On Behalf of Cleanthes: Hume’s Problem of Evil

“The whole earth” contended Philo, one of the three characters, together with Demea and Cleanthes in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, “is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindle among all living creatures.”

In part 10, Philo and Demea contended against Cleanthes’ idea of God. They laid out the problem from undeniable pain and suffering. Philo listed fear, anxiety, terror, hunger, distress, agony and horror among other similar bad things that we face from the moment we enter into this world. He said,

Consider that innumerable race of insects, which either are bred on the body of each animal, or flying about infix their stings on him. These insects have others still less than themselves, which torment them. And thus on each hand, before and behind, above and below, every animal is surrounded by enemies, which incessantly seek his misery and destruction.(Hume 1991, 153)

On top of natural evils, the misery and destruction inflected by animals to man, Philo unceasingly pressed on to add moral evils; “Man is the greatest enemy of man. Oppression, injustice, contempt, contumely, violence, sedition, war, calumny, treachery, fraud; by these they mutually torment each other”(ibid 154) Demea joined Philo, as he too fired a list of horrors we face. He said,

Were a stranger to drop, on a sudden, into the world, I would show him a specimen of its ills, an hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strowed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow. (ibid 155)

According to Philo and Demea, Cleanthes’ concept of God, namely a God resembling morally good human beings, seems very unlikely to be true, since good human beings would want to stop or prevent such amount of pain and suffering. Philo reminded Cleanthes what he judged to be unanswered Epicurus’(ca. 342- 270 BC.) old questions. He asked Cleanthes,

Is he[God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but, not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?(ibid 157)

According to Hume qua Philo, pain and suffering cast doubt that a wholly loving and maximal perfect being with respect to power exists.

How could Cleanthes have responded? He was probably familiar with Epicurus’ questions as quoted in Lactantius’ (ca. 260 – ca. 349) Patrologia Latina, 7, 121:

God either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or he is able, and unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able; or he is both willing and able. If he is willing and able, he is feeble, which is not in accordance with character of God; if he is able and unwilling he is malicious, which is equally at variance with God; if he is neither willing nor able, he is both malicious and feeble and therefore not God; if he is both willing and able, which is alone suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does he not remove them? (Aherm 1971, 2)

Since Hume did not give him the last words, I pondered how, if I were Cleanthes, would I have began my answer to Demea’s and Philo’s objection. Unlike, Cleanthes, I hold to a revised Anselmian concept of God, viz., “a person who is aliquid quo nihil maius aut aequaliter magnum cogitari possit. ” (Inwagen 2006: 158)

God, if exists, is a morally perfect being with maximal excellence with respect to power, thus able and willing to remove pain and suffering. Why He does not remove them, I do not know. But what I know is that it is possible that God has morally good reason(s) not to remove them.

If it is possible, not necessarily true, that God have morally good reason(s) not to remove them, then pain and suffering do not necessarily cast doubts that a wholly loving and maximal perfect being with respect to power exists.

On behalf of Cleanthes, I would have asked Demea and Philo: Is it possible that God could have morally good reason(s) not to remove this copious amount of pain and suffering?

Bibliography:

Ahern,  M. B.(1971)  The, Problem of Evil. Routledge & Kegan Paul: London.

Hume, David (1991) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, publish first in 1779. I used  Standely Tweyman’s ed.  Routledge: London and New York.

Inwagen, Peter van (2006) The Problem of Evil. Oxford Press Inc., New York.

The Beast Falls: The Cold Death Of Deductive Problem Of Evil

In part I, The Beast Rises: The Deductive Problem of Evil, I introduced the logical problem of evil as defended by Hume and Mackie. In this second part I presented analytical Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s response, reception and status of logical problem evil in contemporary philosophy of religion.

Unlike the traditional responses of the problem of evil, theodicies, which attempted to give specific reasons that would justify a wholly good omnipotent God to permit evil, Plantinga offered a defense that does not provide any specific reasons but a possible, not necessarily true, proposition that will show that God and evil are logically compatible.

Plantinga produced his proposition as follows:

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely
perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being
equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good. (Plantinga 1974: 30)

Adding Plantinga’s propositions:

3b. It was not within God’s power to create a world containing moral good without creating one containing moral evil.

3c. God created a world containing moral good.

