erase memories, but then what was the point of earth?)

-In hell, evil people experience the exact suffering that they caused others on earth.

-This allows for reconciliation in a number of ways:

-1) There is a difference maker between the fates of good people and evil people; we are not letting evil people get away with it

-Second, it fulfills the aspect of justice that we might call acknowledgement, or understanding; the evil person needs to acknowledge and understand the sheer evil of their actions; by experiencing the exact pain of their victims, they experience the evilness of their actions. You don't have to try to tell them or convince them that what they did was wrong, you directly show them the wrongness of their actions by forcing them to experience the pain that they caused.

-Third, the victim, knowing that the culprit understands the pain that they caused, now shares something in common with the culprit: a shared trauma, a shared pain, and a shared understanding of the evil that was caused.

-Fourth, the victim can forgive the culprit knowing that when the culprit apologizes, the apology is known to be sincere, because the victim knows that the culprit knows exactly the pain that they caused.

-This allows for reconciliation and forgiveness between moral monsters and their victims.

-This in turn allows for all persons to participate in eudaimonia, and not just people who happened to be initially good enough.

-This is better than annihilating the moral monster, because this way the victim also receives resolution. By annihilating the moral monster, you lose out on true resolution for the victim(s).

-This is better than annihilating the moral monster also because it does right by the moral monster; you don't make their lives retroactively absurd.

-This does right by maximizing eudaimonia by having an additional member of the eudaimonic system.

-This also requires a profound amount of virtue on the part of the victims, virtues pertaining to love and forgiveness and a relinquishing of hatred, pain, and protest.

-This means the torture of hell is smart. Instead of a dumb torture where the pain is meaningless, the pain comes explicitly from the harm the damned committed while on earth. The damned experience all and only the pain they caused others.

-Hell is temporary, as it lasts until you have gone through all the pain you caused others.

-This is hedonistically viable because it allows the damned to reintegrate harmoniously into a eudaimonic system, maximizing happiness.

The only problem with this model of hell is that it's totally ad hoc. There's no biblical evidence for it; there is biblical evidence against it, and it's not the orthodox model.

In fact, the plausibility of this model, insofar as it really is a plausible justification of hell, counts against Christianity exactly because Christianity fails to teach it. If Christianity fails to teach the most plausible model of hell, then that counts against Christianity.

This model is a plausible ethical model, meaning that its justification is plausible, though the idea that this hell is real is not plausible.

The point of this is to show that it's not necessarily the case that retributive punishment goes against a perfect being, or against hedonism.

The damned would not experience unbearable suffering in the sense that the damned would rather cease to exist than go through this suffering. It might not even be determined whether the damned are willing or not to undergo this experience. On some level, the damned might understand that while the pain is bad, the pain is for a good reason, and will eventually lead to eudaimonia. In fact, God could implant this background understanding into the damned mind to prevent the damned from experiencing unbearable suffering by giving them hope that eventually it will all work out.

Project: Intellectual virtue

"Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?" -Aristotle

(Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a, I.2, trans. W. D. Ross)

The truthseeker is a person who holds within their heart the following thought: I want to believe what's true. We start with a desire, the desire for truth, and the desire to be rid of false beliefs.

Should we have that desire? That's a separate question.

Do we have this desire because we are rational creatures, suggesting that anyone without this desire is irrational? That's a separate question. 

What does it even mean for something to be true, or for something to be a desire? Again, separate questions. 

Is truth intrinsically good? Should we seek truth without discretion, or should we only care about certain kinds of truth? Still, separate questions.

To keep things focused, let us focus on the desire itself. If someone wants to increase the likelihood that their beliefs are true, how do they do this? If someone wants to avoid being stuck in false beliefs, how do they do this? This is the question I'm interested in.

By aiming for truth, we increase the likelihood that we find it. Here is then the core question: What does it look like to aim for truth? When a person aims for truth, what will this person sound like when they speak? What will their mindset be? What will they spend their time doing? What practices and habits will they form? What does aiming for truth entail for one's own psychology, personality, and behavior?

