Generic and Specific Problems of Evil

Substack latest.

The nature and tractability of the problem depends on the type of theism espoused.

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Vito Caiati comments:

I very much profited from the short essay “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil” that you posted on Substack yesterday. I have read it several times, and, if viewed from the perspective of the ultimate destiny of the members of our species alone, I see the merit of your claim that “It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A, . . . [those who regard] this world [as] a ‘vale of soul-making’ (the phrase is from John Keats) in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil.”

However, what about non-human animals, who “Despite being wholly corporeal, . . . enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also . . . intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger” (Maverick Philosopher, “Soteriology for Brutes,”3/21/2019)?  

It seems to me, who, as you know, is a philosophic neophyte in these matters, that the theist-A operates with too narrow a perspective on sentience, for ultimate value is placed only on those sentient beings that are rational and hence capable to abstract thought and moral judgments.  The suffering of all the others, including the highest mammals, counts very little or not at all; it certainly does not figure in the soteriology of, say, Christianity, which is obsessively centered on human sin and the need for salvation from it, rather than on the agony and death that permeates the natural world.  Perhaps “death is the wages of sin” for mankind, but what explains the agonizing deaths of our fellow sentient creatures that have not sinned?  Only by remaining in his sin/redemption theory of salvation, which is necessarily restricted to human beings, can theist-A be more reconciled to the existence of evil.  

None of these may be worth your time, but I wanted to share it with you, since it is one of the central concerns of my intellectual and emotional life.

You have pointed out a serious lacuna in my discussion, Vito.  I focused on moral and natural evil as it pertains to human animals but left out of account the natural evil, including both physical and mental suffering, that besets non-human animals.  I will now try to formulate your objection to me as trenchantly as I can.  'You' in what follows refers to me!

1) You maintain that the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of God is considerably more tractable if we humans survive our bodily deaths  and come to enjoy (after a period of purgation) eternal bliss. 

2) You also argue that "It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when . . . some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come."

3) You are presenting a sort of "All's well that ends well" response to moral and natural evil.  You are arguing that the evils of this life are far outweighed and almost completely made up for by the unending bliss of the world to come, so much so that the the 'problem' of evil vanishes for those who subscribe to the specific theism that you call Theism-A.

4) You ignore, however, the problem of animal pain which is certainly real. (We both reject as preposterous the Cartesian view that non-human animals are insensate or non-sentient.) Given that non-human animals are not spiritual beings as we are, and do not survive their bodily deaths, there is no redemption for them: their horrific suffering -- imagine the physical pain and mental terror of being eaten alive! -- is in no way recompensed or outweighed.  And given how many species of non-human critter there are, and how many specimens per species, and how long these animals existed before man made the scene, there is a VAST amount of evil that goes unredeemed.

5) Your argument therefore fails to get God off the hook. 

I take this objection seriously and I thank Dr. Caiati for raising it. At the moment, three possible lines of response occur to me, assuming that there is no Cartesian way out.

A. We can take something like the  line that David Bentley Hart champions against Edward Feser, which I briefly discussed in "Soteriology for Brutes?" (linked above) namely, that animals do survive their bodily deaths and 'go to heaven.' (Lacking as they do free will, I see no reason to posit purgatory or hell for them.  The savagery of a tiger devouring its prey alive is amoral unlike the savagery of humans. No homo is literally homini lupus.)

B. Without embracing Cartesianism, one might argue that we are engaging in illicit anthropomorphic projection when we project into animals our terrors and physical pains.  One might to try to argue that their sufferings, while real,  are next to nothing as compared to ours and don't really count very much or at all when it comes to the problem of evil.

C.  One might take a mysterian tack. God exists and evil exists. Therefore, they co-exist, whence it follows that it is possible that they co-exist. The fact that we cannot understand how it possible reflects poorly on our cognitive architecture but has no tendency to show that God and evil do not co-exist.  Of course, if one took a line like this, one could evade the particulars of my Substack proposal.

While (B) strikes me as lame, (A) and (C) show promise, (A) more than (C).

ComBox now open.

ADDENDUM (9/17)

This morning I found a passage in Berdyaev that supports Dr. Caiati's intuitions about animal suffering from a broadly Christian perspective.

The death of the least and most miserable creature is unendurable, and if it is irremediable, the world cannot be accepted and justified. All and everything must be raised to eternal life. This means that the principle of eternal being must be affirmed in relation to human beings, animals, plants and even inanimate things. [. . .] Christ's love of the world and for man is victory over the powers of death and the gift of abundant life. (Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 253.)

