Before addressing Chris’ latest concerns, I will take a few moments to respond to a guest post that was made on ChoosingHats by ‘ZaoThanatoo’.

On Zao’s Thoughts:

I mentioned in several places throughout my posts in this series that there must be real caution taken by the theist with regard to arguments such as these, to not assume the conclusion false to show the conclusion false. Let’s quickly recap the argument in question:

Horrific Suffering (def.) = that most awe-full form of suffering that gives the victim and/or the perpetrator a prima facie reason to think that his or her life is not worth living.

(1) Necessarily, if God exists, finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God realize their deepest good.

(2) Necessarily, if God exists, the prevention of horrific suffering does not prevent there being finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God.

(3) Necessarily, if God exists, the prevention of horrific suffering does not prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good. (from 1, 2)

(4) Necessarily, if God exists, there is horrific suffering only if its prevention would prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good.

(5) Necessarily, if God exists, there is no horrific suffering. (from 3, 4)

(6) There is horrific suffering.

(7) God does not exist (from 5, 6)

Now, it should be obvious that any objection to the argument which has as a component the denial of (7) is going to be fallacious. One cannot respond to this argument solely by saying, “God exists and he has morally sufficient reasons for permitting horrific suffering.’ Zao, however, extends my cautionary point into his own further analysis when he says:

Mitch contends that one must not assume that God exists (A) in order to disprove the above conclusion that God does not exist (~A).  This, he asserts, is question-begging.  However, for anyone wishing to criticize the conclusion, the alternative is to assume that God does not exist in order to argue that he does.  This is self-contradictory.  We must either assume God exists or God does not exist (A or ~A, Excluded Middle) in presenting our reasoning.  But assuming ~A to prove A is self-contradictory and assuming A to prove ~~A Mitch asserts is question-begging.

These are some strange assertions. If it’s the case that assuming that God does not exist in order to argue that he does is self-contradictory there is a real problem for argumentation in general, as assuming the negation of some proposition to prove that proposition is simply what is meant by “proof via contradiction” or reductio ad absurdum and it would be highly controversial for Zao to claim that instances of reductio are self-contradictory, yet that seems to be his suggestion. Further, it’s not clear why one need either assume that God exists or that she does not in analyzing the argument. This seems to entail that nobody who is agnostic with regards to the existence of God could ever analyze the argument, or that agnostics are committed to the claim that God does not exist, which is false. He appears to cite the “Law of Excluded Middle” as justification for this claim, but this seems confused. It may be the case that “God exists” is either true or false but this does not entail that one has to regard it as so. For example, the “Law of Excluded Middle” tells us that the proposition “Some man named Johnathan will ride a bicycle on November 21, 2014 and crash it into an Ice Cream Stand” is either true or false,  but this in no way entails that I must assume that the proposition is true nor assume that it is false. In short, nothing about the above argument begs the question. This should be clear, but it can be made clearer by formalizing the argument, if one wishes. If such is done, it will be evident that no premise is, nor has as a premise in its justification, the conclusion.

Zao also states:

I’m attempting to elevate the conversation by recognizing the epistemic role which properly basic beliefs or ultimate presuppositions (call them what you like) play in dealing with issues such as the problem of horrific suffering.

The talk about properly basic beliefs is quite confusing as it’s not relevant to the argument at all. I can only assume that when Zao speaks of “assuming” he’s not speaking of “assuming” in the logical sense, but rather in the epistemic sense. Of course, the fallacy of begging the question is a logical fallacy and so whatever might be going on with my epistemology it does not impact the logic of the argument. That is, even if I do believe that God does not exist, that does not make my giving the above argument question begging. Also, I have noticed a general trend amongst presuppositionalists to not only assume a sort of foundationalist epistemology, but to even assume others are foundationalists! How can I have properly basic beliefs or ultimate presuppositions if I think foundationalism is false? This isn’t an immediately relevant thought, but it’s interesting enough to flag.

Zao continues:

In Premise 1 we are told “Necessarily, if God exists, finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God realize their deepest good.”  Let’s break this down quickly for definitional purposes.  We’ll take “finite persons” to be, well, finite persons.  Finite persons who “ever more fully experience the reality of God” are people living life.  Every day every finite person existing ever more fully experiences the reality of God in various ways and to varying degrees, but every aspect of life is an experience of God in one way or another.  “Realizing their deepest good” means simply that they glorify God; and one may glorify God through either salvation or judgment.

So while Mitch’s definition is good, it is incomplete, as he stated: “…Indeed such an experience of God’s reality might manifest itself in different ways to different persons.”  Indeed, some people may realize their “deepest good” (glorifying God) through horrific suffering under the judgment of God for their sins.  So, given the above definitions, Premise 2 is false since certain persons glorify God most fully by suffering horrifically under judgment for their sins; and preventing that category of people from suffering would prevent them from “realizing their deepest good.”

Here, unfortunately, Zao misconstrues the argument. The finite persons who “ever more fully experience the reality of God” are not people living life simpliciter. They are the people who believe they are in a mutually interactive relationship with God of the sort to which theists commonly attest. This is a stipulative definition and I could have perhaps made it clearer, but this is one example of why I dislike long discussions pertaining to a brief survey article of some argument, there are things which get left out or overlooked that aren’t so left out or overlooked in the primary source. But, moving on, Zao is also mistaken about what it means to “realize one’s deepest good.” If you note premise (1) it’s explicitly defining what it means to realize one’s deepest good, and it means to ever more fully experience the reality of God. The rest of Zao’s response in its current form can be overlooked since it’s simply not relevant. Zao has, perhaps unintentionally, strawmanned the argument from Horrific Suffering.

On Chris’ Thoughts:

In Chris’ recent response he begins to steer the discussion in a different direction. He states:

Mitch claims that, “In the background of the argument is the question ‘What would a perfect being do?’” However, the argument pertains to God and not necessarily a “perfect being,” thus insofar as a question like this is in the background of the argument, the question is, “What would God do?” If the Christian concept of God is in view then it is the Christian concept of God which must be evaluated in terms of what the Christian God would do. Otherwise the argument simply does not pertain to the Christian God.

The argument does take the term God to refer to a perfect personal being and insofar as Chris might propose that the Christian God is not a perfect personal being, his conception of God evades the force of the argument. I didn’t make this fact explicit in the opening post for a few reasons: the first post was never intended to be exhaustive and the position that God is not a perfect being is a minority position in the philosophy of religion, to the best of my knowledge. With that said, I do know of a recently published paper which seeks to argue against the claim that “If God exists, God is perfect” though the title escapes me at the time of writing (e-mail me if you really want to know). With that said, there are a couple of options (at least that I can foresee at this very moment) along this road of objection. One can argue against any argumentation which seeks to establish that fact, obviously. Or one can argue for the proposition, “If God exists, God is imperfect.” Also, one claim that the attributes which I’ve argued would belong to a perfect being in fact would not. We can explore Chris’ article to see which, if any, of these routes are explored.

Firstly, it’s important to note that Chris presents some citations which seek to argue against the Ontological Argument. They don’t accurately address this argument however since no appeal has been made to God being that which none greater can be conceived. For that reason, a lot of what follows will be slightly misdirected but I will respond to what I think can be redirected appropriately. Chris first cites Van Til:

[W]e should be careful when we say that God is the being than whom none higher can be thought. If we take the highest being of which we can think, in the sense of have a concept of, and attribute to it actual existence, we do not have the biblical notion of God. God is not the reality that corresponds to the highest concept that man, considered as an independent being, can think. Man cannot think an absolute self-contained being; that is, he cannot have a concept of it in the ordinary sense of the term. God is infinitely higher than the highest being of which he can form a concept…When we speak of our concept or notion of God, we should be fully aware that by that concept we have an analogical reproduction of the notion that God has of himself. (Quoted in Bahnsen, Analysis, 634)

This quotation particularly misses the mark, but it can be illustrative. Van Til is arguing against the claim that God is the greatest conceivable being on the basis that no matter how great a being human persons can conceive, God is infinitely greater. Based on this quotation, one might want to respond to Van Til by saying that God is at least the greatest conceivable being or God is no lesser than the greatest conceivable being. Both of these options satisfy the above criticisms of Van Til and allow for one to still run an Ontological Argument, albeit of a different flavor. How is this relevant to the Argument from Horrific Suffering? Well, if the objection is that no matter how many great things I think being perfect would entail my list will never be exhaustive, we can absorb the objection by simply replying that while this may be true, being perfect could not be anything less. That is, perhaps my reflections lead me to say of God that, as a perfect being, she is perfectly loving and perfectly compassionate. I should not claim to therefore have exhausted God’s attributes, but what I can claim is that any further property ascribed to God such that God’s perfection increases will add to and not take away from those about which I have managed to think. Perhaps Bahnsen is in agreement when he states:

However, God has also revealed that He is much greater than anything that we can finitely imagine. His thoughts are higher than our thoughts (without our thoughts being false or misleading). (Bahnsen, Analysis, 634, n.163)

The key thing to notice here is that it is said God is much greater than anything we imagine. Greater, not worse.

Chris continues:

Recall that [Van Til] claims, “When we speak of our concept or notion of God, we should be fully aware that by that concept we have an analogical reproduction of the notion that God has of himself.” What Van Til is saying is that our concept of God  is God’s concept of God. Now this in and of itself is rather interesting, for surely no one should expect a Christian, which I would at the moment say that I am, to accept a man’s concept of God over God’s concept of God, but that is precisely what Mitch is asking us to do.

Let us keep in mind that Chris can only non-question-beggingly assert that God has a concept of God if it is non-question-begging to assert that God exists. In order for this assertion to be non-question begging, he has to mean by God something other than what the argument means by God; something other than a perfect personal being, since he has not yet argued that any of my ascriptions are false. He has suggested that my ascriptions are inexhaustive but that is of no consequence to the argument unless there is a necessary property of God such that its existence renders the operation of some other property limited. It’s yet to be seen if a suggestion such as this is even coherent, or if coherent, can apply to the ascriptions made in the previous articles.

Chris goes on to cite a previous quote of mine, I will quote the relevant portion:

Many of my discussions with Christians have resulted in their looking at the Christian story and saying that particular conceptual analyses don’t line up with the Biblical conception of God. As I’ve said before, so long as our conceptual analyses are reasonable, so much the worse for the Biblical conception of God; if a God did exist, it would not be that one.

This follows from taking the proposition “If God exists, God is a perfect personal being” to be true. If that is indeed true (and I hope to present my argumentation for this in a future article), and if the Christian story presents a depiction of God that is not a perfect personal being, so much the worse for that depiction. I hope my statement is clearer now, in light of what’s been discussed so far.

Towards the end of his response, Chris calls into question some of the ascriptions I’ve made and while I don’t see an argument against them in what he’s written, there are some questions worth answering. Chris says:

Any problems with Mitch applying his concept of “compassion” to the Christian God are now apparent as well. He writes, “Granting that there can exist no being more compassionate than God, if she exists, this perfect compassion coupled with perfect knowledge of what it is to undergo Horrific Suffering entails that God is, as Schellenberg puts it, maximally opposed to these sufferings.” But why does Mitch grant that God is compassionate at all? Perhaps some god is the very opposite of compassionate even in Mitch’s understanding of the matter. How would the argument then apply to that god?

Taking God to be a perfect personal being, we can reason as to the properties such a being would have by analyzing out the great-making properties of human persons; the great-making properties of personhood. That is, human beings possess the properties of being loving, being compassionate and being generous. These properties differ in quality from, say, the property of being deceptive or the property of being violent such that the properties of being loving, compassionate and generous can be called great-making properties. There are a lot of ways in which we can hash out this idea, but for the purposes of this article we can say that they are the properties which are intrinsically better to have than not, the properties we regard as great-making in that the more of these a person has, the more we speak of their excellence as a person in the positive sense. Now God, if the perfect personal being, will possess all the great-making properties of human persons to their maximal (highest possible) degree and probably possess some great-making properties that human persons do not. It is because of this that we can perform a conceptual analysis of what love means, what compassion means and so on, and reason (even if inexhaustively) as to which properties a perfect personal being would have. Such reasoning in this case has led us to the conclusion that because of God’s perfect knowledge and compassion which entails a profound awareness and opposition (compassion is sympathetic opposition), she will know what it is to suffer horrifically and not permit such a state if unnecessary for the deepest good of human persons. Again, since it is unnecessary for the deepest good of human persons, the existence of horrific suffering shows us there is no God.

So, in summation, and to be precise, the argument demonstrates that there exists no perfect personal being. It may turn out that this argument does not impact Chris in any way because as a Calvinist, he already agrees that there exists no perfect personal being. If this is the case, so be it, as the argument was never addressed to Chris directly (though his responses are always welcome). Certainly many people do believe in a perfect personal being and this argument has much discussion to provide amongst them. Alternatively, Chris might argue against the properties I’ve associated with perfection; arguments which I imagine will be quite interesting given how obvious the analyses seem upon reflection. At any rate, having the discussion head in this direction (if it continues) could serve to be very beneficial in understanding not only this argument, but other important issues in the philosophy of religion.