Proposition 4. Evil exist follows logically from 1-3, 3b and 3c showing that Mackie’s claim that the existence of God and evil are in logical contradiction, is false. Simply put, Plantinga showed that:

a. God is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly good.

b. God creates a world containing evil and has a good reason for doing so. (Plantinga 1974: 26)

After Plantinga’s case Mackie admitted and surrendered the logical problem of evil. He acknowledged,

[P]roblem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another [… God] might not eliminate evils, even though it was logically possible to do so and though he was able to do whatever is logically possible, and was limited only by the logical impossibility of having the second-order good without the first-order evil. (Mackie 1982: 145)

William L. Rowe, in American Philosophy Quarterly, not only confessed but also pointed to Alvin Plantinga’s God, Freedom and Evil 1974 work p. 29-59. He wrote,

Some philosophers have contended that the existence of evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of the theistic God. No one, I think, has succeeded in establishing such an extravagant claim. Indeed, granted incompatibilism, there is a fairly compelling argument fro the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of the theistic God. (Rowe 1979: 335 fn1)

Paul Draper, in a premier philosophy journal Noûs, also “agree[s] with most philosophers of religion that theists face no serious logical problem of evil”(Draper 1989: 349 fn1 )

William P. Alston declared that Plantinga “has established the possibility that God could not actualize a world containing free creatures that always do the right thing”(Alston 1991:49) and thus “it is now acknowledged on (almost) all sides that the logical argument is bankrupt, […]”(Alston 1996: 97)

Remarking Philo’s logical argument from evil echoed by Hume, Stephen J. Wystra, wrote,

In our day the work of Plantinga and others has made much clearer the import of such broadly logical constraints, making this talk by Philo (or, only a few decades ago, by Mackie) of ‘decisive disproof’ look like naïve bluster. (Wystra 1990: 158).

James Beebe, Peter van Inwagen and Robert M. Adams gave the same verdict that Plantinga succeeded in answering the logical problem of evil.

Standing against atheists’ and theists’ philosophers, a Christian philosopher Richard G. Swinburne does not agree that Plantinga killed the logical problem of evil’s beast. He wrote,

It seems to be generally agreed by atheists as well as theists that what is called ‘the logical problem of evil’ has been eliminated, and all that remains is ‘the evidential problem’. See e.g. Paul Draper, who writes that he ‘agrees with most philosophers of religion that theists face no serious logical problem of evil’ (‘Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists’, Nous, 23 (1989), 331-50: 349). But whether that is so depends on what we understand by ‘the logical problem’. It has not been shown to the satisfaction of atheists that there is no valid deductive argument from the existence of certain evident bad states E (via some necessary moral truths) to the non-existence of God. It has been shown merely that there is no such valid deductive argument evident to theists, who dispute the validity of any such argument by disputing the necessity of the relevant purported necessary moral truths (Swinburne 1998: 20 fn. 13).

The swift in philosophy of religion literature’s focus from the logical problem of evil to the evidential problem of evil by both atheists and theists’ philosophers shows that Swinburne is incorrect. The logical problem of evil’s beast is dying a cold death in academia. Plantinga’s dagger went to deep.

Question: Can the logical problem of evil be rescued?

Previous: The Beast Rises: The Deductive Problem Of Evil

Bibliography:

Alston, William P. (1991) The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition, in Philosophical Perspectives 6: 29-67. Reprinted in Howard-Snyder 1996.

________________ (1996) Reprint in Daniel Howard-Snyder, The Evidential Argument From Evil. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 97-125.

Draper, Paul (1989) Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem For Theists. In Noûs 23:331-350.

Hume, David (1779) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 2d ed. London.

Mackie, J. L (1971) “Evil and Omnipotence” in The Philosophy of Religion. ed. Basil Mitchell. Oxford University Press. Mackie’s case from Mind journal vol. 64 in 1955.

_______________ (1982) The Miracle of Theism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. See also p. 155

Plantinga, Alvin (1967) God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

____________________(1974). God, Freedom and Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Richard Swinburne (1998) Providence and the Problem of Evil Oxford University Press.

Rowe, William L. (1979) The Problem Of Evil And Some Varieties Of Atheism. In American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 16. 4:335-341, October 1979

Stephen J. Wykstra (1990) The Humean Objection to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of ‘Appearance’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 16 (1984), 73-93. Reprinted in (ed.) Marilyn M. & Robert M. Adams (1990), The Problem of Evil Oxford University Press. 138-60

The Beast Rises: The Deductive Problem Of Evil

In this first part of two series-articles I introduced, what I called Epicurus’ beast, the deductive problem of evil as presented by Hume and Mackie. In the second part I presented analytical Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s response, reception and status of logical problem evil in contemporary philosophy of religion. My aim is to show the contribution of  Plantinga’s work since the mid-1960’s that is believed by majority of philosophers both theists and nontheists’, to have provided the answer to Epicurus’ beast.

