Mitigated Pessimism and the Meaning of Life

The central question of the meaning of life is: why live?

People clearly do live. So people clearly must have reasons for living, something causing them to get out of bed and to put one foot in front of the other. We can then ask the descriptive question and the normative question:

 

Descriptive: What are the actual reasons people have for getting out of bed and putting one foot in front of the other?

 

Normative: What reasons should people have for getting out of bed and putting one foot in front of the other?

 

The descriptive question is empirical, and as such requires survey data to answer. But the answers are so obvious that such data may not be needed. People live because: 1) they have an inner biological urge to live; 2) because the alternative, choosing to die, sounds horrible; 3) because they are curious about human history and want to bear witness to how things unfold; 4) because they have some kind of addiction and they can't wait to get their next fix; 5) because they have some kind of obsession or vision and feel compelled to work toward satisfying the obsession or realizing the vision; 6) because they feel excited and joyful about life due to their children, other family members, friends, or wider community who need and/or want them and make them feel welcomed, included, and like they belong; 7) because while they do not necessarily feel excited or joyful about life, they do feel morally obligated to live for the sake of those who want and/or need them to live, such as children or other family members and friends (or for the sake of some other perceived moral obligation); 8) because they feel excited by their religion and that they have a God-given purpose in life; 9) because while they do not necessarily feel excited by their religion or that they have a God-given purpose, they do feel obligated to live for religious reasons and that God would be wrathful toward them were they to reject their earthly life; 10) because their job and/or hobbies give them a sense of excitement and purpose; 11) because life is fun, exciting, dramatic, interesting, and so on, and being dead sounds really boring in comparison.

 

Certainly, everyone lives for some combination of the above reasons.

 

The next question is: should we be living for these reasons? Are these good reasons to live?

If the answer is no, and there are no objectively good reasons to live, and the choice to live is thus purely arbitrary, then life is absurd. Life is absurd when there are no truly good reasons to live and yet you live anyway as if there are truly good reasons to live.

If the choice to live is arbitrary, then there would be nothing wrong with flipping a coin and living if it comes up heads and choosing to die if it comes up tails. And yet we strongly feel that that would be an insane thing to do. We feel strongly that living for the above reasons is perfectly rational, details pending. Certainly, the smartest people in the world choose to live, and they choose to live for some combination of the above reasons. So if that combination of the above reasons is good for the smartest people in the world, why wouldn't they be good for you or me? (To refute this point you'd have to show that self-death is more common among the smartest humans, which, if I'm not mistaken, cannot be shown because it's not true. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if self-death was more common among people who fail at life, and that life failure was more rare among the smartest people, and thus that self-death was less common among the smartest people. Though, there are likely conflicting factors. Smarter people might disproportionately feel higher pressure and expectations, causing despair.)

If you allow for objective reasons, and if you further grant that there are objectively good reasons to live, then life is not absurd, at least not for those for whom those objective reasons apply. Life is absurd for those who live and yet have no good reasons to live, or who have good reasons to live but better reasons to die.

People will say that "the absurd" refers to our demand for life to be meaningful, and life's subsequent failure to give us any meaning. The terms 'meaning' and 'meaningful' are vague, so let's put it this way: ..."the absurd" refers to our demand for reasons to live and life's subsequent failure to give us reasons to live.

 

But Camus also describes the absurdity of life as related to contradiction, juxtaposition, ridiculousness, and futility. At the heart of it, absurdity is the contradiction between life and death. Life commands us to live by letting us be born, and validates our existence. But then life contradicts itself and commands us to die and thereby invalidates our existence. With existence comes glory and with death, humiliation. Life conspires to both glorify and humiliate us. We naturally assume there is a good reason for our existence, only to discover that there really isn't. We naturally assume that there is a good reason for death, only to discover that there really isn't. Religion very nicely explains both the purpose of life and death (at least, Christianity nicely explains this, at least at first until you start questioning things and it all falls apart). But with the discovered falsity of all religions, we are left with an indifferent universe that couldn't care less whether you were born or whether you died. It turns out that our lives and deaths are purely the result of the chaos of random particles smashing together in ways governed by laws of nature that are there because they have to be because that's just the way things must be. Often, people die shortly after being born, accentuating the pointlessness and stupidity of it all. When life feels like one big joke, that's when you know you've encountered the apparent absurdity of life.

 

If the absurdity of life is a problem, then it is a psychological problem relating to a person's personal calculation over whether the reasons for them to live outweigh the reasons for them to not live. If a person calculates that they have overwhelmingly better reasons to live than not, then there is no problem. If a person calculates that they have roughly equal reasons to live and die, then they will struggle, even agonize, over the choice to live.