Note: For those who may not know, the article image is a reference to the old Christian poem entitled “Footsteps” which tells the story of a person told by God that they never walk alone, when God is asked then why at times there is only one set of footprints she remarks that those are the times in which she carried the person. I think this, though a story, can help to demonstrate what perfect compassion might look like.

At this point, Chris is still challenging premise (4) of the following argument:

Horrific Suffering (def.) = that most awe-full form of suffering that gives the victim and/or the perpetrator a prima facie reason to think that his or her life is not worth living.

(1) Necessarily, if God exists, finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God realize their deepest good.

(2) Necessarily, if God exists, the prevention of horrific suffering does not prevent there being finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God.

(3) Necessarily, if God exists, the prevention of horrific suffering does not prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good. (from 1, 2)

(4) Necessarily, if God exists, there is horrific suffering only if its prevention would prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good.

(5) Necessarily, if God exists, there is no horrific suffering. (from 3, 4)

(6) There is horrific suffering.

(7) God does not exist (from 5, 6)

In my most recent article I outlined reasons for thinking (4) is true. I want to bring out some underlying strands of the debate, that will simultaneously address Chris’ concerns.

In the background of the argument is the question “What would a perfect being do?” In answering this question, one engages in conceptual analysis (not just this question, practically all of Western philosophy involves conceptual analysis). In analyzing concepts, we take something like the concept of perfect love, for example, and ask the stereotypical philosopher question of what it means to be perfectly loving. It is the hope of the philosopher that such analysis leads to deeper understandings of the concepts in question. In my last article, I presented a series of considerations for thinking that a perfect being would only permit the existence of horrific suffering if it’s prevention would prevent finite persons from realizing their deepest goods. Forgive me for quoting at length:

Let us delve further, take the state in question, that of Horrific Suffering, defined as being “that most awe-full form of suffering that gives the victim and/or the perpetrator a prima facie reason to think that his or her life is not worth living.” States such as this are often the most difficult times in people’s lives, one need only speak with someone who has gone through such turmoil to realize this fact. God, however, would not even need to speak with these persons. The perfection of God surely entails an omniscience that encompasses all kinds of knowledge. This includes a perfect knowledge of how particular states feel to her created beings and thus, complete insider knowledge of the experiences of every created being. Granting that there can exist no being more compassionate than God, if she exists, this perfect compassion coupled with perfect knowledge of what it is to undergo Horrific Suffering entails that God is, as Schellenberg puts it, maximally opposed to these sufferings. Granting that God stands in maximal opposition to the experience of Horrific Suffering it is surely the case, entailed by our aforementioned analyses, that God allows persons to suffer horrifically only if such suffering is a necessary condition of these persons realizing their deepest good; a relationship with the Creator that will unfold throughout all of eternity, the only thing that God’s perfect nature will deem enough. In fact, even if the existence of Horrific Suffering were a necessary condition of some very-good-other-goods such that they, perhaps in quantity, “outweighed” the non-good state of Horrific Suffering, our above analyses entail that permitting such suffering is still inconsistent with the divine nature!

Given the analysis of the concepts in question, the conclusion to which we are led certainly seems to be that (4) is true. That is, reasoning about what these particular things mean leads us to a conclusion about what a being with those properties would do.

Thus, when Chris suggests that God has morally sufficient reasons for causing or permitting horrific suffering, a few things are occurring. Firstly, he begs the question against the conclusion drawn from the conceptual analysis. He assumes that there can be a reason such that in light of this reason God would permit the existence of horrific suffering even in cases where the deepest good of persons does not have such suffering as a necessary condition. But, our conceptual analysis leads us to the conclusion that there is no such reason; God would not do such a thing. Chris cannot merely assume the failure of the conceptual analysis, he has to argue for it.

The most relevant portion of Chris’ response, is, I think the following:

Is the thought that one’s life is not worth living really something which God is “maximally opposed to?” Many of us have in fact had such thoughts and have subsequently gotten over it. Some people do not get over it. If it is true that Hitler committed suicide then it is likely the case that he did not get over it. But is God “maximally opposed” to Hitler’s horrific suffering or the possible result of him taking his own life? What about the well-to-do millionaire who decides after losing a few million that his life is no longer worth living by virtue of the fact of him losing those few million?

Well, if our conceptual analysis is reasonable (which I contend it is) then the affirmative is a reasonable conclusion to draw. I’m not sure if Chris has ever gone through such a period, but at the very least he probably knows of someone who has gone through such a period and even many who have “gotten over it” regard it as the worst point in their lives. The relevant portion of the analysis is the feeling involved with horrific suffering, not the antecedent conditions. We are reasoning about a being that is perfectly compassionate and because of her omniscience shares in our experience. Whether Hitler, a millionaire, or whomever, the experience of Horrific Suffering does not change in content. Chris has even admitted this to an extent, in pointing out that it may have led to Hitler taking his life. It is easy for us, I think, to scoff at people like Hitler and say that they deserve it or what not, but we should not assume that a perfect being, if she exists, shares our shortcomings in this respect; we many not be perfectly compassionate, but surely she is.

So, has Chris offered any reasons to think that the above conceptual analysis is in some way misguided? Not directly. Directly, he’s only begged the question against it by speaking of “morally sufficient reasons for God to permit horrific suffering.” There are hints of a better reply in his responses however, namely, that of “skeptical theism.” A treatment of that topic would require another article, so for now I will only flag it as a possible course of objection for Chris.

Something that I’ve mentioned before seems relevant yet again. Whereas I am asking the question, “What would a perfect being do?” Chris seems to be asking the question, “What has a perfect being done?” The difference is subtle, yet illuminating in how both of us approach this, and probably many other issues in the philosophy of religion. There is some initial question as to whether or not the being Bolt calls “God” possesses the properties of perfection I’ve ascribed to the term. There is a tendency that I have experienced in my many discussions with Christian people to assume that this world is the type of world that God would create, since God did create it. But if our conceptual analyses lead us to discover that this world is not the world that a God would create as I think is the case here, we are left with the conclusion that there is no such being. Many of my discussions with Christians have resulted in their looking at the Christian story and saying that particular conceptual analyses don’t line up with the Biblical conception of God. As I’ve said before, so long as our conceptual analyses are reasonable, so much the worse for the Biblical conception of God; if a God did exist, it would not be that one. While I think there are hints of this confusion occurring in Chris’ thought, I would like to thank him for not, as many confusedly and amateurishly have, done something like throw the book of Job at me or cite various parables from the Bible. It should be clear how to do so in this context, would only be to beg the question even further.

So, our conceptual analysis seems to lead us to the conclusion that this world, with it’s occurrences of horrific suffering, is not the world that a perfect being would create and thus, there is no God.

Chris’ most recent response chooses to set aside his initial two objections and focus in on premise (4) of the argument:

(4) Necessarily, if God exists, there is horrific suffering only if its prevention would prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good.

His main complaint is that no reason is given for accepting the premise. This isn’t true, in my response I provided one such justification:

Looking at an analogous instance, it seems obvious that something has gone wrong when we are saying of the parent that they are acting in accordance with anything we might remotely pick out as being “good” when they cause or permit their beloved child to suffer horrifically when the prevention of that suffering would occur at no loss to the beloved!

This is a piece of prima facie justification and whether or not Chris finds it persuasive, it is there. I will, however, take this opportunity to say much more. If there is anything that perfect goodness is not, it is the causing or permitting of non-good states to obtain for the sake of their being non-good states. What might it mean to say of some person that they are perfectly good and without repercussion can avoid the causing or permitting of some other person their experience of pain (for example), but causes or permits such pain anyhow? It is difficult to make sense of in the same way it is difficult to make sense of there being some person such that they are omniscient, and yet they do not know my name. Whatever is a property of the person in question, it surely isn’t omniscience, and in our previous example, it surely isn’t anything close to perfect goodness. We can reason then that if a perfectly good being causes or permits the obtaining of some non-good states, her doing so must in some way be necessary for some greater good state. Surely a perfectly good being, if bringing about non-good states, does so reluctantly, takes no pleasure in doing so, and would avoid doing so if at all possible without sacrificing one of the greater goods.

Good parents exemplify this in their interactions with their children. They may take their child to the dentist, permitting the obtaining of the non-good state of painful tooth extraction, taking no pleasure in the non-good state obtaining, but permitting it because it leads to the good state of having a healthy mouth. In the above example, the parents seem justified in their permitting their child to suffer because of the upcoming greater good for the child. As Chris notes, if God exists, her being our creator grants her a particular set of rights over our lives that exceeds even that of parent and child. Given such authority, however, we are not to neglect God’s perfect goodness which would ensure that the instances of non-good states are justified in some way. Let us delve further, take the state in question, that of Horrific Suffering, defined as being “that most awe-full form of suffering that gives the victim and/or the perpetrator a prima facie reason to think that his or her life is not worth living.” States such as this are often the most difficult times in people’s lives, one need only speak with someone who has gone through such turmoil to realize this fact. God, however, would not even need to speak with these persons. The perfection of God surely entails an omniscience that encompasses all kinds of knowledge. This includes a perfect knowledge of how particular states feel to her created beings and thus, complete insider knowledge of the experiences of every created being. Granting that there can exist no being more compassionate than God, if she exists, this perfect compassion coupled with perfect knowledge of what it is to undergo Horrific Suffering entails that God is, as Schellenberg puts it, maximally opposed to these sufferings. Granting that God stands in maximal opposition to the experience of Horrific Suffering it is surely the case, entailed by our aforementioned analyses, that God allows persons to suffer horrifically only if such suffering is a necessary condition of these persons realizing their deepest good; a relationship with the Creator that will unfold throughout all of eternity, the only thing that God’s perfect nature will deem enough. In fact, even if the existence of Horrific Suffering were a necessary condition of some very-good-other-goods such that they, perhaps in quantity, “outweighed” the non-good state of Horrific Suffering, our above analyses entail that permitting such suffering is still inconsistent with the divine nature!

Premise (4) is thus established and since, as argued in the earlier articles, Horrific Suffering exists and is not a necessary condition in the relevant way, it follows that God does not exist.

Horrific Suffering (def.) = that most awe-full form of suffering that gives the victim and/or the perpetrator a prima facie reason to think that his or her life is not worth living.

(1) Necessarily, if God exists, finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God realize their deepest good.

(2) Necessarily, if God exists, the prevention of horrific suffering does not prevent there being finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God.

(3) Necessarily, if God exists, the prevention of horrific suffering does not prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good. (from 1, 2)

(4) Necessarily, if God exists, there is horrific suffering only if its prevention would prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good.

(5) Necessarily, if God exists, there is no horrific suffering. (from 3, 4)

(6) There is horrific suffering.

(7) God does not exist (from 5, 6)

Chris’ first objection takes aim at premise (2) of the argument. The premise is motivated by the existence of persons in the actual world who attest to experiencing the reality of God and who, themselves, have not gone through horrific suffering. Chris mentions that we must assume that these people are not “lying, deceived, forgetful, or otherwise confused about their alleged lack of horrific suffering.” He rightly notes the extraordinary implausibility of defending such a position, and I add that it would be a most uncharitable interpretation of those in question. However, he does suggest that such a question can be asked of their experiencing the reality of God. That is, of those who attest to experiencing the reality of God and not having gone through horrific suffering, how do we know that they are not lying, deceived or confused with respect to experiencing the reality of God? Chris says:

Now we need not take so strong a position as to deny that these people have experienced the reality of God in order to plant this objection. Rather, we may point out that the subjective nature of experiencing the reality of God is sufficient to raise our suspicions about these people who claim to have had the experience of God without the experience of horrific suffering. How do we know that what one non-suffering person believes is an experience of the reality of God is anything at all like what some suffering person believes is an experience of the reality of God?

To experience the reality of God, in the context of this argument, is to be in a personal relationship with the creator of the cosmos. A relationship of the type theists mention often. It is a being as aware of the existence of God as a child is aware of his or her loving mother. That such an experience occurs in the “ever more fully” sense is to simply point out that given the infinite complexity of God, there will always be more about God for some finite human person to know. That is, if God exists and is as awesome as theists often claim, it is difficult to see how any finite human person can exhaust the things there are to know about God, or exhaust the feelings there are to be had about God, or exhaust the myriad of forms a personal relationship with her might take. It is indeed doubtful that these things can be exhausted in the context of human-to-human relationships, let alone human-to-divine relationships.  Indeed such an experience of God’s reality might manifest itself in different ways to different persons; perhaps we should even expect such a thing given God’s infinite resourcefulness, creativity, and the existence of unique individuals. Chris’ question then seems misguided. Why should we have to know that what one non-suffering person believes to be an experience of God’s reality is what a suffering person believes to be an experience of God’s reality? What is it about the subjective nature of experiencing God’s reality that should lead us to, as Chris suggests, be suspicious of those who claim to experience God, having never suffered horrifically? I fear I must have misunderstood Chris here, as I cannot bring out the objection.