Philosophy, as a discipline for seeking the most fundamental truths, begins with psychology: the psychology of the kind of person who cares, and could care, about truth.

Questions:

• What is virtue?
• What is intellectual virtue?
• What are the intellectual virtues?
• How do we know when something is virtuous or vicious?
  
• Does intellectual virtue provide a foundation for seeking truth? Or is it part of the foundations of truthseeking? Does all rational inquiry begin with virtue?
• Does intellectual virtue provide examples of true 'should' statements? Ex. You should be passionate about truth, you should be intellectually brave, you should not be intellectually lazy, you should be able to disagree well, etc.
• What does virtue have to do with epistemology? What is virtue epistemology?
• How does virtue relate to epistemic hypocrisy?
• How does virtue relate to the problem of being epistemically stuck?
• How does virtue relate to how we can tell whether someone is a genuine truthseeker?
• If someone appears to not exhibit intellectual virtue, then how should we react to their truth claims?
• How does intellectual virtue relate to intelligence?
• How does intellectual virtue relate to rationality? 
• How does intellectual virtue relate to reason, reasons, and a priori knowledge?

Bibliography:

• Linda Zagzebski: Virtues of the Mind (book)
• T. Ryan Byerly: Introducing Logic and Critical Thinking (book)
• Michael Huemer: Knowledge, Reality, and Value (book)
• Joe Schmid: The Majesty of Reason (book)
• Josh Rasmussen: How Reason Can Lead to God (book)
• Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (W. D. Ross translation)
• Philip Dow: Virtuous Minds (book)
• Richard Swinburne (quote) 

Degree complete 🥳

I have officially completed my Bachelor's in Philosophy from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. I already had a Bachelor's degree in Business Admin – Accounting from Wichita State, so my general eds carried over. I end with a Philosophy GPA of 4.0 and a cumulative GPA of 3.73.

What does a 4.0 GPA in a philosophy Bachelor's mean? By itself, almost nothing. It depends on the quality of the program and what the student actually accomplished. There are only three (slightly) noteworthy things in my case:

1) I took a metaphysics class that was not required for graduation. This is not a class the school teaches – I had to request this class and I selected the textbook for it – Alyssa Ney's introduction to metaphysics. It was guided very well by Rob Byer, a PhD student of Linda Zagzebski (I'll be doing a deep dive on one of her books starting... today in fact).

2) I took a philosophy of mind class that was not required for graduation.

If you were to ask me what an undergraduate of philosophy must have under their belt by the time they graduate, I would say (among other things): Advanced Logic, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Mind. I was on track to graduate with none of those, which I found unacceptable. At least I was able to get 2/3.

3) I won the first annual essay contest with my essay "The Logical Problem of Hell." I've posted an updated version of that essay here: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-logical-problem-of-hell.html

Since I've written this, I think there are a lot of problems with this argument and it would take a lot of work to sort them out. I'll post at some point a follow-up looking at those. Maybe the argument is salvageable.

One reason why I say a Bachelor's in philosophy means almost nothing, at least from this program, is because it would have been much easier to not take those two optional classes, and I would have still had the same degree with the same GPA. So GPA doesn't tell the full story, and really it doesn't tell much of anything. Someone could have a Bachelor's in philosophy without having taken advanced logic or intro to mind or intro to metaphysics, which is crazy to me. At least the program required epistemology and ethics.

In this case it's a moot point because the philosophy program at Fort Hays has been terminated; I'm one of the last graduates. Philosophy classes are still being taught to cover gen ed requirements, and I believe they still have a Master's program that requires philosophy courses (it's not a Master's in philosophy, but something else). I guess this is a known trend – the eradication of humanities departments in small colleges, with philosophy high on the chopping block.

I don't see how things could be any other way. As demand for philosophy classes goes down (as they don't lead to jobs), supply goes down.