The (febrile) Russian existentialist is making a surprisingly radical claim here. He is maintaining that the existence of the world is justified and our lives in it are affirmable as worth living only if absolutely everything is redeemed and preserved in the end, not only everything living, but the inanimate as well.  Somehow everything temporal must be somehow cancelled and preserved -- aufgehoben in Hegel's sense  -- in eternity.  How the inanimate could be brought to eternal life is of course a thought transgressive of the discursive and hard by the boundary of the mystical.  

In Berdyaev as in Simone Weil, we are at the outer limits of the religious sensibility.

Comments

[Dave Bagwill]

A couple of very humble remarks to make a larger point: We have a Cat, or vice-versa, named Rosie, a long-haired beauty of great grace, seriousness, and utter silliness. We love her.
That long hair, though! It takes constant effort to keep it untangled; it ruins her 'magnificence' and is a health hazard. The untangler-in-chief is my wife and, since Rosie does not like the procedure, she is reluctant to get in my wife's lap - the wife cannot overlook a tangle, let alone a whole mess. It is her obsession; when she has had her good effect Rosie is safer and gorgeous.
The second remark is not quite so humble. A cancer patient - and I've had a few as friends - wants obsession on their Dr's part. Not much else matters in life and death. A person with a serious addiction - threatening his life, his family, his livelihood - may not want, but desperately needs obsession on the part of others to confront (judge) them, pull the problem into the light, and mercifully help the addict to larger and meaningful life.
I'm pretty obvious here, aren't I : the obsession with sin and judgment is justified, imo - the light it brings is the sine qua non of humanities' healing. Example: James 4.1-2 "What causes conflicts and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from the passions at war within you? "You crave what you do not have; you kill and covet, but are unable to obtain it. You quarrel and fight." 'Nuff said.
Homely stuff, but that's how I roll.

[Vito B. Caiati.]

While I agree that “(A) more than (C)” is the most promising response to (4), its adoption by a theist-A is no easy task, since his theological/philosophical worldview is founded on a thoroughgoing anthropocentrism. On the logical assumption that theist-A is an orthodox Christian, who, while not necessarily embracing the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, allows for an intermediate state for the soul before final judgement, theist-A can reasonably hold (C) only by rooting it firmly in scripture, that is, in either or both the Old Testament or the New. Now, in the last several decades there have been some audacious attempts to attain this end, most of which involve the search for and exegesis of isolated biblical passages that are proffered as evidence for a more exalted, divinely sanctioned state for animals or the reinterpretation of the Incarnation in ways that extend Christ’s kenosis and compassion, sometimes including His Sacrifice on the Cross, to embrace the animal kingdom. Leaving aside the specifics of these approaches, it seems to me that they seek to make of Christianity something that it is not, for the Incarnation, the coming of the Second Person in the flesh, is the consequence of the Fall of Man, of the one creature made in the image of God. From Genesis, through the Pentateuch, the historical and poetical books, the books of the prophets, to the Gospels themselves, God troubles Himself, on one way or another, with the fate of the members of our species, first of Israel and then, in Christian thought, of all humanity. The beasts, although declared to be “good” (Genesis 1: 25), are not part of this Great Story of Salvation. Placed under man’s “dominion” (Genesis 1:26), which is barely limited by divine commands (for example, Genesis 9:4; Exodus 20:8; Deuteronomy 22:6), no series theological obstacles appear in either the Old or the New Testament to the systematic exploitation and mass slaughter, including ritual killing, of animals, and no serious theological unease is shown before the horrendous pain and terror that they endure in the wild. Their fate in this world is, if present at all, negligible in scripture and that in the next entirely absent.

[Vito B. Caiati]

Correction: I meant "theist-A can reasonably hold (A)" not (C)

[Dave Bagwill]

Good comments. There is the well-known verse about the lion laying down with the lamb, but I'll have to look into that a bit more.
I'm also not certain that 'dominion' necessarily has dark overtones in this context; I am aware that the 'dominion' language is most probably meant to convey the idea of 'stewardship', not dark-over-lordness, so to speak; that is more in line with the gracious Creation we are 'put in charge of.'
But maybe those things are not to the point: certainly, there is a food chain, and that necessarily means some amount of pain and distress for the lower links in that chain. But I am reminded of something C.S. Lewis mentioned, that the total amount of suffering in the world is what one human can experience in extremis. The math of suffering is not additive, I think he was getting at: there is not twice as much suffering because two humans are in that predicament. I should look that up again. The point being of course on that view, suffering is not to be diminished, but neither is there more suffering because more people are suffering. I definitely need to find that source.
Something like that reasoning might work with the plight of the animals? Again, not to diminish their fear and pain, but to realize there is no greater total of pain just because it is wide-spread. Little comfort to the individual animal, as it is to a suffering human, but a good point nonetheless.

[BV]

Hi Dave, thank you for your comments.