 

If you want to make the absurdity of life a philosophical problem, then you have to argue that because there are no objectively good reasons to live, everyone is failing to live on the basis of reason. Therefore, if someone wanted to live their life according to reason, which sounds like a very rational thing to want, then that person really shouldn't live their life at all. And yet they do. And it's this contradiction of living as if you have good reasons to live when objectively you do not that amounts to the philosophical problem of absurdity. But if we can argue that the reasons we live for are objectively good (which, we can), then the philosophical problem is solved. There is no contradiction.

 

On the other hand, if a person believes there are no objective reasons of any kind, then there are no objectively good reasons to live or not live (or do or not do anything), then this should result in a total paralysis of choice for the person who aims to live according to what reason says. Or, if this person says we needn't live according to what reason says, and instead must live according to what we want, then whether a person ought to choose to live or choose to die is incredibly simple: do whatever you want for whatever personal reasons you have, and there is no right or wrong answer. (And this, says the antirealist, is not meant to be taken as a command. If antirealism is true, there are no true moral commands. So as far as the antirealist is concerned, you may do whatever you want for whatever personal reasons you have, or you may choose to act contrary to your wants for whatever reason. Though, inevitably, everyone acts according to some desire of some kind.)

 

The person who insists that the absurdity of life is a real problem, they might have something like the following in mind. Consider the flip side to the central question of the meaning of life: why die?

 

For a person to choose to die they must be in the throes of some kind of despair. They must be pessimistic about their ability to maximize flourishing by living, and therefore believe that the next best thing, minimizing suffering, requires them to end their life. I've argued elsewhere that choosing death implies unbearable suffering. Unbearable suffering then, of one kind or another, explains why someone should choose to die rather than live.

 

We can divide the reasons to die, call them factors of despair, into three categories: broad factors, regional factors, and local factors.

 

Broad factors are those tragic facts about life that are deeply built into the nature of life. These problems can never be solved. The fact we live in a fundamentally neutral world, which is infinitely disappointing for the person who expected our world to be fundamentally good, is a broad factor of despair. So are factors pertaining to death, the imperfection of human nature, the inevitability of pain, ignorance, and so on. To be broadly pessimistic is to be skeptical about the goodness of reality as a whole.

 

Regional factors are those tragic facts about the lives of those around you. These are the tragic stories on the news, stories of horror, war, murder, and so on. They don't affect your life other than the fact that they give you an idea of the kind of world you live in, namely, a bad one, and thereby depress you. To be regionally pessimistic is to be skeptical about the goodness of the lives, or future lives, of other people.

 

Finally, local factors are those tragic facts about your own life. To be locally pessimistic is to be skeptical about the goodness of your life or future.

 

There is the goodness and badness of your life, the goodness and badness of the lives of those around you (in your family, city, country, or planet, depending on how far you zoom out), and, zooming all the way out, the goodness and badness of reality itself. There is the goodness or badness of these things in the short term, and in the long term.

 

The person who argues that the absurdity of life is an objective problem is saying that because we ought to be skeptical about the goodness of reality as a whole and about the goodness of our planet, this is cause for us to feel despair.

The distinction between broad, regional, and local factors of despair might not matter at all, because really there are only two things that matter: your psychology and your circumstances. If your circumstances are such that you are aware of the suffering of millions of people, and your psychology is such that you cannot ignore this suffering, then you will suffer too. If your circumstances are such that reality as a whole is tragic because everyone dies in the end, and your psychology is such that you cannot ignore the fundamental tragedy of life, then you will suffer. If your circumstances are such that you are suffering from poverty and disease, and your psychology is such that this bothers you, then you will suffer.

The question of absurdity then is whether we should be bothered by something we are not bothered by. If someone isn't bothered by the fundamental tragedy of life, and if they aren't bothered by the wretchedness of our world, and they only care about the details of their own life, then does that mean this person is irrational, or insensitive, or small minded?

 

I don't think so. If someone is locally optimistic while broadly and regionally pessimistic, then they can acknowledge the badness of reality and the badness of the world while acknowledging the goodness of the details of their life. Such a person can be rightly optimistic about their ability to flourish.

 

The worry is that a genuine truthseeker will be sensitive to the badness of reality and the badness of our world, and will thereby feel despair. We are rationally obligated to be depressed, says this line of thinking. You can only avoid despair by burying your head in the sand, by ignoring reality, and by living according to a noble lie.

 

But that's not right. If you zoom out, you will see a hopeless picture of walking corpses living on the edge of societal collapse in a world that will likely soon become uninhabitable on a planet that will eventually be destroyed in a universe that will eventually die, all part of a reality that is fundamentally indifferent to your suffering and absurd in its simultaneous insistence on your life and death.

 

I grant this, and to this extent I grant that pessimism is true.