I've heard people say that it's better to use that money and time to just buy philosophy books and read them. The advantage of formal courses is that 1) Professors introduce you to authors, books, and papers that you wouldn't have been introduced to otherwise; 2) Professors offer student hours in which you can ask questions to check your understanding; 3) Classes force you to be motivated to push and get work done using deadlines, getting you into the habit of what it feels like to push yourself to get work done on a good pace; 4) Classes force you to learn how to research properly; 5) Professors provide feedback on essays.

If you don't care about any of that then it's not worth it. But if you want to increase your skill specifically at essay writing in philosophy, then it is worth it if you can afford it (and many people can't – neither the upfront costs nor the opportunity costs).

Really, it just comes down to who you are. There's a Youtube clip of an exasperated Jon Blow getting asked the question, "Should I make video games?", and he basically says that if you have to ask the answer is no. A true game dev doesn't ask the question; they just make games. This generalizes; someone truly passionate about philosophy doesn't ask whether they should pursue it; they just do, come hell or high water.

Good/bad (Value) vs good/bad (Success)

Introduce a pluralism about badness/goodness. Good (Value) refers to intrinsic goods, extrinsic goods, and saving goods. These are objective, undeniable, judgment-independent, and mistake-making in a non-goal sense.

That is, if a certain intrinsic good takes place, and someone denies that it takes place, then the denier is wrong. They are mistaken. And they are mistaken regardless of anyone's judgment as to whether they are mistaken. They are mistaken relative to a non-goal fact.

A failure, by contrast, is a mistake relative to a goal fact. Epistemic mistakes are failures, though in some cases they can be bad too. For example, it's bad to believe p without evidence that p. This is bad (failure), and may also be bad (value).

A mistake is to regard p as true when p is not true, where 'regarding' is some minimal doxastic attitude.

So just as physical facts (e.g. the earth is round) are mistake-making in a non-relative sense, value facts are mistake-making in a non-relative sense. Value facts include facts about happiness and pain, which are instantiations of intrinsic good and intrinsic evil. Depending on philosophy of mind, value facts are physical facts. Or you could say there are goal facts and non-goal facts (world facts). Both physical facts and value facts are world facts.

Good / bad (success) is when something is a success / failure with respect to some goal. 

If I write 'snuflowre', that's a mistake relative to the goal of spelling 'sunflower' correctly. Snuflowre is bad (success) spelling, but not necessarily bad (value).

The problem with only having value facts is that there are epistemic facts that are undeniable mistakes, but they don't necessarily constitute extrinsic or depriving evils. So we have to introduce a second kind of badness.

This seems to cut against monoaxiology. There is, in fact, more than one kind of badness / being wrong. Failure is not necessarily intrinsically bad, extrinsically bad, or a depriving bad. Depending on the system, failure can be intrinsically, extrinsically, and/or a saving good.

Argument for and against 'nothing matters'

When you take the limit
And the limit is infinite
And the limit is infinite
We diminish
To nothing we finish

When perception is reality
And forever we perceive nothing
We never existed
We never existed

-Lyrics from a song I wrote in January 2017, "From the Void"

Scenario 1: You never come into being. An infinite amount of time passes where you have no subjectivity.

Scenario 2: You come into being and then eventually die, and you stay dead forever. An infinite amount of time passes where you have no subjectivity.

In both cases "you" spend an infinite amount of time with no subjectivity. If we made a pie chart showing the percentage of time spent with subjectivity and without, both charts would look identical.

So, there is no real difference between Scenario 1 and 2.

If there is no real difference between Scenario 1 and 2, then nothing matters.

So, nothing matters.

Response: It's true that as time approaches infinity, the finite time spent alive approaches zero. But zero is a limit, never truly reached. So the time spent alive is never actually zero.

More importantly, while we are alive, we are certain that we have experiences; we are certain that we are existing and thus certain that we will have existed. So not only is it false that there is no difference between Scenario 1 and 2, it's certainly false.