>>certainly, there is a food chain, and that necessarily means some amount of pain and distress for the lower links in that chain.<< Would you say that being eaten alive is "some pain and distress"?

>>But I am reminded of something C.S. Lewis mentioned, that the total amount of suffering in the world is what one human can experience in extremis. The math of suffering is not additive, I think he was getting at: there is not twice as much suffering because two humans are in that predicament. I should look that up again. The point being of course on that view, suffering is not to be diminished, but neither is there more suffering because more people are suffering. I definitely need to find that source.<<

I have had that thought myself, the thought that suffering is not additive. PLease do look for the source. It might be in The Problem of Pain

I think I wrote something about this but I can't find it. Suppose you and your wife both have splitting headaches. You can't feel her pain and she can't feel yours. (Only Bill Clinton had the power to feel another's pain.) So the felt headache pain in your house is the same whether only one of you is suffering or both. Still, wouldn't it be better if only one of you were suffering? And so, while animal pain is not additive, it is objectively worse that trillions of animals suffer instead of one.

[BV]

Vito,

Theism-A is common to a number of different theisms. So a Theist-A need not be an orthodox Christian who >>can reasonably hold (C) only by rooting it firmly in scripture, that is, in either or both the Old Testament or the New.<<

But I agree with you that trad. Xianity has no room for the salvation of animals. Can you point me to a book or article that makes the case that you are opposing?

[Vito B. Caiati]

The works of Andrew Linzey argue that Christ’s compassion for and ultimate sacrifice for the weak and powerless provides a model for Christian treatment of animals. Laura Hobgood-Oster (The Friends We Keep) attempts to extend the good of the Incarnation beyond man to the animal kingdom. I think that the most serious attempt to argue for animal salvation after death from someone working within a Christian framework is Trent Dougherty’s The Problem of Animal Pain: A Theology for All Creatures Great and Small. Unfortunately, the book is so expensive that I have been able to read only parts of it. The book is reviewed by John Schneider, who gives a critical overview of each of its chapters (https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-problem-of-animal-pain-a-theodicy-for-all-creatures-great-and-small/).

To what other theisms might theism-A refer? This interests me greatly.

[Dave Bagwill]

It might be worth considering that many things are taken for granted in the Bible, as common to most of mankind. One of those things would be the unnecessary suffering of animals: why would that even have to be mentioned?
There is also a very provocative statement by St. Paul in Romans 8:19-21:
"That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens."
The Creation, of course, includes animals!

[Vito B. Caiati]

Dave Bagwill, I profited from reading your thoughtful comments. However, it seems to me that the issue turns not on “the unnecessary suffering of animals,” whatever human harms to them that it may embrace, but on the obligatory suffering of animals inherent to creation itself, one that worked its ruthless logic long before the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens and that continues to this day. The brutality of man towards the lower orders of being, although horrific and worse in modern times, is far less than the brutality imposed on them by nature itself. However we may throw into the balance the joys that this state of nature offers to animals, and there are certainly many, these take place within an evolutionary system that is horrendously violent and painful, and all the attempts to justify it, either in terms of the development of higher orders of being or of the unavoidable costs of the emergence of an orderly and predictable physical order, fail to defeat the objection that there is too much suffering present in creation to speak of it as unquestionably good or to not cast doubts its cause, if one. One has only to consider the waste of this evolutionary process, one in which only about one-tenth, the most optimistic estimate, of all animal species that ever existed are alive today, most having perished in evolutionary dead ends, quite often after enduring unimaginably painful predacious and parasitical harms and brutal deaths. If only a fraction of these species were sentient, we have here something quite terrible. I offer these thoughts not as an argument against the existence of God, which I affirm, nor to equate animal and human suffering, since I regard the latter as something rather unique, but rather to raise problem of animal suffering within creation, a suffering, albeit distinct from its human variety, that is universal and real and that theists cannot avoid or brush away with facile responses.

[Dominik Kowalski]

Is anyone else here familiar with the book by Fr Brian Davies "The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil"? Since David Bentley Hart has been mentioned here it should be said that he implicitly champions Hart in important ways, at least in the way I understand him, e.g. claiming God as good for us because it is only within him that we can perfect our nature since he grounds that which is our final cause. Only if that were impossible for us would it be right to say that God is evil.

Note the total lack of reference to moral standings and also, explicitly in Davies, the denial of God having any obligations in the moral sense. He just is not a moral agent, since we don't share a nature with him.

I am reminded of Maimonides, he also only derived God's goodness from his effects, not from anything within him and much less the, dare I say "cancer", found in modern philosophy of religion talking about God's perfections and moral goodness being one of it. Maimonides derived something akin to benevolence from the fact of creation and God's inability to profit from it, thus making creation for creations' sake.