In 3^rd century A.D. Diogenes Laertius’ De Reum Natura brought to light Epicurus’ (341-270 B.C.), who is believed to be the architecture of the logical problem of evil, beast that challenged the existence of an all powerful (omnipotent) and all loving (omni-benevolent) God.

The “Epicurean paradox” beast claimed that if God existed, He is a benevolent and omnipotent being. If God were benevolent and omnipotent, then there would be no evil. But there is evil, therefore a benevolent and omnipotent God does not exist. Evil, according to this beast, is logically incompatible with existence of an omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent God. If true, this beast would tear down all who believe in the existence of such a God.

David Hume invoked the voice of the beast when he remained his readers that  “Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered”. He wrote about God,

“Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”(Hume 1779: 186)

“In its simplest form the problem is this:” wrote J. L. Mackie, “God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true, the third would be false.” (Mackie 1971:92)

1. God exists
2. God is omnipotent
3. God is whole good
4. Evil exists

Plantinga began by challenging logical problem of evil’s defenders to clarify where, they believe, lays a contradiction. He wrote “to make good his claim the atheologian must provide some proposition which is either necessarily true, or essential to theism, or a logical consequence of such propositions”(Plantinga 1967:117) to show that existence of God and evil are in logical contradiction since proposition 1-4 does not contain explicit contradiction.

Mackie agreed with Plantinga and he provided those missing propositions. He wrote,

“According to traditional theism, there is a god who is both omnipotent (and omniscient) and wholly good, and yet there is evil in the world. How can this be? It is true that there is no explicit contradiction between the statements that there is an omnipotent and wholly good god and that there is evil. But if we add the at least initially plausible premisses that good is opposed to evil in such a way that a being who is wholly good eliminates evil as far as he can, and that there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do, then we do have a contradiction. A wholly good omnipotent being would eliminate evil completely; if there really are evils, then there cannot be any such being.”(Mackie 1982: 150)

3a. A wholly good omnipotent being would eliminate evil completely.

If 3a. is true, then Mackie is correct that theologians do have a contradiction(3a and 4) in their belief and thus necessarily false. But is it true that God being wholly good omnipotent being would eliminate evil completely?

Next: The Beast Falls: The Cold Death Of Deductive Problem Of Evil

Problem Of Evil: Possibly Not A Convincing Case For Atheism

An English philosopher Michael Palmer boldly contended that there could be no amount of theological ingenuity to resolve “an irreducible incompatibility between scientific evidence [viz., “the theory of naturally selection that Darwin presents is one of unparalleled barbarity, impersonal and haphazard in form and subject only to the vagaries of environment”] and religious belief [viz., “any notion of an omnipotent, benevolent and purposive deity, of a loving God who cares for his creature but is yet quite prepared to subject them to a life of unremitting brutality and hardship”](Palmer 2012: 10)

According to Palmer, “cruelty cannot accommodate benevolence, at least not on this scale, on the scale of omnipotence, when presumably other options were available to God and the creation of a happier and less barbaric world a real possibility”. (ibid) With scientific evidence in place, he concludes, it is reasonable to ditch theistic case altogether.

Late Australian philosopher John Leslie Mackie explained that the problem of evil “is not a scientific problem that might be solved by further discoveries, nor a practical problem that might be solved by decision or an action”(Mackie 1982 150). The problem of evil arises to those who hold to the traditional theism.

For Mackie, unlike Palmer, there is a possible amount of theological ingenuity to resolve the problem of evil. One of them could be what Mackie called a “[m]uch more interesting” suggestion, namely “things that are evil in themselves may contribute to the goodness of an ‘organic whole’ in which they are found, so that the world as a whole is better as it is, with some evils in it, than it could be if there were no evil.”(153).

Mackie explained that this suggestion could be developed in several ways. He wrote,

It may be supported by an aesthetic analogy, by the fact that contrasts heighten beauty, and that in a musical work, for example, there may occur discords which somehow add to the beauty of the work as a whole. Alternatively, the notion of progress may be used: it may be argued that the best possible organization of the world will be not static but progressive, perhaps with what Kant called an endless progress towards perfection: the gradual overcoming of evil by good is really a finer thing than would be the eternal unchallenged sovereignty of good.(ibid)

This theological ingenuity may not have offered a real solution of the problem (154) but as Mackie concluded,

Since this defence is formally possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theist are logically inconsistent with one another”(154)

Free will defence is also another  “amount of theological ingenuity” that may solve the problem of evil. Even though Mackie believed that all forms of the free will defence fail, he noted that “[i]t is plain that [free will defence] is the only solution of the problem of evil that has any chance of succeeding.”(155).