The real moments of real flourishing (or suffering) that real people really have—that's the difference, and just as we are certain of those moments, we are certain of that difference. So not only is 'nothing matters' false, it's false with certainty.

If you cannot prove that worst possible fates are impossible, then you should not have children

Informal argument:

1) I cannot prove that our world is not fundamentally bad.

(A fundamentally bad world is one that generates fundamentally bad lives. A fundamentally bad life is a life in which the person living it would rather die than continue living but is forced to continue living forever.)

(A maximally fundamentally bad world is one that generates many lives where 100% are fundamentally bad. A minimally fundamentally bad world is one that generates exactly one fundamentally bad life, or generates many lives where some minimal percentage above 0% are fundamentally bad.)

2) So, for all I know, our world is at least minimally fundamentally bad.

3) So, for all I know, some or all of us are living fundamentally bad lives in which we will survive death and go on to live forever while wishing for death.

4) So, for all I know, any number of my children (if I were to have them) will go on to live fundamentally bad lives.

5) The most evil thing you can do to a person is cause them to live a fundamentally bad life.

6) So having children is risking the most evil thing you can do to someone.

7) Knowingly taking an evil risk is itself evil.

8) So having children knowing it is risking the most evil thing you can do to someone is itself one of the most evil things you can do.

Douglas Portmore on Philosophy and Moral Disagreement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBq-2vpbS60

8:15 - 13:24

"Philosophy is unique as a discipline in that you do not have to accept any disciplinary assumptions or methods in order to count as doing philosophy. You can do philosophy so long as you are investigating certain questions like whether we have free will, whether there are moral facts, and you don't have to accept Rene Descartes' method of doubt or foundationalism or coherentism or X-phi or any other particular methodology to count as doing philosophy. You also don't have to accept any kind of particular assumptions, like you don't have to accept classical logic, or the law of non-contradiction, or the principle of bivalence to count as being a philosopher.

Now that's different from other disciplines. You don't count as doing science if you don't employ the scientific method. You don't count as doing science if you don't accept or assume that there's a world that exists independently of our perceiving it, a world that we can learn about via our empirical observations. And that's why we don't teach creationism in science class, and we don't look at the argument from design in science class. To count as science you have to do empirical investigation and creationism doesn't involve doing that kind of empirical work, and the argument from design for the existence of God doesn't do that kind of empirical work, so it just doesn't count as science.

Same thing with mathematics: if you don't accept Euclid's axioms and you don't accept classical logic as the method of inferring certain theorems and postulates from those axioms using classical logic, then you just don't count as doing geometry.

So philosophy is unique in that in order to count as doing philosophy you don't have to accept any particular assumptions or even particular methodology. And this is why philosophers don't converge on views in the way that scientists and mathematicians do. And this is why, with respect to philosophical disagreement, you don't have a resolution of these philosophical questions in the way that you have a resolution in mathematics and in science. . . . 

Why is there so much moral disagreement? Because we do moral inquiry via philosophical inquiry. And when we do philosophical inquiry, we are not required to start from any certain assumptions, and we are not required to follow any particular methodology. . . . 

So we've had three explanations for moral disagreement: One explanation is the disagreement is due to the fact that there are no moral facts for us to agree on. The second explanation is that although there are moral facts for us to agree upon, we fail to agree because some people are just ignorant of those facts. And then a third explanation is that the reason why there is so much moral disagreement is because moral disagreement is done in the mode of philosophical inquiry, and the nature of philosophical inquiry is such that it doesn't result in convergence on certain particular views.

I think the third is the best explanation, and to see that, notice that we don't find that there's any greater disagreement about moral issues among philosophers than there are about other philosophical questions among philosophers. So we find that the kind of disagreement we have with respect to morality is the same as the kind of disagreement we have with respect to whether there's free will . . . how to solve the mind-body problem, and so on and so forth. So it's no surprise then that we find that there's so much moral disagreement . . ."