Chris’ next objection is also misguided, but I fear the fault is mine for not taking the time in the initial article to outline the meaning of “ever more fully experiencing the reality of God”.  Chris says that even granting that there exists one person who has not experienced horrific suffering and has experienced the reality of God, it does not follow that the individual is in a position to “ever more fully experience” the reality of God. I hope my paragraph above clarifies what is meant by that term. I am speaking here of, in many ways, an experience of God that unfolds throughout eternity and is such that, given God’s infinite resourcefulness and creativity, the fruits of which are inexhaustible by the finite human person. Now, as Chris continues there is an important distinction to be made. Chris says that:

It could be the case that the non-suffering individual experiences the reality of God in an increasingly fuller sense but that the individual will never experience the reality of God to the degree that she could have had she of endured horrific suffering.

But this is no objection to the argument. No matter which “level of experience” the finite human person initially finds themselves at, there will be an infinite amount of unfolding left to occur. This effectively diffuses Chris’ objection as the value is placed not in the degree at which the divine experience occurs, but in its unfolding nature, the “ever more fully experiencing.” But even setting this point aside, what would be preventing the experience of the non-sufferer from reaching the heights of the sufferer? Is it God, the nature of horrific suffering, or something else? And further, why think that such prevention is necessary? Thus, assuming Chris does not want to object to (2) by taking the strong position of denying that those who claim to experience the reality of God without having suffered horrifically have actually experienced such a reality, the premise seems to survive this round of scrutiny.

Chris’ next target is (4). The denial of (4) seems quite the denial indeed. To deny the premise suggests that if God exists, there can be instances of persons who undergo horrific suffering even though their doing so is unnecessary for the realization of their deepest good. Chris, being the good Calvinist that he is, writes:

It is conceivable that a perfectly good God would “justifiably cause/permit some person A to suffer” even if that suffering were not necessary for bringing about some greater good for A. God not only owns that person, but is Himself the standard of what is just. God does no man wrong by taking his life from him immediately and without any cause known to us, and the same might just as easily be said with respect to “horrific suffering.” Herein lies a serious difficulty with reasoning through atheists’ arguments; the assumption throughout this particular argument is that humanity is the main focus of God’s dealings rather than God being the main focus of God’s dealings as Scripture describes.

It would be fruitful to understand to which particular flavor of Divine Command Theory Chris adheres, if he does possess such a view. I think Chris owes us some argumentation as to how the existence of a perfectly good God is compatible with the existence of human persons unnecessarily undergoing horrific suffering. Looking at an analogous instance, it seems obvious that something has gone wrong when we are saying of the parent that they are acting in accordance with anything we might remotely pick out as being “good” when they cause or permit their beloved child to suffer horrifically when the prevention of that suffering would occur at no loss to the beloved! Chris hints that the analysis may be too narrow, assuming that humanity is the main focus of God’s dealings. The lurking suggestion might be that God causes or permits the existence of horrific suffering for her own “deepest good.” It’s difficult to see how this might work out. This does suggest, however, that there is some good-for-God which only obtains if finite persons exist. But goods in this category seem to be, for example, instances of personal relationship between God and the created. Certainly I do not want to limit the category to those things, but I want to note the prima facie implausibility of there being, as a good in that category, that finite beings suffer horrifically. What is it about the existence of horrific suffering that makes it a necessary condition for the realization of God’s deepest good?

But these considerations aside, Chris’ objection simply begs the question. Recall, he says: “It is conceivable that a perfectly good God would justifiably cause/permit some person A to suffer even if that suffering were not necessary for bringing about some greater good for A.” Temporarily ignoring the debate of whether or not conceivability is a suitable modal epistemology, that is, whether or not it is a suitable guide to possibility, the argument from horrific suffering seeks to demonstrate that such a thing is not possible. Thus, unless Chris is just assuming from the outset that this argument is unsound, the objection does not work. Chris needs to argue (in a non question-begging way) against any justification of that premise, rather than merely assuming the premise false!

It is also important to note that when Chris says, “… the assumption throughout this particular argument is that humanity is the main focus of God’s dealings rather than God being the main focus of God’s dealings as Scripture describes,” it seems he is taking it to be the case that if God creates a world, God creates this world. That is, he is taking the data presented by the argument and attempting to make sense of how it “fits” in this “Christian-God created world.” The argument, however, has as its conclusion that there is no God, so Chris must be careful not to beg the question against the argument by reasoning in a manner that assumes the conclusion false, to show the conclusion false. An appeal to Scripture to show that the existence of horrific suffering is consistent with the Christian story may easily yield to us the conclusion that “If God creates a world, God does not create this world.” More precisely, we must be careful in looking upon the actual world as being created by God when attempting to reason about the type of world God would create and the types of worlds she would not/could not! Argumentation may lead us to say, “So, Scripture claims that God made a world with unnecessary horrific suffering… so much the worse for Scripture.“

Given these considerations, Bolt’s objections to the argument in their current form fail, and we may successfully conclude that God does not exist.

The Argument

Let us start by defining a term:

Horrific Suffering (def.) = that most awe-full form of suffering that gives the victim and/or the perpetrator a prima facie reason to think that his or her life is not worth living.

Now, the argument as Schellenberg formulates:

(1) Necessarily, if God exists, finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God realize their deepest good.

(2) Necessarily, if God exists, the prevention of horrific suffering does not prevent there being finite persons who ever more fully experience the reality of God.

(3) Necessarily, if God exists, the prevention of horrific suffering does not prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good. (from 1, 2)

(4) Necessarily, if God exists, there is horrific suffering only if its prevention would prevent there being finite persons who realize their deepest good.

(5) Necessarily, if God exists, there is no horrific suffering. (from 3, 4)

(6) There is horrific suffering.

(7) God does not exist (from 5, 6)

As you can see, the argument is pretty straightforward. Premise (1) is developed out of the idea that there can be no deepest good (where a deepest good is a greatest good for a particular individual) that is superior to the experiencing of God’s reality. What could be superior to the experience of the perfectly good, merciful, loving, just, and wise creator of everything? Premise (2) is motivated in part by the existence of persons in the actual world who attest to experiencing the reality of God in some way and who, themselves, have not gone through the horrific suffering defined at the beginning. Such suffering then cannot be a necessary condition of finite persons realizing their deepest goods and so, the prevention of such suffering would not prevent that realization from occurring. Premise (3) is a simple deduction. Premise (4) is motivated by a typical theistic response to the traditional problems of evil. That is, many theists maintain that a perfectly good God would justifiably cause/permit some person A to suffer, if that suffering were necessary for bringing about some greater good for A. Premise (4) reason then that there are instances of horrific suffering only if preventing this suffering prevents the realization of the deepest good for finite persons. We’ve already seen that it does not, however, and so from (3) and (4) we may reason (5). There obviously are cases of horrific suffering in the world, and (6) is proffered. From (5) and (6) we may deduce that God does not exist.

Free-Will Theodicy

One possible response to the argument would be to suggest that individuals need to be able to cause (or remove) this type of suffering in order to have a world that is serious enough for the virtues of soul-making and choices of destiny. But it is difficult to see how such a condition cannot be satisfied by a world where choices leading to or resulting from the horrific suffering outlined above would not suffice. Taking our actual world as an example, one is tempted to ask “How free are we really?” As we are no doubt exposed to, there exist instances where the occurrence of murder, rape or other such crimes seem to be better explained by the prior states of the world than by the free action of the individual. That is, those who are raised terribly such that their actions seem plausibly explained in sociopsychological terms properly considered an unfreedom. But more interestingly, there are a great many people who do not engage in bringing about horrific suffering who do not even seem able[1]. There seem to be good evidences that a great many people are simply incapable of performing actions which lead to horrific suffering. There are those who, no matter how hard they tried, could not bring themselves right now to rape, murder or launch nuclear bombs at some populated area. Is there really a relevant sense in which we are free?

Freedom in the actual world, thus, does not seem ‘bound up’ with the capacity to cause horrific suffering. But perhaps our reasoning is incorrect, perhaps this is not the case. At least, God could ensure that through the relevant stages, creatures are incapable of performing actions leading to horrific suffering without rendering them less free than they actually are. But even if this is misguided as well, surely we can think of a world where such horrific suffering is absent and note that this world still contains freedom and responsibility. Persons, even if unable to bring about horrific suffering, could have the ability to bring about many nonhorrific evils. This seems to satisfy the relevant concerns as in this world there is much for us to work on improving: emotional pain still exists, we are afraid of death, we have political disputes that may result in war, etc. Such instances are occasions ripe with the ability to produce, in the relevant creatures, choices moral/spiritual significance. We seem able, then, to detach horrific suffering from the development of our selves in this way.

Free-Will Defense

Schellenberg makes use of Peter Van InWagen’s outline of a defense (page 262). Schellenberg notes that the defense, which I will not produce here, makes the following assumptions (keep in mind that InWagen is a Christian):

(1) That love might essentially involve free will.

(2) That creatures gifted with the beatific vision might nonetheless rebel against God and leave Eden.

(3) That what it means to be separate from God might be to live in a world of horrors.

(4) That seeing the horror of life without God might provided the most effective motive of cooperation and return.

(5) That if a reconciliation plan involving horrors was implemented when the rebellion first occurred, many millennia ago, that plan might nonetheless not yet have proved successful.

(6) That those who experience horrors might all know of the existence and nature of God and of God’s call to return.

(7) That if God’s plan is thus, the number and distribution of horrors today might be great and wide enough.

These are assumptions which I want to flag for the purposes of introducing Schellenberg’s argument and a couple of responses, but for a full outline and criticism of InWagen’s Christian Story consult the primary source already named at the beginning of the article. Suffice for the purposes of this brief overview is to note the assumptions above as being assumptions which are anything but obviously (or perhaps even plausibly) true. A brief interesting question to note in passing, re (1), is “What really happens to what we know of love if we find out that we cannot have done otherwise?”

Lastly, one other type of defense would suggest that it is logically possible that God, when contemplating her creation of the world, saw that for each world she would create without horrific suffering in which free creatures achieve their deepest good in freely chosen relationship with her, the attempt to actualize it would be disrupted by uncooperative free agents. Thus, since it’s possible that God cannot achieve her goal of freely chosen relationship with persons without permitting horrific suffering, then any claim that God would necessarily prevent horrific suffering is, at best, unjustified. However, this, Schellenberg suggests, is the wrong conclusion to draw. That God would necessarily prevent horrific suffering becomes unjustified only if freely chosen relationship with God is entailed by possession of the deepest good for creatures. But, it seems clearly not. Taking God’s options in creation and the infinite number of modes of relationship with her, there must be many ways in which our deepest good can be achieved in the absence of freely chosen relationship. It could be the case that God’s glory is made so clear to creatures that our desires to oppose her simply fade away. That is simply one example out of an infinite number. 

Surely God would give consideration to the modes of relationship other than freely-chosen relationship. Alternatives to permitting horrific suffering that are still compatible with finite creatures realizing their deepest good. Any such alternative, since these worlds are equally (as Schellenberg says) splendid is always going to seem preferable to a world where horrific suffering occurs, even if the world in question is a world with freely chosen relationship. Simply consider, as Schellenberg invites, “…if a perfectly good, and loving, and empathetic, and wise God is able to choose between a scenario whose goodness is very great but requires the permission of horrific suffering and a scenario with goodness equally great and no need for such suffering, how does one think the divine would choose?”

_____________________________

[1] As Schellenberg notes, where capability in this context is hashed out by my rejecting the idea of perpetrating horrors at one time, and at the same time being able to choose to do otherwise.

If you consider thoroughly the ramifications of a deity taking care of us, what you’ll find is an irresolvable logical conflict between God guaranteeing health and safety on one hand, and the motivation for of caregiving and interdependence on the other. That behavior happens to define human existence like none other.

So, God doesn’t allow people to suffer and die for specific reasons. He does so because it makes more sense than not that we live as mortals – i.e., with the vulnerability to suffering and death.

God allows suffering and tragedies in our world because only as flesh-and-blood mortals does life on Earth make any sense.

Bad things don’t always have to be understood as serving some greater purpose. However, immanent mortality, or the fact that anyone can suffer and die, is the primary ordering principle of human life. Our mortal vulnerability motivates the behavior that builds an important depth of experience to humanity – including the search for spiritual knowledge.

That’s why God allows us to suffer and die. We have to live as mortals.

In mortal life, there are many flaws and imperfections, but there are no definable or achievable qualities that could be called perfect.

One could say that life builds upon imperfections and frailty – forming immeasurable good out of the possibility of evil and suffering. Our mortal vulnerability motivates caregiving and social organization – the behavior that anchors all culture and civilization. Everything we get from permanent culture – knowledge, traditions, institutions, identity, the structure of families, societies, the civil order of nations, our sense of worth or esteem for our place in them – we owe to the social stability of cooperative living and childrearing. We owe to the behavior compelled by the fact that anyone can suffer and die.

We suffer because the impassive forces that generate and sustain life also imperil it, and because no human could be perfect enough to be free of the potential for evil. But we’re members of families, cultures and civilizations because of our mortal interdependence and the need to guard against human flaws and natural peril.

The theodicy I’ve developed not only explains how mortality structures our existence, it shows why nothing else makes sense – especially and including a deity manipulating existence from the heavens to keep good people safe and healthy.

For God should not be regarded the same as a human bystander who has the means to avert tragedy but does not. (Otherwise, he is either not good or not powerful, the dilemma asserts.) God is the bystander to all tragedies everywhere and throughout time who, if he chose to make us safe himself, would change existence – and not for the better. That’s why I argue that it’s not just important, but essential that people address the dangers of the world instead of God.