Of course, especially from a religious background, Davies' view is unattractive, but honestly I found it, for me, to be the most intuitive account, faced with an agent that is so totally beyond our understanding. And it has the advantage of dissolving the problem of evil.

[Dave Bagwill]

VBC, thanks again for your engaging remarks! Your passion for the subject is palpable, and I appreciate it.
Is it true that facile theists are brushing away what you and others feel is a problem? It could be that some theists do not assess the situation as being horrific, terrible, or unimaginably painful for the animals. Those same theists would otoh judge the human predicament as precisely such and are totally focused on that problem, which in their view is the big one.

[Vito B. Caiati]

Dave Bagwill, I agree that most theists do not "assess the situation as being horrific, terrible, and unimaginably painful for the animals" and that "the human predicament" is the "big" problem for them. There are all sorts of explanations, and justifications, philosophic and religious, for whatever woes the animals suffer at the hands of man and nature that can be marshalled to put one right with the dominant state of affairs. Some of these are more worthy of consideration than others, but too many of them are "facile". To cite two examples, consider Michael Murray's Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering, which flirts with and implicitly endorses neo-Cartesian arguments to render their pain less problematical than that of human beings or of Swinburne's justification of natural evil as the necessary means that allows "humans to have the kinds of choice which the free will defense extols" (Is There a God, OUP, 1996: 107). The first of these philosophers flirts with and implicitly endorses a high dubious (read absurd) philosophical position on pain that has been decisively refuted by science and the second blithely justifies millions of years of animal misery as the cost of human freedom, as if no alternative is even imaginable. Would it not be preferable to hold the position that the suffering of all the sentient beings who dwell on the Earth, whatever the particularities of that suffering for each species, including the unique dilemmas of our own that arise form our rational capacities, such as the knowledge of death, present the theist with a thorny and unavoidable theological and moral issue?

[Dave Bagwill]

I don't feel that the issue is thorny or unavoidable! I do take it as a subset of the so-called 'problem of evil', at best.
The way the problem is cast in this thread, it appears at bottom to be a religious, ethical question, or a theological one, if you prefer. It can be cast in other ways as well, such as the philosophy or neuroscience of consciousness and what that entails.
I don't want to sound like a Fundie but - Jesus ate meat and fish; Peter had his vision of all the animals in a sheet and the command to eat of them as he would; the creation itself, biblically, declared 'Good' to all the animals - which of course would include carnivores.
Peter heard from heaven, if we choose to believe it: "He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. 12 It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. 13 Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” Acts 10:9-16. Kill. And eat.
Consider also the thousands of animals and birds sacrificed in the Temple rites. By a commandment from God who surely knew the animals as well.
If the question is one of sensibilities, then I don't think argumentation would help - I feel like you would consider it theistically 'sweeping under the rug' rather than a reasoned presentation. And I'm ok with that, I just happen to cordially disagree.

[Dave Bagwill]

BTW I watched a very interesting short video concerning Temple Grandin, who fought 'Big Meat' by insisting on a more humanitarian way of slaughtering cattle. They still got slaughtered, but without the fear and horror of watching other cattle getting killed.
Could that be considered a step in the ethical direction?

[Vito B. Caiati]

Referring to the problem of animal suffering, which. yes, can be taken as a "subset" of the problem of evil, as "thorny," that is an issue causing difficulty or disagreement" is hardily a controversial statement. I know of no philosopher who has tackled this question who would hesitate to characterize it in this way, whatever position they make take on it. I also note that we are in agreement on the approach of Judeo-Christian scripture to the problem of animal suffering, since, as I commented, "no series theological obstacles appear in either the Old or the New Testament to the systematic exploitation and mass slaughter, including ritual killing, of animals, and no serious theological unease is shown before the horrendous pain and terror that they endure in the wild. Their fate in this world is, if present at all, negligible in scripture and that in the next entirely absent." If you find a personal solution to the problem in quoting New Testament passages that endorse the killing and eating of animals, you are certainly justified in doing so. In Bill's terms, you have "solved" the problem by placing both feet in Jerusalem; I can't follow you along this path, for, as you note, my "sensibilities," which include my philosophical inclinations, do not permit it. In any case, I enjoyed our exchange of views.

[Dave Bagwill]

Thank you, I've enjoyed it as well.
I am not certain what you mean by 'both feet in Jerusalem', however. I'm wondering if your sensibilities allow even One foot in Jerusalem? Do you feel that Jerusalem is a suburb of Athens? What in the end is your authority?
My thinking is that we should avail ourselves of all of the information we can get to address a problem. Athens can get one only so far.
I realize that, if the problem is your sensibilities, I would not know how to address it. I don't even know how to properly address some of mine. :-)
Peace to you.