 

But if you zoom in, you see people's faces and futures, fears and failures, pains and joys, laughter and life, and the many remaining days of their lives that they still have yet to live. You see the undeniable goodness of their happiness, the undeniable badness of their pain, and the undeniable superiority of their happiness over their pain, and thus the undeniable meaningfulness of making their lives better for the time being.

 

The truthseeker is sensitive to regional and global truths, but they are just as sensitive to local truths as well. Our experiences are undeniably real and true. Nothing is more real than pain.

 

So if a truthseeker lets the broad truths of life dominate their mind, they will come out deeply pessimistic and in despair. But if they let the local truths of life dominate their mind, they will find plenty of meaning both in terms of the flourishing to be maximized and the suffering to be minimized.

 

So the philosophical problem of absurdity returns to a psychological problem. If you find yourself living in the moment and being sensitive to local truths, letting the truth of the present dominate your mind, then broad factors of despair won't become local. But if you find yourself incapable of ignoring the broad truths of life, and you can't help but let the big picture dominate your mind, then broad pessimism will become local. You should be skeptical of your ability to flourish if your ability to flourish depends on your circumstances and your psychology, and your circumstances are such that you are living in an infinitely disappointing world and your psychology is such that you can't get over the fact that the world is infinitely disappointing.

 

People say that you shouldn't worry about those things beyond your control. If that's right, then local factors are all that really matter. But that's just the issue: if someone's psychology is such that they cannot help but have their minds dominated by broad truths, then that is a local fact. And so really there are only local factors of despair.

 

The problem of absurdity then is person-relative. It's no different than other local problems, like that of health, poverty, ignorance, stupidity, a lack of opportunities in life, and so on.

 

Most people's minds are, for obvious reasons, dominated by local factors, as that's what's right in front of them day to day, that's what their survival depends on, and that's what they can control. But I don't see how someone could be faulted for being highly sensitive to the broader facts of life. Practically speaking, they might be worse off, but if the person in question has local factors of despair anyway, then it's tempting to look toward life as a whole for some sign of hope. If it's despair all the way down, then the solution for this person is to choose death. But this will not apply to the vast majority of people, who are rightly locally optimistic.

Two short clips vs William Lane Craig

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PDSNfzJBZKE

Here Craig defends God's command of the mass killing of Canaanites, including Canaanite children.

There are obvious consequentialist reasons why a good God would never command the horrific commandments of the Old Testament. But even on virtue ethics, God should be disturbed by the fact that his followers would have the character such that they would be willing and able to kill children. And on deontology, God is treating the Canaanites (and other enemy tribes) as means to ends (God's glory, God's justice, letting his chosen people know that God favors them) rather than ends unto themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3-afEhw7c0

This is about the "Low Bar Bill" controversy. Here Craig backpedals on what he said about Christianity being worth believing in even if there were only one in a million chance of it being true. In context, this is Craig's conversion story, where he converts to Christianity at 16 years old. So I would think that Craig would say something to the effect of: That's what I believed then, but now I believe that it would not be reasonable, or even psychologically possible, to believe in a worldview if you believe there really were only a one in a million chance for that worldview to be true. And then he would go on to say that Christianity is very likely true. Maybe Craig would say this if questioned on it.

But bizarrely, he doesn't give this clarification, and in fact says something even more confusing. He says: "And so for me I was saying that, really if there was any sort of reasonable chance of believing in Christianity, it was worth it, in view of the promise that it holds out and the tremendous benefit of knowing God and finding eternal life." (I take it he means reasonable chance of Christianity being true. "Reasonable chance of believing" doesn't make sense.)

Does Craig think that a one in a million chance is a reasonable chance? What odds would Craig give rival worldviews, like atheistic naturalism? Surely, a number of worldviews must add up to 100% for Craig, right? (At least, worldviews that roughly correspond to worldviews defended by various authors on earth.) Unless Craig thinks there is a yet-to-be-discovered worldview that will dwarf all current worldviews in probability, then this is right, and obviously as a Christian surely he would put Christianity at 100% or at least very high. 

Elsewhere I've seen him refuse to give such a percentage. I believe this happens in his debate against Kevin Scharp. Looking it up... Well, the transcript doesn't show that exactly (https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-there-evidence-for-god), but Craig seems to think that you need at least 51% confidence to believe in something:

"If you think it’s more probable than not, if you think this is more probably true than false, I would guess I would say that is enough for belief." (Now, Craig has just recently released his Volume 1 of his Systematic Theology in which he discusses belief and faith. So he may have updated views. I'll see if I can get my hands on a copy and return to this topic.)

So for Craig, a one in a million chance would not be anywhere near sufficient confidence for belief. And yet for Craig, belief is required for saving faith. (See: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/can-an-agnostic-be-a-christian)

There are a number of confusing items here, so let's take them one at a time.