Were God to ensure people’s health and safety (or, the health and safety of “good” people, “innocents,” etc.), or arrange that we never suffered too much, he would create a world without incentives or consequences. The result would be a profoundly different world, not a better one.

That’s because God couldn’t address evil by changing the outcomes of only the atheists’ favorite examples of manifestly un-Godly suffering. A just God couldn’t address suffering according to context, newsworthiness, historical significance or sensation unless he was only interested in public relations. Under God’s active stewardship, no earthquake would mean no natural hazards to life at all. No Holocaust could happen because there could be no murder. No tsunamis could threaten life because no one could drown. Precluding cancer could only be part of preventing any excruciating or deadly disease. And we couldn’t suffer or die from starvation or thirst because we couldn’t depend on any kind of sustenance.

Asking for a world in which God keeps innocents safe is asking for a world in which it’s unnecessary to raise children. It’s also asking for a world in which innocents don’t have to live cooperatively with others, work for a lifetime or organize socially at all. A world unburdened of compulsory parenting or work wouldn’t be a bad or evil place. But it certainly wouldn’t be our world “improved.” It’d be idle and more primitive than anything on our planet.

And if God as a rule made exceptions and intervened during times of distress, he would only turn the living incentives we have inside-out and encourage us to live in conditions that guaranteed good health. If our vulnerability to nature extended only as far as we understood it, the advance of knowledge would be hazardous. Likewise, children would be safer without parents. We’d be inclined to avoid fertile soil and water sources that made us hunger and thirst (and compelled us to work for food and water). Isolation from human assistance would distance us from suffering. And if we figured out that people who are physically trapped remained miraculously healthy until rescued, we’d know that one of the best ways to ensure the safety of those we care about would be to entomb them against their will.

It’s easy for atheists to cite incidents and kinds of suffering in isolation and note that God failed or fails to intervene to correct each one. What’s impossible for them for anyone to do is to put all those corrections together, with God creating, arranging, intervening, or whatever, and leave behind a sensible world. We live as mortals and are all able to suffer mortal consequences. Nothing else makes sense.

In fact, we make sense of our existence by giving it cultural form and meaning because we’re all mortal. God could create life and even sustain it, but it’s the living who endow it with value. And we’ve done so by taking care of children and with the social organization that bonds us to families and that forms cultures.

The better aspects of human life exist because health and safety are in the care of mortals and only mortals. It’s not fair to everyone, and the results of our failures and vulnerabilities can be gruesome. But on the one hand, who did anything to deserve a certain amount of life? The answer is no one, and that happens to be true whether a God exists or not.

There’s no divine plan that requires thousands to be crushed, trapped, stranded and killed by rubble. But there is a good reason why we must live as mortal flesh-and-bones, vulnerable to nature and other people.

It’s an essential and even defining fact of living that maintaining health, safety and life itself is our endeavor, and ours exclusively – not God’s responsibility, or ours with God as a backup. I call it the logic of living. It’s not theology, and it’s not even religious; it’s common sense, woven into the fabric of being. Flesh-and-bones is our responsibility. I believe that God concerns himself more with the soul within. It’s an order that works best for us.

What is sentimentally good is not always wise. So it would be with God safeguarding life and limb for a people whose existence is based on behavior meant to safeguard life and limb.

Our world is not perfect, but not because there’s no God or because there’s no good or omnipotent God. It’s not perfect because there’s no such thing as a perfect world.

Preliminary Discussion

                It is useful to begin by saying a brief bit on logic. Logic concerns itself with consequence, which has been referred to as truth-preservation. An analysis of consequence is performed by demonstrating the validity of arguments such that:

(Logical Consequence) Some conclusion C is a consequence[4] of a set of premises P iff in a case where all the premises of P are true, it is a case where C is true.

The “cases” referred to above are laid out by truth-conditions. Systems of logic provide truth-conditions for that which will be parsed through them[5], or rather, what will be a consequence of what. For example, I might provide the following condition (Where P and Q are the ‘things’[6] being parsed):

P ^ Q is true in some case iff P is true and Q is true in the same case.

In providing such a truth-condition I have enabled the system to demonstrate the validity of the following:

P ^ Q

_____

P

If P ^ Q is true then P is true, or in other words, P is a consequence of P ^ Q. The question is whether or not there are multiple ways to understand, or lay out, the aforementioned cases. Logical pluralism rejects the position[7] that there is only one way to determine whether or not some argument is formally valid, or put differently, that there is but one true logic[8].  It proposes instead that there are multiple ways of specifying cases (truth-conditions), all of which are true. If you were to ask the logical particularist whether some argument were valid he or she would maintain that there is only one answer to that question. The logical pluralist would reject that statement.

The Presuppositionalist’s Logical Laws[9]

                In much of the literature I have come across and in my discussions with presuppositionalists as they defend their thesis re logic they state that the non-believer cannot account[10] for the truth of the so-called Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) and the Law of Identity (LI). These titles denote particular propositions found in, at least, Classical Logic (let the following ‘P’s stand for any sentence letter or compound sentence:

LNC: ~(P ^ ~P)

LEM: (P v ~P)

LI: A <-> A

These propositions are tautologies under Classical Logic and while their being named “laws” by some; they possess no special status over any other tautology under Classical Logic, such as:

((A v B) ^ (A -> C) ^ (B -> C)) -> C

Tautologies are formulae which are always true in their systems by virtue of the logical rules, regardless of the truth-value assignment of some sentence letter or compound sentence. That is to say, the mere syntax of the system is sufficient for the truth of tautologies. As an example, take the LEM: (P v ~P) is always true because the logical rules for Classical Logic state that a disjunction is only false when both disjuncts are false and whatever truth-value assignment we give to P, one of the disjuncts in the LEM will be true (Classical Logic only has two truth values: T/F) and that is sufficient for the truth of the entire disjunction.

I suspect that the presuppositionalist will want to disagree with my statement above, that the logical rules of a system are sufficient for the truth of that system’s tautologies. The presuppositionalist will claim that the existence of God stands in some truth-making relation to the tautologies (and everything other truth the system parses). It seems abundantly clear, however, that the logical rules are enough. I suspect the presuppositionalist would posit God as a necessary and sufficient condition, in some fashion, to the truth of the LEM (for example, and to remain consistent).

I have heard two common expositions of the truth-making relationship between the existence of God and the LEM (or any other logical truth). One maintains that the LEM is a reflection of God’s nature. I do not know precisely what is meant by this particular suggestion. What does it mean to be a ‘reflection’ in this context? How is the LEM a reflection? What is it about God’s nature that causes the LEM to be reflected? The questions are numerous. The other suggestion is that the LEM (or any other logical truth) is a reflection of the way God thinks. Similar questions arise to this suggestion as well. In order to move the discussion forward, we can at least concede that both suggestions suggest that there is something about God that makes (in some way) the LEM true.

Concerns

                Now, recall logical pluralism once more and consider some ternary logic (a three-valued logic) in which the LEM comes out false. The LEM essentially states “either true or false” but ternary logic introduces some third value (depending on the system that value might be: indeterminate, irrelevant, unknown, etc.) and so regards the LEM false. This system of logic will have a different logical rules than Classical Logic, in many ways it is a different language as French is different to English. The logical pluralist wants to maintain that this system is fundamentally no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than Classical Logic (though different systems may in different contexts be more ‘useful’). This system will also have tautologies which differ from those of Classical Logic and the pluralist will maintain that they are true tautologies, given the particular ternary system.

Let us assume, though it may be difficult to do, that the logical rules of this system are not sufficient conditions for the truth of some proposition which entails the falsehood of the LEM, and that the existence of God is a necessary and sufficient condition of the truth[11]. If we take the relationship between the existence of God and the truth of the proposition to have something to do with his nature or thinking, then it seems that there is something about God’s nature or thinking that is making the LEM true in one instance and making the LEM false in the other. That is, where under Classic Logic God is making (a) (P v ~P) true, under some ternary logic he is making (b) ~(P v ~P) true.

The two propositions initially seem to be contradictions of each other, but because they are arising out of different logics, they are essentially arising out of different languages. If no translator were present, I think it obvious that “I am hungry” does not contradict “Je n’ai pas faim.” A contradiction only seems to arise when we parse one sentence from some other language into whichever one we are using. So, if I translate “Je n’ai pas faim” and I see that it is the negation of “I am hungry”, now I have some contradiction where prior to the translation/integration, I merely had foreign symbols. So where (P v ~P) and ~(P v ~P) seem to be contradictory, I suggest that this is only the case if taken into a common language where both are expressed and where the rules of that language determine them to be in contradiction. We should not be misled, in our example of (a) and (b) both instances use the same symbols but essentially arise from different languages. So, (a) as expressed in Classical Logic is only contradicted by (b) if it too is expressed in Classical Logic and so on.

Now, continuing along with our assumption that the existence of God (in some way) is a necessary and sufficient condition of the truth of the aforementioned propositions in their respective systems if they are to be non-contradictory, it seems that they must be non-translated. But, focusing on God’s thoughts, what might it mean to say that God’s thoughts (or thinking) act as the truth-maker for the truth of both statements, but that he thinks them in a manner analogous to thinking a statement in French and thinking a statement in English and not knowing the translation[12]? Surely if the statement is translatable, God knows the translation. Put in another way, God in some way makes (a) true in Classical Logic and (b) true in some ternary logic. Assume that by translating (a) into the system of (b), (a) is rendered false and by translating (b) into the system of (a), (b) is rendered false. Something about God (presumably an unchangeable something, according to the Reformed tradition) in this example makes (a) true and makes it false, and likewise with (b). How is one to make sense of this?

Perhaps it is the case that God possesses a system of logic which he translates both (a) and (b) into, and this logic is such that the contradiction yielded by the aforementioned translation “does not matter”. This would be to suggest that God-Logic[13] is dialtheist in some sense, permitting of contradictions in a non-explosive manner. This God-Logic however will of course have its own logical rules, but continuing with our assumption these are insufficient for any of the truths yielded, the truth-maker will have to be something about God. Now we also have something about God that makes the LNC, after translation into God-Logic, both true and false. If this is true then the presuppositionalist explanation regarding what logic is, or how the existence of God relates (in a necessary way) to logic, becomes quite unparsimonious, on one hand leaving being quite mysterious and barely serving as an explanation, and on the other having to invoke a God-Logic which all ‘subsidiary’ logics depend on for coherence.

It renders the position far less plausible, I think, than accepting that the logical rules of various logic systems are the necessary and sufficient conditions for their respective logical truths and that each system generating propositions which may conflict only when translated into another system where the logical rules generate the confliction is not a problem.

Though, at this point, the presuppositionalist may just want to rid themselves of logical pluralism. They may admit to the existence of these other logical systems but deny that they are the one true logic. In this case, as presuppositional logical particularists it seems that they would suggest there exists only one system of logic that is true and something about God stands in a necessary and sufficient truth-making relation to the truths of this system. They might further suggest then that all of this talk about other logics generating contradictions when translated is simply not a problem because that is what we should expect if the other systems are wrong. The problem with this route, I think, is that we do not appear to have any way of knowing which system of logic is the one true logic! From the various presuppositional writings it sounds like the consensus amongst them would be that Classical Logic is the one true logic, but why must one accept this? It would seem then that all of the talk about the “laws” of logic, which are just tautologies of a particular system, is quite possibly irrelevant and incorrect if there exists one true logic. We are in an uncomfortable epistemic position, the very thing from which presuppositionalism promised us deliverance.

                Thusly, the common presuppositionalist argumentation regarding logic and God’s necessity hitherto has, I think, some explanatory work to undertake. It is currently far from convincing that one should reject the sufficiency of a system’s logical rules regarding the truth of some proposition arising from that system in favor of adopting the presuppositionalist view on the matter.

[2] ‘Experience’ should be taken very loosely.

[3] This list is not exhaustive, but is indicative of the usual discussions as per my experience.

[4] One can also make sense of the principle by replacing ‘consequence’ with ‘follows from’.

[5] Provided that what is parsed is capable of being expressed given the system.

[6] Most commonly a claim of some type

[7] Hereby referred to as logical-particularism

[8] The particularist will not deny the existence of other systems of logic any more than the religious particularist denies other religions; he or she will merely deny their truth.

[9] I find it a source of confusion that presuppositionalists only seem to refer to three particular tautologies of a particular system. I do not understand the restriction, but perhaps sake of simplicity plays a role.

[10] I cannot find a conceptual analysis of their usage of ‘account’ though it seems to mean a type of explanation.

[11] Again, that is to say it stands in some type of truth-making relation

[12] Assuming the translation will yield a contradiction.

[13] Thought of as an overarching logical system.

In keeping with the spirit of Lao Tzu, I would like to “respond intelligently, even to unintelligent treatment”. There were some points raised that I think should be responded to, some of which are more ‘personal’ in nature. Again, I must encourage everyone to listen to the recording prior to reading this response, as to obtain the appropriate context of the statements made by both parties. Some sections that follow may feel a tad bit nit-picky, but this is done on purpose. I think this will be a fun exercise in critically examining what’s being said by Slick during this radio show, and discerning just how much substance there is to all of it.