Contrary to Palmer, Mackie concluded that “[w]e cannot, indeed, take the problem of evil as a conclusive disproof of traditional theism”(176)

A Possible Solution: Reducible Compatibility

I think theist could resolve the compatibility between the scientific evidence and the religious belief that Palmer presented by offering a premise that does not even have to be true nor believed by a theist or an atheist, but simply possibly true, to show that the problem of evil is compatible with religious belief of “an omnipotent, benevolent and purposive deity, of a loving God who cares for his creature”.

Theist could argue that it is possible that “an omnipotent, benevolent and purposive deity, of a loving God who cares for his creature” has good moral reason(s) “to subject them to a life of unremitting brutality and hardship”.

If it is possibly true that God, if exists, has just reason(s) to subject the creatures He cares, then contrary to Palmer, there could be amount of theological ingenuity to resolve the problem of evil. So it is not reasonable to ditch theistic case altogether since the problem of evil is not as convincing as Palmer believe it to be, unless he succeed to show that,  God, if exists, can not have any good reason(s) to permit evil.

Bibliography:

Mackie, J. L (1982) The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God.  Oxford University Press Inc., New York. U. S.

Palmer, Michael (2012) The Atheist’s Primer. The Lutterworth Press. (Uncorrected Proof Copy Review Purposes Only)

Photo Credit: Paint Pain Paint

Animal Suffering: Darwin, Dawkins + Possible Solution

With too much misery in the world, Charles Darwin could not persuade himself that “a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice”(Darwin 1860)

He could not “overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world”(Darwin 1873) “That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes,” correctly observed Darwin. He went further:

A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?(Darwin 1958)

For Darwin, the existence of suffering was a strong case against the existence of an intelligent first cause. “[T]he presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.”(Darwin 1958 ibid 85-96)

Darwin’s advocate, Richard Dawkins, echoes Darwin’s challenge.  “During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence,” contended Dawkins, “thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”(Dawkins 1995: 132)

Having “Darwin’s ichneumon wasp that the caterpillar should be alive, and therefore fresh, when it is eaten, no matter what the cost in suffering” in mind, Dawkins wrote,

If Nature were kind, she would at least make the minor concession of anesthetizing caterpillars before they are eaten alive from within. But Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested one way or the other in suffering, unless it affects the survival of DNA.(ibid 131)

“Nature is neither kind nor unkind” concluded Dawkins. But what if “Nature” is kind to a caterpillar? What if “Nature” spared caterpillars and many other animals an ability to suffer? Neo-Cartessianism, a position explored in Michael J. Murray’s Nature Read in Tooth & Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering, aims to lessen the thrust of the problem of pain and suffering in animal kingdom. It was briefly explained  by William Lane Craig in his debate with Stephen Law at Westminster Hall on October 17, 2011.

In my next article, I will explore Murray’s neo-Cartessianism case, Craig’s presentation, and explore  Jerry A. Coyne, PZ Meyer’s, and Austin Cline’s criticisms  directed toward Craig’s presentation.

Question: In Oxford Journals’ article, D. Öngür and J.L. Price’s explained that primates and many other species have orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. Did Craig err in asserting that “[f]or the awareness that one is oneself in pain requires self-awareness, which is centered in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain—a section of the brain which is missing in all animals except for the humanoid primates.”?

Bibliography:

Darwin, Charles (1860) Letter To Asa Gray

___________ (1873) Letter To “Doedes, N. D.”

___________ (1958) The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, with Original Omissions Restored, ed. Nora Barlow. London: Collins.

Dawkins, Richard (1995) River Out Of Eden. Weidenfeld & Nicolson
, The Orion Publishing Group

Bug Photo: Wireless Sensor Networks Blog

Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part II

Edited: Matthew Flannagan

In my last post, Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part I, I sketched Tooley’s distinction between a deontological and an axiological argument from evil and argued that Tooley rejects the axiological version because it rests on controversial ethical claims that are likely to be rejected by many theists. I outlined Tooley’s deontological version and explored the moral assumptions it is based on and Plantinga’s criticism of these.

Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part I

Edited: Matthew Flannagan

This two-part series criticises the deontological argument from evil proposed by Micheal Tooley in The Knowledge of God, the print debate between him and Alvin Plantinga.1 My critique proceeds in four parts. Initially I will sketch Tooley’s distinction between a deontological and an axiological argument from evil and will argue that Tooley rejects the axiological version because it rests on “controversial ethical claims;”2 claims that are “likely to be rejected by many theists.”3 Then I will outline Tooley’s deontological version and focus on the moral assumptions upon which it is based and Plantinga’s criticism of these. This will conclude Part I of the series.