First, Craig says that you can be an agnostic and a Christian. Yet, in the same post, he says that saving faith implies belief. That's a contradiction.

Second, most Christians would not consider you to be a Christian if you were agnostic. If your answer to Jesus' resurrection and/or God's existence is "maybe" or "I don't know," it's really hard to consider you to be "baptized in the Holy Spirit" or "regenerated" or "a new creation in Christ," or a "Child of God," or any spiritual term describing a saved Christian.

Third, arguably faith requires more than mere belief, but something closer to certainty.

Fourth, Craig says Kierkegaard and Karl Barth both were agnostic and yet "personally knew God." That doesn't make any sense.

Fifth, Craig says you can believe something and have your belief be rational even if the belief is not justified by argument. I think that's right, because we rely on foundational beliefs in order to even be capable of making an argument. These pre-argument beliefs cannot be supported by argument without circular reasoning, and I reject circular reasoning. Craig mentions phenomenal conservatism, which is a form of foundationalism which says it's rational to believe something if it seems true to you, provided there are no defeaters. There are defeaters for Christian belief, many of them, so it's weird for Craig to offer phenomenal conservatism as a way to justify Christian belief apart from arguments. Plantinga's properly basic belief also requires an absence of defeaters, which Christianity doesn't have. I don't like "warranted true belief" as a model of knowledge anyway, preferring explanationism or infallibilism.

Sixth, if Craig thinks Christian belief is properly basic apart from arguments, then why would he call Kierkegaard and Barth agnostics? If they personally knew God then they had belief that was properly basic and thus rational despite not having arguments.

Seventh, if Christian belief can be justified apart from arguments, then why care about the probabilities of Christian belief at all? Why not say, "Yes, there is only a one in a million chance that Christianity is true. Doesn't matter. I don't need arguments. Evidentialism is false." Or say: "Christian belief cannot be one in a million because I have a properly basic belief that it's true and there are no defeaters." Or if a belief's being only one in a million counts as a defeater, then on Craig's own view it would not be rational to believe in Christianity.

On the goodness of an infinitely good sacrifice

Christians believe sacrificial love is a good thing. Indeed, sacrificial love is apparently so good that it justifies the horrors we see on earth. Without evils, there would be no opportunity for sacrificial love (along with many other virtues). So, evils are necessary to enable sacrificial love.

 

I think this is stupid, and here's why.

 

Imagine God is a sadist. He loves playing with creatures like they are toys. One day he comes to you and says, I will send you to hell for eternity. You will wish for death every day and will be unable to die. In return, all other humans will go to heaven, where they will be high on life forever. They will have no idea of your sacrifice, because you shouldn't sacrifice yourself for the sake of your own glory, but for the sake of the people for whom you are being sacrificed.

 

Or, you can choose to do the selfish thing. You will go to purgatory forever, and everyone else will go to hell forever. But, you have to live with yourself, knowing what you have done. However, purgatory is not hell, so if you wish, you can choose to die.

 

If you sacrifice yourself, then you perform an infinitely good sacrifice. Sacrificial love does not get any better than this. (We could imagine you sacrificing yourself for the sake of an infinite number of persons, but set that aside.)

 

Question: Is the goodness of such infinite sacrificial love worth being in hell forever?

 

It's hard to see how it could be. If you choose to save yourself, then you are infinitely selfish. But what's so bad about being infinitely selfish? It's not like you are being tortured forever. If you choose to be sacrificed, you get to enjoy having a clean conscience. But if your reward for having a clean conscience is suffering so bad that you wish for death but can never die, then it's hard to see how having a clean conscience is worth it.

 

Compared to a worst possible fate, any other bad fate is by definition better. So the bad fate of being an evil person or a selfish person, as bad as it is, by definition cannot be as bad as suffering a worst possible fate.

If God's aim is to get you to understand just how deep his love is for you, and that's why he is incarnating to sacrifice himself on your behalf, there is a much, much, much better way for God to show his love: by talking to you, by saving you from your unfortunate circumstances, by healing you and your loved ones, by interacting with you instead of being hidden, by giving you a life worth living. The whole earth thing is just a giant waste of time. Even worse, we conclude that there cannot be a loving God because of our understanding of love (and God does nothing to change this understanding) and because of the evils of earth (and God does nothing to prevent or cure these evils).

 

The only thing that matters is conscious experience – the real experiences real people really have. Magical goods are worthless. If your axiology leads to the justification of eternal conscious torment, then your axiology is clearly mistaken.

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

That All Shall Be Saved (2019), 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. It did in fact surprise his parents, though, as they had not realized until then that he had never before consciously absorbed the traditional Christian picture. Now that he had, 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.