The Persecution

At 2:55 Festivus comes early with an airing of grievances! It is indeed true that recently there has been some hostility between DC (the ‘persecuted’) and some of the other users here at UP. Chat logs demonstrate that there has been hostility of the type outlined in the audio passage on both sides of the issue, that is, performed by both DC and others. In all cases disciplinary action was taken, however, the chat logs do not (to my knowledge) show any instance in which someone called DC “stupid for believing in a mythical god”. In fact, I suspect most of the users would frown on such a statement given how “New-Atheist-ish” it sounds. This is, of course, small potatoes when contrasted with where the audio journey will take us.

It may be worth mentioning that I’ve, personally, noticed what I think to be an interesting change in DC as of late. I have noticed that DC has become quick to pronounce his persecution at the hands of non-Christians when interacting with them in discussion. Now, I am not denying that Christians are indeed persecuted at times (I think it safe to say that every human being is persecuted at some time or another, and Christians are certainly human beings, sometimes persecuted because of their beliefs) but Slick offers a trinket of encouragement at 3:46 that makes it all too easy for the Christian to think that instances of disagreement are instances of Christian persecution, saying  ”If you’re not being attacked, you’re not doing the word of god”. There is some question as to what it means to “do the word of God” but the most charitable interpretation I can think of is that it means (or at least involves, largely) defending one’s Christian commitments. Given this statement we can know (via modus tollens) that if one defends Christian commitments, they will be attacked! Slick is quick to qualify that his principle is only meant to apply to situations of argument. What seems odd here is that by restricting the usage of his principle, he hasn’t actually told us anything interesting! Should it not be entirely obvious that if a Christian is in a situation where he/she is defending their Christian commitments, they are being attacked? If there’s no attack (or at least, a perceived attack) from where comes the need for a defense? Note a couple of things about Slick’s principle; firstly, it’s applicable to absolutely anyone. No matter who you are, or what you believe, if you are in a situation of argument and you are defending your position, you are being attacked. Secondly, note how the rhetoric is constructed in such a way that makes it very easy to affirm such persecution. The principle imposes itself on instances of discourse and fuels this notion of persecution. Consider, if you are an atheist and in the context of an argument, if you are defending atheism then you are being attacked. That’s great! But why think this is an instance of persecution rather than disagreement?

There is another way to interpret Slick’s statement, and that is to take “attack” to refer to a type of person-centered (rather than argument or idea centered) criticism. Something akin to the instances of hostility referred to above. I thought to include this interpretation of Slick’s principle first, but did not do so because it is uninterestingly false. Modified, it would be roughly: “In situations of argument, if you are defending Christian commitments, you are receiving person-centered attacks.” I doubt it will take much argument to show why this is false, but one absurd conclusion from Slick’s principle is that in every dialog ever had between a Christian and a non-Christian the only times where the Christian was *actually* defending Christian commitments are the times in which the non-Christian interlocutor retaliates fallaciously. All of those civil dialogs between prominent Christian philosophers and their opponents can be discarded, unless the opponent lashes out at some point. For added absurdity, look now to Jesus’ interaction with Nicodemus (John 3:1-21). In the defense that Jesus offers in response to Nicodemus’ questions, Nicodemus does not attack Jesus. If Matt Slick is correct in what he has said here, Jesus was not doing the word of God. This seems too silly to take seriously, but again, the rhetoric is certainly useful in invoking feelings of the previously mentioned sort.

Strangely, at 5:04, Slick tells DC that these people (the ‘attackers’) are not insulting ‘him’, they are insulting a ‘figure’ (referring to his screen name, I assume). The use of language here becomes a bit confusing, if ‘DC the person’ is not being insulted, what has Slick been talking about all this time? He then concludes from this that ‘DC-the-person’ just has to “take it”… but take what? We were just told that he’s not being attacked! This appears to be the second instance of a sentence which doesn’t really say much of anything. I find sentences of this type to be particularly interesting in counselling-type conversations, they are the blank cheques of language. I find they are often thrown about and fully left to the counseled to interpret, the end result of course that they are often interpreted as favorable to the perception of the status of whatever ailment is being discussed at the time. Sylvia Browne seems to do it, and now, Matt Slick?

At 5:11 Slick graciously remarks that those who engage in the aforementioned hostility are “servants of the evil one”. As far as I know, I’ve not been hostile in this way to DC and so thankfully am excluded from being a servant of the evil one (for the time being) . Not only are these people servants of the evil one, but DC is told at 5:21 that if he lets them get to him, he will become depressed and start to doubt everything! Not only is this section a glaring instance of a special type of ad hominem we like to call ‘poisoning the well‘, the things DC is being steered away from are curious. Apparently, becoming depressed and starting to doubt things are some very bad things to go through, but I’ve heard numerous conversion stories that start out precisely like that: “Well Karl, I was really depressed and I started to doubt everything… [fast forward 5 minutes] Hallelujiah!” In fact, DC is an example of one of these folks himself (I will not repeat the story here, as I do not know if he would approve, but you can ask him yourself!), but for DC these things led to a great realization. I suppose going through depression and intense doubt is only bad, and should only be avoided, if they do not lead to Jesus. But, what if DC feeling these things indicates yet another coming great realization (surprised face)?! At any rate, what Matt Slick seems to be doing here is, in fact, poisoning the well against those would would attack DC. Of course, he is being attacked because these people are servants of the evil one who despise the lessons of righteousness he espouses, they couldn’t possibly have a point, because they seek only to persecute!

At 6:00 DC is told that “… when you ruffle the feathers of the bad guys… [inaudible]… but you have to understand that in the demonic realm that there’s going to be a certain amount of attack that comes to you… and, plus, if you just hear how bad you are in so many different ways it has an effect on you as well.” A few things, firstly… the bad guys? This well is getting awfully poisoned! Demonic realm? No comment. I did however find the last portion interesting, it’s spoken in a rather negative tone saying that “if you just hear how bad you are in so many different ways it has an effect on you as well”. The tone and the context leads me to think that the effects which Slick is referring to are negative effects. If this is what he means, I would agree with him that hearing how bad you are over and over has negative effects. Empirical verification of this fact can be obtained by sitting in the CARM chat room and listening to some Christians talk about, as they often do, what terrible, worthless, abominations of human beings they all are. Now I’m no psychiatrist, but I’m not sure that partaking in such a discussion is good for your mental health (were we not just implicitly told that we should avoid depression? If this doesn’t cause depression, what does?!). I find the differences in reactions to negative labels particularly interesting, as they seem to change in different contexts. Consider: Christian #1: “Hey, you’re a terrible human being!” Christian #2: “Thanks, you too!” vs. Non-Christian #1: “Hey, you’re a terrible human being!” Christian: “Help, I’m being persecuted!”

Slick confesses at 6:34 that “It is difficult to love the people who are in the [service] of Satan. It is difficult to try and reason with them, and they express hatred. You love them, and they are vile to you.” There are a couple of gems here, but most importantly look at how the term “hatred” is used. Remember, it’s hatred folks, not disagreement, but hatred! He continues, “How do you maintain an attitude of love for them by not being affected by their ungodly demonic attacks?” Correction on my previous sentence, it’s ungodly demonic attacks folks, not disagreement. It seems astoundingly easy to feel persecuted when instead of finding yourself in a disagreement, you find yourself in some remake of Constantine!

Moving along, 7:50: “There are times when I say to myself I’m not being loving enough, and I pray, Lord forgive me, I’m not being loving enough…” 8:48: “You’ll notice, I go in the chat room, you notice I’m very quick to hit the ban button… I am not going to put up with any crap from these idiots… I’ll tell you why, because what they do, they are spiritual vampires, they will suck you dry…”

Well no wonder DC and Matt feel persecuted, with demons and vampires already around, they are one werewolf away from being in a Twilight film! But in all seriousness, I just want to draw attention to the interesting juxtaposition between Matt’s statements. Perhaps it would be easier to love these people, if you didn’t paint them as idiotic demon spirit-suckers. But, more seriously, this is another clear instance of well poisoning.

Moving forward a bit, DC questions why, on this site, no other Christians stepped in to help him defend his position. At 12:33 Slick remarks that “…you will find Christians, for example, who will say ‘you are a bigot, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re in sin’ and these are the ones that are aiding and abedding the enemies of the gospel.” At this point we seem to be moving away from statements that, I contend, bring about or strengthen a persecution mindset, and we are moving towards what seems to be almost a type of paranoia. “You can’t even trust some Christians, as they are in cahoots with the demon soul-suckers. Who are these Christians that are in cahoots? Oh, well the ones who disagree with you!” What does this do to the idea of Christian edification?

Atheism

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, at 16:45 Slick remarks: “When you tackle atheists, because these usually are atheists and liberal wackos, they don’t believe in the Christian God… it’s an easy thing to do… it’s really easy to beat atheists.” Now, I’m not sure how we suddenly jumped from the persecution of DC to talking about atheists, but it happened.

The chat continues: Matt: “You said it was an atheist website, right?” DC: “Yup.”

Hold the phones! UP isn’t an atheist website. Sure, lots of articles are written by atheists (theists, UP wants your contributions!) but the majority of our chat users (where DC spends all of his time here on UP) are non-atheists. I don’t know why he thinks we’re an atheist website (maybe it makes the plot of the persecution story juicier?), but let me put the kibosh on that right now. We’re certainly not a Christian website, but we are not an atheist website.

At 17:12 Slick remarks, with regard to atheists, that: “… you’ve already got them beat. The way to do this is to be strategic. You’ve got to understand that what atheists like to do is gang up on you, you’ll say one thing and they will come in fifty different directions… and complain that you don’t know this and that.” At this point, Slick has appeared to have stopped consoling DC and is now gearing him for battle (Go Team Edward!), but not before he poisons the well yet again and commits the fallacy of hasty generalization. In fact, to avoid repeating myself, roughly all of his chat about “atheists” and what they do commits this fallacy. Further, Matt’s discussion about ‘atheists’ and how they respond to arguments and the like suggests to me that Matt should interact with some more philosophically minded atheists. I’ve extended an invitation to interact with him a couple of times, but as you’ve heard while listening to this radio excerpt, he does not like to engage in written format. He has invited me to phone into the radio show, but I think the issues with some of his particular thoughts far too complicated to be discussed via that format. Though, at 18:30 Matt would have you believe that the reason I’ve not called up is because I know I’m going to get my “clocks cleaned”. I’d like to know how he thinks he knows such things, but needless to say, that statement is probably based on yet another instance of fallacious reasoning. Granted, while we’re playing this game, let me join in and say that the reason Matt Slick will not engage in written dialogue with me is because he’s afraid he’ll get his “clocks cleaned”! Hey, that was kind of fun…

18:37: “Now what they’re going to do is hide, and lie, and cheat, and steal. Just consider them like that.” If you’re confused, you’re not alone! Perhaps we should thank Matt here though, since he did restrain himself from mentioning our demonic soul-sucking practices in this particular example. Not only do I not understand the relevance of this point, I find his usage of “just consider them like that” interesting as well. We’ve poisoned this well so much that the residents of the city are drinking alcohol for hydration! Is he actually telling DC to just consider atheists as those who hide, lie, cheat and steal? Do I even need to list the fallacies at play here?

At 18:50 Slick begins to draw some battle plans. “Here are some principles: use what they say against them… it’s very easy to do. You have to understand something, they do not have the proper basis of rational thought, nor do they have the basis of moral objectivity. They don’t have those things…” He continues on recounting a dialog between him and some atheist wherein he “stumps” them by asking, “how do you know?” I think the same question needs to be extended to Slick based on the statements he’s just made. 19:52: “She has now hung herself [by making an assertion]… when they make assertions, ask them to verify their assertions.” I feel just eerie listening to this, it really is some sort of battle plan (though it kindly left out the bit about how you can defeat us by driving stakes through our hearts!).

Aside from DC’s monumental misunderstanding of moral nihilism espoused in the latter portion of minute 21 (how can things be morally permissible if there exists no morality?) Matt continues with his instruction, at 21:48 he states “…in order to [use the atheists statements against them] you’re going to have to study logic… you should learn [list of fallacies]…” I will politely recommend that this instruction be adjusted inward. What Matt seems to take to be the goal of logic, I doubt is actually the goal of logic. But, further, he tells us about a girl who said she enjoyed the content on his website, but could not trust it because Matt is a Calvinist. Matt identifies this as an instance of the genetic fallacy. At 22:32 he says, “… the information on the website needs to be studied on its own merits and not judged by the source, but by what it is.” Well let’s hold the phones again, Matt seems to tread awfully close to committing this fallacy throughout the discussion. I find it curious that he acknowledges that arguments need to be considered on their own merits, but spends a considerable amount of time teaching DC how to argue against atheists and not particular atheistic arguments. Interesting, yes?

The reason I feel so uncomfortable about discussions like this is that its all too similar to putting guns on children and sending them out to shoot people. Matt Slick has given DC a particular rhetorical technique to use, but he’s not given him any explanation as to why his analysis is correct. I find that to be some scary stuff indeed.

At 24:11 he goes on to suggest that in arguing with atheists DC should think about where their argument leads. Just a minor point of clarification, if Slick is suggesting a proof by contradiction, hooray. If he’s not, he’s implicitly utilizing another fallacious method of reasoning, namely, the fallacy of the slippery slope! If he does that, he’ll just commit a whole bunch of other fallacies! (There’s an example of it, just for fun!)

Oh, another added bonus, at 25:31 Matt actually utilizes the fallacy of the slippery slope. Doesn’t he offer a course on logic on his website? Oh well, at least he doesn’t soul-suck.

The next portion is largely uninteresting, as I find it to be the usual confused chatter about morality. I strongly suggest a course in ethics for Mr. Slick, however.

At 28:20 something really strange happens. Earlier, DC identified with Matt an instance of fallacious reasoning known as the genetic fallacy, but now DC actually commits the fallacy! He says: “Even if an atheist gives you a formal argument, and you don’t understand it at the time, if you put enough time into it, you start to look at where the worldview is coming from, you can tear it to pieces.” What?! Why didn’t Matt Slick, our resident logician for the day, call DC out on this fallacy? Maybe fallacies are only fallacies when used by vampires!

Conclusion

I could go for quite awhile, I think, but I don’t want to make this too long to read. Admittedly, I have been facetious in places but I hope at the very least I’ve drawn out some issues that are interesting to think about. The encouragement or provocation of “Christian Persecution-(ism?)” from fellow Christians, the vilification of non-Christians, and the arming of ill-prepared Christians with quick-draw tactics forgoing teaching with any real rigor. When all is said and done, this conversation at least gives the non-theist a basis for claiming persecution. I’ve never felt more vilified in my life!

Beatrice:          What do you think the problem of evil can accomplish? Can it argue someone out of their faith?

Adam:             I think so. People do lose their faith, and evil is a common reason why. It isn’t always argued or reasoned: I don’t think people are carefully constructing inductive arguments when they ask why God let their child die. Evil might subvert or damage one’s relationship with god: you might hate god, or believe that he hates you. This doesn’t make sense if God exists as advertised by religion: he hasn’t (and can’t) do anything to warrant hatred, and loves us all.

But whether there is a good argument matters. If evil doesn’t really suggest Atheism[1], then those who renounce God in the face of evil are making a tragic error. But if it does, perhaps we should make a more sober conclusion: instead of a malicious or uncaring god, perhaps there isn’t one at all. Perhaps we live unsupervised by a caring creator, and so evil is wholly expected: the world was never made to make life good for us.

Beatrice:          What do you mean by ‘good argument’? That any reasonable person aware of it must accept its conclusion? That it would be decisive for an ‘ideal’ agnostic?[2]

Adam:             Neither. I can’t think of any argument that would persuade everyone who is reasonable. And although an ideal agnostic standard is closer to the mark, I don’t think it is very helpful here – unlike some more arcane fields of philosophy, I think everyone has prior commitments and intuitions about God.

So I’d want something like the following: A good argument is one that can change a rational person’s degree of belief. A reasonable person, after considering the premises and the inferences of the argument being offered, adjusts their confidence in the conclusion.

Invalid arguments are never good. But probably unsound arguments might be. Even if a given premise of an argument is believed to be probably false, it might still undermine great confidence in the opposite of its conclusion. If you were certain of X, but only pretty sure that Y, then being presented a valid argument that X iff Y, then perhaps you shouldn’t be certain of X, but only pretty sure, like you are of Y.

Beatrice:          Perhaps, but you might do the opposite. On realizing X iff Y, and that you are certain of X, why not conclude that, in fact, you should be certain of Y too? That might be reasonable – yet it would mean this isn’t a good argument: they’re still certain of X. Yet in principle any argument can be ‘turned around’ and played in reverse to deny the premises used in a ‘Moorean shift’. So are there no good arguments?

Adam:                         There are perhaps two degrees of belief at work here: you’re actual likelihood assessment, and your confidence in that likelihood assessment. I may believe something is as likely as not because of long and bitter enquiry, or through simple ignorance – and it would take a lot more argumentative might to shift the former P ~ 0.5 than the latter.

So you might need a suite of arguments: if I thought, when showing X iff Y to get someone to be uncertain of X instead of certain of Y there was a risk they’d reinforce their priors, I might want need other arguments to close off this option – separate reasons why you shouldn’t be certain of Y.

Beatrice:          Similar difficulties apply when trying to provide these reasons for why Y shouldn’t be considered certain – perhaps I might be inclined to reverse that argument too. That doesn’t seem an unrealistic prospect for real arguments like the Argument from Evil: it touches on lots of side concerns about ethics, free will, divine foreknowledge, and so on. All of these have a plethora of different positions – all held, I imagine, by pretty reasonable people. These in turn may draw their credence from still more beliefs, and so on. To get someone to accept the Argument from Evil might require you to transform their entire web of beliefs from the locus of one argument.

Adam:                         I don’t quite agree. You are right that I am faced with lots of different webs of belief to negotiate, but I don’t need to offer arguments for every single remotely relevant belief. I might argue that a given belief doesn’t matter either way; the argument still works whether it is Z or not-Z. Or I might offer parallel arguments, one for if Z, and one for if not-Z (or for all the alternative reasonable positions if it isn’t yes or no) for the conclusion I am after.

That’s hard, but no one wants the problem of evil to be successful with some prior beliefs, but not with others; they want it to be shown that evil is good evidence or not regardless of the variation in prior beliefs sensible people may have. I think some issues cannot be side-stepped (for example, the issue of free-will) but many can.

Beatrice:          Fine. But even if an argument has persuasive power, that needn’t change someone’s mine. Even if evil does provide evidence against God, other concerns might give stronger evidence in favour.

Even if we can see that God probably doesn’t exist, then that isn’t necessarily important. I don’t think many people believe in God through evidentialist grounds – it means more than that. Likewise, I don’t think probability assignments have all that much to do with the religious form of life. Even if I thought God was unlikely, I might believe in him out of the hope he was there.[3]

Adam:             I agree with you. Even if evil does constitute evidence against God it may still be the cumulative case for Theism over Atheism is decisive. When considering multiple arguments, the picture I’ve given above becomes even more complicated. But evil is a better place to start than most: it is a common reason why people don’t believe, and ‘hits you in the gut’ a way more metaphysical concerns with natural a/theology lack.

I also agree to your second point: one needn’t believe that God probably exists to have faith in him – so for these people, God’s probability is moot. Yet I think it can inform doxastic attitudes: if you think that a world without God isn’t that bad, then you might consider having faith in God similar to hoping that you’ll receive a fortune: you might, if asked, accept that it would be good, but this won’t motivate the sort of committed hope which could resemble a ‘living faith’.

Beatrice:          Life might be wonderful for you, but what about everyone else? If God doesn’t exist, then many people – often those who form ‘case studies’ of the problem of evil – have lives that are horrendous. Whatever goods in their lives are not only outweighed but defeated by the evils they suffered.[4] So perhaps hope for them should motivate faith.

Adam:                         Pace universalism, Theists don’t hope for this either – many that live awful lives will lose out post-mortem too.[5] Perhaps whatever account they offer is still better than likely oblivion, but it doesn’t seem very hopeful to me.

Why not a universalist? Because I think it is too remote a possibility to be worth hoping for. Like me magically becoming rich, it is something that I would like, and something that is for all we know possible, but it seems a waste of time to bother entertaining hope that it will happen. So too a universalist God, if the argument from evil works as well as I think it does.

Beatrice:          Fine. So what is the argument?

Evil:

Adam:             Consider:

1)    If God exists, there are no examples of pointless evil.

2)    There are cases of pointless evil.

3)    God does not exist.[6]

‘Pointless’ means without justification. A gratuitous evil is not one that is necessary, in whatever sense, for an outweighing good.[7]

This is the core of the problem of evil. It’s surely a valid argument. I think it is basically sound as well. We don’t know for certain that there are pointless evils, but it’s pretty damn likely given the lots of apparently pointless evils that some are pointless.

Beatrice:          I know most of the criticism hinges on (2), or the evidential premise, but I have doubts about the theological premise as well. I think there may be cases where God would permit a particular case of evil, not because it itself locally permits a greater good, but that permission of that evil might be globally necessary, in whatever sense. Perhaps God must permit a certain number of horrendously evil events to occur such that we realize our fallen nature, but there are no particular events specified.[8]

This is similar to other principles that might ‘tie god’s hands’. Perhaps God cannot stop a young child being raped and murdered because he must maintain a world of moral choices, or perhaps he must allow her to drown because he cannot allow massive irregularities of the laws of nature. This gives a Theist a lot of latitude: defences, along these lines, can be vague.

Adam:             I agree with this sort of vagueness, but there still must be global justification, even if local explanations are lacking. But I wouldn’t agree with the hypothesis that there is no minimum: even if no explanation can be demanded for why this child as opposed to that, but one can be for how many children in total. Perhaps to some extent this is out of his hands, but he must pick the best strategy to minimize this global evil.[9]

I agree such concerns are useful in local evil. A valid defence to a particular charge isn’t why that child suffered, but that some children needed to – and if so, then why not that one? I am happy to argue against candidates of such defences, should the need arise.

Given how we’ve alluded to case studies and suffering children, here’s an example from recent news – if I’ve mistaken some the details, I hope you’ll agree that evils like this can and do occur.

The Puttick family was, by all accounts, an idyllic one. Neil and Kazumi were devoted to each other and their newborn son, Sam. One friend of the family said: “if you could bottle up a perfect marriage, theirs would be it.”

They were involved in a car accident in 2005. Kazumi’s legs and pelvis were broken. Sam’s spine was severed at the neck – he would have died were it not for two doctors who stopped to help. On being rushed to hospital, the parents were told that Sam’s injuries were catastrophic. Neil was defiant:

“… I believe in my heart the doctors are wrong and he will win. I believe God is with us and Sam will walk, talk and breathe again.

He was a miracle when he came to us, it was a miracle when he survived the crash and it will be a miracle when he recovers. These things do happen and they will happen to Sam.”

Sam survived, and flourished. Both Neil and Kazumi quit their jobs to devote their time to looking after Sam and raising the money necessary for his care. The wider community helped out too with sponsored events. They also sent pictures of themselves from all over the world holding cards with ‘Hi Sam!’, which Sam enjoyed immensely. Given all of this, perhaps the evil of Sam’s injury was outweighed (or even defeated) by all of these goods.

Sadly, that isn’t the end of the story. At the age of five Sam fell ill with meningitis, and it became clear there was no hope of survival. Neil and Kazumi took Sam home, and he died soon afterwards. His parents put Sam’s body in a rucksack, and filled another one with his toys. They carried both of these to the cliffs at Beachy head. Beachy head is a suicide hot-spot: a Chaplaincy has been set up there solely to try and prevent suicides. Yet neither they nor any passers-by saw Neil and Kazumi. They threw themselves to their deaths.

The point of this story is not to give other another ‘theodicial nasty’, but rather to point out the usual sub-categorizations (‘natural evil’, ‘moral evil’) aren’t always clear, and aren’t always useful. It also brings into stark relief some of the harder problems with the usual theodicies

Beatrice:          This is horrific. But what are these ‘harder problems’ why couldn’t one try and offer accounts for the natural and moral evil involved in events like these?

Adam:                          Take moral evil. The usual discussions of moral evil involve what I call deliberate moral evil: someone explicitly intends to harm someone else. An example would be van Inwagen’s example of “The Mutilation”, the true story of a woman who was raped, beaten, and both arms severed at the elbow, or Rowe’s case of “Sue”, where a young child was raped and killed.[10] Examples like these are picked to provide the ‘toughest case’ a free will defence needs to answer – if it works for them, perhaps it can work elsewhere.

Yet I think ‘Radical evils’ – to use Arendt’s phrase – aren’t the hardest ones for Theists to account for – such profound deliberate evils fit well with a Theistic account of mankind’s nature.[11] The hardest ones are cases where the choices leading to the moral evil are far less significant than the evil itself. Suppose that a Doctor – if only he knew that Sam Puttick had meningitis – could have stopped the infection before it got out of control. Or that perhaps, if he were an incredibly good Doctor he would have made the diagnosis in time, but as he was only a good Doctor he did not. There seem lots of instances where God could have gently guided people’s morally-irrelevant decisions towards the good. God might have to allow evil things to happen when people will the wrong, but why allow evil things to happen when people will the good?[12]

Beatrice:          This ties into global concerns I suggested earlier. Perhaps there are certain ‘freedom’ thresholds that God needs to keep in order to preserve a moral world, a Vale of soul-making, or something like this?

Adam:             But these ‘choices’ have no moral bearing – so why should God protect them? Surely God would want to facilitate good acts wherever possible by this ‘guidance’.

Beatrice:          Who says he doesn’t? Such ‘commonplace miracles’ are mentioned often in the lives of believers.

Adam:                         Perhaps, but what about these instances of ‘missed providence?’ What thresholds need to be observed for these morally irrelevant choices: why can’t God offer a guiding hand all the time?

Beatrice:          What about a threshold of mystery? Maybe if God did guide us too much we’d begin to wonder at all these little coincidences, why providence always favoured us.

Adam:             We seem to be going in a circle – you said a minute ago that God really did guide us so much that some of us (albeit believers) twig that he’s at work in these ‘commonplace miracles’. Besides, Theism – at least the Theism of world religions – entails commitment to the idea that God does get intervene drastically: consider the lives of Jesus or Muhammad. If he’s willing to do that, what plausible excuse does he have to do something far more subtle?

Of course, all of these leads to the problem of hiddenness – that, actually, God being mysterious and apart is exactly what we shouldn’t expect on Theism.[13] To appeal to it as a solution to evil seems to be avoiding one monster by throwing oneself down the throat of another.

This concern ramifies elsewhere: after all, the precipitating cause of the Puttick tragedy was a natural evil – meningitis. Now, I suspect you will offer some defence of natural evil on the need for having a regular order of the natural world.

Beatrice:          Partly. I also find it strange when Atheists are so confident in suggesting adjustments to the laws of nature – that we all be unable to be bodily harmed, say – as definite improvements. I have little idea what the world would be like under radically different natural laws, if you’ll excuse the term.

Adam:             It is better to focus on fairly minor changes to natural laws, especially those where we can easily imagine what the world would be like, for example a world without HIV or Polio. If we imagine an ‘evil landscape’ or phase-space, it may well be that far away from our location on this evil landscapes that there are minima lower than ours – but it’s hard for us to assess worlds so far from our own. However, if I only want to show our world has some pointless evil, then showing a local minimum nearby would be sufficient.

But the Puttick’s point to another problem: that the world doesn’t need to be actually regular. It just needs to appear regular. So it seems clear God could have simply prevented Sam Puttick from getting ill whilst still keeping up appearances of regularity and order. It isn’t like people would wonder “isn’t it strange Sam didn’t die of meningitis when he was five? That’s terribly irregular.”

Beatrice:          Two concerns. One: why not say that genuinely regular worlds are better than apparently regular worlds, in a similar way to genuinely living is better than plugging yourself into an experience machine? Two: What about the argument that there wouldn’t be a minimum to suffering, because if God stopped this instance of suffering, he should have stopped that one too, then another, and then we end up removing all the evil which was serving a purpose in the first place?

Adam:                         I think your first argument will struggle. The Theistic god regularly breaks the natural order, so you need a plausible account to justify these to avoid allegations of special pleading. I also don’t see the strength of the analogy with the experience machine: we don’t hook ourselves up because we want genuine experiences, but I don’t see the appeal of living in a world with genuinely regular laws over one with apparently regular laws. After all, for all I know, the laws aren’t regular anyway.

For the second concern, consider the world has so much evil to achieve a certain threshold. Surely we can rearrange this: so the meningitis that got Sam could have affected someone who would survive. You may then say your argument applies just as well to this: because if we rearranged this evil, why not that evil and end up with an evil being rationally arranged. Yet this isn’t true – there would be a global reason why he couldn’t eliminate all evils. We can know that your threshold concern doesn’t apply – simply because we realize that we would be none the wiser about God’s intervention in Sam’s case than if he didn’t. So we know by inspection we aren’t at the minimum threshold.

Beatrice:          Is it really as simple as that? The minimum threshold must be vague – we can’t lie ‘on the limit’, because that itself could be taken to show God’s action in the world.

Adam:                         I think you might be confusing me unnecessarily. If we grant God requires some mystery in his action in the world as justification for great natural evils. I think Sam’s case is sufficient to knock that over – if it never happened, we wouldn’t lose any of this mystery. It’s an open question how many such evils God could remove without violating this global concern, but it’s pretty clear there’s at least one.

There is a general worry here too. If you expand this idea of mystery too far – that God must make it appear that he doesn’t exist, then you might end up with a position like “God exists, but he makes the world looks like he doesn’t”. If you do, why shouldn’t someone turn around and say “Then I reject this idea in the same stroke as I do external world scepticism”?

Beatrice:          No, I see the problem. I think you are right about explanations for evil being much harder than I might hope. There are two worries: one is that the concerns a Theist offers simply don’t ‘cut it’. A theist might not agree, but I confess I am tempted to agree with Ivan Karamazov when he says free will concerns are never enough to justify the suffering of an innocent child.[14]

The second problem, which we’ve talked about, is instrumental. Even if free will, or soul making or similar are valid concerns, God seems to have done a cack-handed job of realizing them – that we can see that someone interested in free will, or soul making, or whatever, could do it better. I see that you are right in that looking at evils together, how evils can engender or amplify each other presents difficulties for the Theist.

Adam:             The usual dialectical moves in the problem of evil involve the Atheologian cutting out whole classes of evil to side-step potential theodicies. So you avoid moral evil to dodge the free will defence, and you usually end up with instances of animal suffering as the toughest problem for Theists to provide explanations for.

This approach is, to my mind, misguided: it concedes far too much ground, and ignores all the interactions which, to my mind, make evil so difficult. The cases of the Putticks, I think, is so awful precisely because of how it happened despite the moral virtues of all involved (worse, perhaps it happened because of these moral virtues: perhaps, if Sam and Kazumi were not such utterly devoted parents, they might still be alive today).

This discussion kicked-off because I wanted to justify premise (2) in my argument: that there are pointless evils. Given the formidable difficulties I’ve pointed out by trying to show it likely there are ‘points’ to the evils we observe. I think it is fair to say (2) is probably (or almost certainly) true. Given (1), or something in the neighbourhood or (1) is also true, would you be willing adjust your likelihood of god downwards?

Beatrice:           Evil already ‘adjusts it downwards’, in whatever sense. However, what you’ve said about scepticism reminded me of something. I think I might have let you go too far in your argument. I think we should be a bit more sceptical.

Appearance

Beatrice:          I think there might be another way to think about evil. We have both been groping around some of the difficulties and trying to work out how it falls together. I don’t think we are in any position at all to figure out the problem of evil. It might look like some evil is unjustified, but that is only in the same way that a patch of grass seems not to have insects on when we view it from a skyscraper. We do not satisfy the Condition of Reasonable Epistemic Access (CORNEA for short).

Wykstra put it something like this:[15]

“For X to say ‘it appears that P’, it must be reasonable for them to believe, if it were not-P, it would appear otherwise.’

In a similar way, Evil’s might appear pointless, but on further reflection we should see that we are in the skyscraper case. If so, then the rest of the discussion on evil doesn’t matter: instead of getting God’s acquittal, we’ve found out our verdict is unsafe.

Adam:             It’s hard to see, if we should doubt the appearance of pointless evil, what else we should doubt as well. How about this:

M)        Suppose you were able to stop Neil and Kazumi Puttick committing suicide. If God exists, then it’s likely that he sees great goods beyond our ken. Thus, although it might appear that stopping these people committing suicide is good, in fact we aren’t in a position of epistemic access to say this.

Yet this is strange.[16]

Beatrice:          Why should I be committed to something like this? I only need to be sceptical about how god must interact with the moral world.

Adam:             What would distinguish this from simply appealing to your reasons for Theism (whatever they may be) to rebut the argument from evil: “Sure, it appears that there are instances of pointless suffering, but I think different rules apply to God.”

And I think, if not this, you are committed to different rules. If the world is so morally obscure such that only God can fathom out the right thing to do. Yet in our day-to-day lives he ensures we can trust our faculties for the bulk of our decision making. That seems pretty ad-hoc to me.

Beatrice:          What’s the problem? Why not say that – but for the grace of God – we have no hope of understanding our moral world. This isn’t (at least for me) an ad hoc adjustment. It fits in quite nicely with the noetic effects of sin.

Adam:                         Sure, but these seem extensions to the Theistic hypothesis, and although they purchase immunity from disconfirming evidence, but at the risk of making the conjunction of (Theism & Extension) implausible – it becomes ‘top heavy’.[17] This worry I think applies if you make further moves: for example, why can’t, if there’s evil which God must permit for reasons beyond our ken, could God not give us some sense of assurance that it is all for the best? You might say ‘Why not apply CORNEA to this, too?’ but I think people are at liberty to think that God permits evils for reasons beyond our ken, and in a bulk of theses cases must, also for reasons beyond our ken not assure of that he is permitting these evils for reasons beyond our ken seems, to me, flatly ridiculous. It doesn’t get off the ground as an explanatory hypothesis, and I can only urge you to think the same.

I think we can argue that moral obscurity is implausible by its own merits. The argument in favour relies on a comparative judgement – God, if he exists, would possess intellectual and moral capacity vastly in excess of our own. Yet this isn’t enough to get to the conclusion, which is that we aren’t in a position to trust moral appearances.

Analogies offered by William Alston for sceptical theism can be co-opted to make this point clearer.[18] He points to examples like chess grandmasters to laymen, physics professors to students, or parents to children suggest instances where the former can’t explain their reasons to the latter (‘Why did you move the pawn there?’ ‘How did you derive that?’ ‘Why can’t we eat?’) yet their beliefs or behaviours being wholly reasonable. So here’s the problem – focus on the chess example:

Even if a layperson can’t dissect out optimal play or a complicated mid-game scenario, he might be able to do something simple like assess whether black is in checkmate. He might be able to work out less categorical circumstances: if white has got a pawn and black all his pieces, then they’d be surely reasonable to think ‘black is winning’. Now, a grandmaster can be more confident that ‘black is winning’, and perhaps supply many more reasons why black is in fact winning, but that still doesn’t mean our layperson isn’t in a position of epistemic access. We don’t show that by pointing to people who have far better access than us. We show the situation at hand is inaccessible.

Why believe that for day-to-day ethical scenarios? Given most conceptions of normative ethics, we are able to morally assess states of affairs somewhat competently. Moreover, these theories tend to be axiologically complete – we don’t hold open the door for other things being good besides what we specify, so qualities of ‘goods beyond our ken’ seem implausible. Instances of ‘goods beyond our ken’ with qualities we already know are plausible, but, on the bulk of normative theory, this isn’t so common as to make appearances untrustworthy. It might be harder to assess things like justification, greater goods and other concerns in the problem of evil, but it still remains surely accessible.

Of course, some moral questions might really be inaccessible – but the problem of evil looks at cases where it seems clear that something is pointlessly evil. Of course, it might be that all the apparent evils we observe aren’t evil at all. But I never claimed to be infallible. Besides, given there are lots of apparently gratuitous evils, it seems a pretty safe bet that at least some of these are gratuitous. CORNEA needs to convince us that the appearances of pointlessness give no reason to think it is pointless because we aren’t in a position of epistemic access. But we’ve seen believing that we have access (even if God’s is far better) is highly plausible. So CORNEA collapses – not because of wider conceptually difficulties, but because it simply doesn’t apply to the circumstances. We aren’t ‘on a skyscraper’ regarding pointless evil. We’re in the thick of it.

Beatrice:          Then perhaps theodicy has a role after all: to try and ‘muddy the waters’ of what appears to be. If one can be convinced that the appearances aren’t as clear as one thinks – that it is more like dissecting a complicated midgame than seeing if you’re in check, then assumedly sceptical Theism is back in the game.

Adam:                         Yes, if. Concerns of soul-making or free will or regularity do ‘muddy the waters’. Yet it needs to be made entirely opaque for a sceptical defence to work. Perhaps we do see through a glass darkly, but the image is clear enough to me.

REFERENCES:

Adams, Marilyn M. (2006). Christ and Horrors, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Adams, Robert M. (1972) “Must God Create the Best?” Philosophical review, 81(3): 317-332

Alston, William P. (1996) “Some (Temporarily) Final thoughts on the Evidential Argument from Evil,” In Howard-Snyder (ed.) The Evidential Problem of Evil. Bloomington. Indiana University Press.

Almeida, Michael J and Oppy, G. (2003) “Sceptical Theism and Evidential Arguments from Evil,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81: 496–516.

Chrisholm, Roderick M. (1968) “The Defeat of Good and Evil,”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 42: 21–38

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

Hasker, W. (2008). The Triumph of God over Evil: Theodicy for a World of Suffering, Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Howard-Snyder, Frances. (1994) “How an Unsurpassable Being Can Create a Surpassable world.” Faith and Philosophy 11: 260-268

Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Moser, Paul K. (2001) Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, New York: Cambridge University Press

van Inwagen, Peter (2006) The Problem of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press

van Inwagen, Peter (1991) The Problem of Evil, The Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence. Philosophical perspectives, 5: 135-165.

Murray, Michael J. (1993) “Coercion and the Hiddenness of God,”

Pojman, Louis P. (1991) “Faith, Doubt and Hope” in Contemporary Classics in Philosophy of Religion, eds. Ann Loades and Loyal Rue, Open Court pp. 183-207

Rowe, William L. (1979). “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 16: 335-41

Rowe, William L. (1984) “Evil and the Theistic Hypothesis: A response to Wykstra” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 16: 95-100

Rowe, William L. (1996). “The Evidential Argument from Evil: A Second Look,” in Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, 262-85.

Rowe, William L. (2006). “Friendly Atheism, Skeptical Theism, and the Problem of Evil,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 59: 79-92

Russell, Bruce and Wykstra, Stephen J. (1988) “The ‘Inductive’ Argument from Evil: A Dialogue” Philosophical Topics, 16(2): 133-160

Schellenberg, John R. (2005) “The hiddenness argument revisisted,” [two essays] Religious studies, 41:201-215 and 287-303.

Schellenberg, John R. (1993) Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Weilenberg, Erik J (forthcoming) “Skeptical Theism and Divine Lies” Religious Studies

Wykstra, Stephen J. (1984). “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of `Appearances’.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 16

Wykstra, Stephen J. (2009). “CORNEA (1984 – 2009) In Memoriam?” Presentation at the 18th Baylor Philosophy of Religion Conference. Available online at:

Wykstra, Stephen J. (2007): “Cornea, Carnap, and Current Closure Befuddlement” in Faith and Philosophy 24:1 88.

[2] See van Inwagen (2006) Ch. 2 for an example of this criterion of ‘philosophical success’

[3] Pascal’s wager is a common argument, but here rational self-interest is not being appealed to, but rather “if God does not exist, life might not be splendid”. See Pojman (1991)

[4] ‘Defeat’ is being used in a manner after Chrisholm (1968). Evils and Goods can be outweighed by greater goods or evils. They are only defeated if that evil or good is a necessary part of the greater whole that is good or evil.

[5] This concern can explicitly motivate commitment to universalism. See (M. Adams 1999) p229-230

“Traditional doctrines of hell go beyond failure to hatred and cruelty by imagining a God Who not only acquiesces in creaturely rebellion and dysfunction but either directly organizes or intentionally “outsources” a concentration camp (of which Auschwitz and Soviet gulags are pale imitations) to make sure some creatures’ lives are permanently deprived of positive meaning.”

[6] Formations of the ‘evidential problem of evil’ are on these lines, although they might be expressed in probabilistic or Bayesian idiom (see Draper (1989)). Here, I use Rowe’s formulation, expressed first in Rowe (1979)

[7] The concept of ‘gratuitous evil’ is difficult, but will not be discussed here.

[8] van Inwagen (2006, 1991) and Hasker (2008) are two who employ this approach.

[9] Two problems: Robert Adam’s has suggested that God is ‘within is rights’ not to minimize evil (R. Adams 1972). It is also commonly urged that God cannot minimize evil, because there simply is no minimum: God is not able to do it in a similar way that he can’t tell us the last integer (See Howard-Snyder and Howard Snyder (1994)). I urge that even though God could add goods to a world without end, there is a limit to pointless evils – none. Thus (at least on this point) it is fair to demand god minimize evil.

[10] See Rowe (1979) and van Inwagen (2006) respectively.

[11] One might hope that evils like the mutilation or Sue’s murder are natural evils because those who committed them weren’t sane. Sadly, even if those evils really were done by madmen, it seems likely that at least some evils as horrific as them were done by people who were ‘in their right mind’.

[12] This point is developed, in part, from a fleeting mention in Russell and Wykstra (1988)

[13] For snapshots of the evolving discussion on the ‘Problem of divine hiddeness’, See Schellenberg (2005, 1993), Murray (1993), and Howard-Snyder and Moser (2001)

[14] See Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov, Ch. 5.

[15] After Wykstra (1984). Much like the original argument (which it was a response to) it can also be phrased in probabilistic idiom. Rowe (2006) and Wykstra (2009) give the two sides of this developing conversation.

[16] These reductios are a common response to sceptical Theism (of which Wykstra’s work is one branch). Besides arguing that it entails moral scepticism (Oppy and Almeida (2003)), it’s also been suggested that it leads to violations of epistemic closure (Wykstra 2007) and that Theists should not trust God’s revelation (Weilenberg forthcoming)

[17] This is the main objection Rowe deploys against sceptical Theism: that the ‘extension’ of moral obscurity isn’t plausible ‘by its own lights’, even if it purchases immunity from disconfirmation by apparent evil. See Rowe (1984)

[18] See Alston (1996)

Collins’ Argument Paraphrased

Collins’ cosmological fine-tuning argument is deceptively simple, yet requires an extensive vocabulary of abbreviations, various hypotheses, and scientific and philosophical terms. Here, I will attempt to offer a version of the argument that is more accessible, without losing any of the power or simplicity of the original¹.

1. Given the fine-tuning evidence, it is very, very surprising that a life-permitting universe (LPU) exists, under a naturalistic single universe hypothesis (NSU).

2. Given the fine-tuning evidence, it is not surprising at all that a life-permitting universe exists, under a theistic hypothesis (T).

3. The theistic hypothesis was advocated prior to the discovery of the fine-tuning evidence, and thus is not ad hoc.

4. Therefore, by the likelihood principle, LPU (the existence of a life permitting universe) strongly supports T (the theistic hypothesis) over the NSU (naturalistic single universe hypothesis).

(Collins 2009, p. 207)

The fine-tuning evidence of which Collins writes is the fact that the laws, constants, and initial conditions of our universe must fall within a very narrow range in order for a universe to be life permitting. A life permitting universe is one which can support the existence of, what Collins calls, embodied moral agents; complex physical beings possessing intelligence and the ability to make moral choices and affect one another. The naturalistic single universe hypothesis states that there is only one universe and that the values of the constants, laws, and initial conditions are a unexplainable brute fact, and could have had any value from a very wide range. The theistic hypothesis states that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, eternally existing, and free creator of the universe. And the likelihood principle states that the degree that a piece of evidence counts towards one hypothesis over another, is proportional to the ratio of how surprising the evidence is under each hypothesis.

The justification for the first premise comes from the fact that there is a very large range of values that each physical constant could have taken, but only a very small range of values which would have allowed the resulting universe to be life-permitting. And, given the naturalistic single universe hypothesis, there is no reason to expect each constant to take one value, as opposed to any other. That each constant took a value which allows the universe to be life-permitting, then, is very surprising under NSU.

The second premise is justified by appealing to God’s motivations, which we can know by reasoning from the attributes that Collins takes Him to have. Collins explains that the only reasons God would have to do anything would be to increase the moral and aesthetic value of reality (2009, p. 254). From that, it is reasonable to conclude that the existence of embodied moral agents does add significantly to the moral and aesthetic value of reality. Therefore, it is not surprising at all that God would create a universe (with aesthetic value in its own right) which could hold such creatures.

The third premise seems obvious, in that the theistic hypothesis was widely held well before the fine-tuning evidence came to be understood.

As for the conclusion, the likelihood principle is fairly uncontroversial and derivable from Bayes’ Theorem. If the first two premises are true, then LPU does serve as powerful evidence for T and against NSU.

The Understatement of the Century

Imagine a trial where the defendant stands accused of stabbing a man to death in the victim’s living room. The accused takes the stand, and admits to being in the victim’s house at the time of the murder. Does this evidence support the “defendant is guilty” hypothesis or the “defendant is innocent” hypothesis?

It seems easy to see that it would be unsurprising that the defendant would be in the house at the time of the murder, if he is guilty. It also seems quite surprising that the defendant would be in the house if he were innocent. Using the likelihood principle, this evidence counts toward the guilty hypothesis and against the innocent hypothesis.

Were this singular piece of evidence to be the extent of our knowledge of the events in question, this conclusion seems quite reasonable. But how would our evaluation change, were we to also know more specific facts about the case? If the defendant were locked in the basement of the victim’s house at the time of the murder, it would still be true that he was in the house at the time of the murder. But the additional, more specific evidence seems able to render the initial likelihood calculation irrelevant when determining which hypothesis is supported by the evidence.

What exactly is the relationship between more general pieces of evidence which seem to favor one hypothesis over another, and the more specific evidences which point in the opposite direction? And, most importantly, what does this have to do with the fine-tuning argument?

As for the first question, Paul Draper calls this the fallacy of understated evidence. “This fallacy (i.e., mistake in reasoning) is committed when one uses some relatively general known fact about X to support a hypothesis when a more specific fact about X (that is also known to obtain) fails to support that hypothesis. (Draper, 2008)” We can see that this applies to the case of the man accused of murder; the general fact is that he was in the victim’s house at the time of the killing, the specific fact is that he was locked in the basement while the murder took place.

As for the second question, Draper accuses Collins of unintentionally committing the fallacy of understated evidence by, “understating what we know about life, Collins makes the fine-tuning data appear to support theism more than it really does. (Ibid.)” He agrees with Collins that the mere fact that intelligent life, of some sort, exists is less surprising under theism than naturalism. But Collins ignores the more specific evidence that humans are the only form of intelligent life known to exist. Draper takes this more specific evidence to point strongly toward naturalism.

Menschliches, Allzumenschliches

Let us consider a second, more specific piece of evidence:

HE: The only intelligent life we know to exist is human.

Then, the following argument can be formed:

5. Given the fact that intelligent life exists, it is not surprising at all that the only intelligent life we know to exist is human, under a naturalistic single universe hypothesis (NSU).

6. Given the fact that intelligent life exists, it is very, very surprising that the only intelligent life we know to exist is human, under a theistic hypothesis (T).

7. The theistic hypothesis was advocated prior to the discovery of the fine-tuning evidence, and thus is not ad hoc.

8. Therefore, by the likelihood principle, HE (humans are the only form of intelligent life known to exist) strongly supports NSU (the naturalistic hypothesis) over T (the theistic hypothesis).

Under the naturalistic single universe hypothesis, it is no surprise at all that HE is the case. In evolutionary terms, intelligent life is expensive, requiring huge amounts of resources. Given that intelligent life exists, we should expect that it would be relatively unsophisticated, only incrementally better morally, aesthetically, in intelligence, and in emotional sophistication than its evolutionary ancestors, and far more common in the universe than more advanced life.

However, under the theistic hypothesis, HE is very surprising. If God’s motivation can be understood entirely in terms of adding moral and aesthetic value to the universe, that the most morally and aesthetically valuable intelligent life is human, seems very unlikely. An omnipotent God would have the power to create life which was not constrained by its evolutionary history, which was not limited in morally and aesthetically irrelevant ways, and which was “better” intellectually, physically, and emotionally. Given that intelligent life exists and the truth of the theistic hypothesis, HE is very, very surprising indeed.

The conclusion of this argument mirrors the conclusion of Collins’. As HE entails that a life-permitting universe exists, by using the more specific evidence, we should expect to obtain a more accurate conclusion. And, if this conclusion is true, it should dampen, if not extinguish entirely, the persuasive power of Collins’ fine-tuning argument.

Of Angelic Aliens…

One possible objection to this reasoning rests on the idea that, although humans are not the only kind of intelligent life we would expect God to create, our existence is a net-positive, all things considered. So the creation of humans could very well play a role in maximizing the moral and aesthetic value of reality.

I will agree with the first part of that objection; it does seem that humans, for all our flaws, are a net-positive in terms of moral and aesthetic value. But I would disagree with the second part; our existence cannot fit with a plan to maximize the moral and aesthetic value, carried out by an omnipotent being.

It seems very easy to conceive of a species of intelligent life, which was morally and aesthetically superior (if only marginally) to humans, able to live and thrive in exactly the same kinds of environments as humans, and which would be far more likely candidates for existence under the theistic hypothesis. It would be very surprising, if all of our intuitions of what kind of intelligent life is possible were false. Therefore, it would be very surprising were HE to be true, even if it were also true that humans play but a small role in a larger plan to maximize the moral and aesthetic value of reality.

…and Panglossian Possibilities

A different sort of objection to the probability calculation involving HE, is that it is possible that humans are much, much more morally and aesthetically valuable than we give them credit for, that it is possible that God has knowledge of some kind of moral consideration which makes the existence of humanity consistent with the maximization of moral and aesthetic value.

On the face of it, I would agree; this is certainly a possibility. God, with his perfect view of the moral landscape, would possess a better perspective on the relevant moral issues regarding the value of humanity. But what we are concerned with, for the purposes of this argument, is not mere possibility, but the likelihoods of those possibilities.

If the theist maintains that she would not expect to know the relevant moral considerations which would affect what actions God would take in order to maximize the moral and aesthetic value of reality, this does nothing to undercut how surprising it would be, to us, that morally and aesthetically superior beings would not raise the moral and aesthetic value of reality more than morally and aesthetically inferior beings.

So, without some kind of explicit justification for the idea that, contrary to our own moral intuitions and reasoning, God does have a good moral reason for creating humans, which is also non-ad hoc and does not fall victim to Collins’ probabilistic tension criticism for extended hypothesis, we are completely justified in continuing to believe that HE is surprising.

Conclusion

The fine-tuning argument does show that the existence of intelligent life is more likely if theism is true, rather than if naturalism is. Were the singular fact that intelligent life exists make up the totality of our evidence, this argument would require the rational person to significantly revise their degree of belief in theism upward, and their degree of belief in naturalism downward. Unfortunately for the proponents of the fine-tuning argument, LPU is not all the evidence we have available to us. If the mere specification of the kind of life which is known to exist is enough evidence to cancel out the epistemic effects of the fine-tuning argument, then there seems to be no repairing it.

Notes

[1] I have endeavored to reproduce the argument without introducing any subtle errors. To be sure, any that are found are due to my rendering of the argument, not the original. I would urge anyone interested in learning more about fine-tuning arguments to read the original, as it is a model of clarity and precision.

Works Cited

Collins, Robin. “The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe.” The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Draper, Paul. “Collins’ Case for Cosmic Design (The Great Debate).” The Secular Web. Internet Infidels Inc., 2008. Web. 26 Apr 2010. .