The Problem of Evil E-Book

Daniel Speak

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Key Concepts in Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 278

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The most forceful philosophical objections to belief in God arise from the existence of evil. Bad things happen in the world and it is not clear how this is compatible with the existence of an all-powerful and perfectly loving being. Unsurprisingly then, philosophers have formulated powerful arguments for atheism based on the existence of apparently unjustified suffering. These arguments give expression to what we call the problem of evil. This volume is an engaging introduction to the philosophical problem of evil. Daniel Speak provides a clear overview of the main lines of reasoning in this debate and argues for the defensibility of theistic belief in the face of evil. He fleshes out the distinction between theodicy and defense and guides the reader through the logical, evidential, and hiddenness versions of the problem. In an accessible and beautifully written account, Speak describes the central issues surrounding the problem of evil in a way that clarifies both the complex reasoning and specialised terminology of the topic. The Problem of Evil is an ideal introduction to contemporary debates over one of the most gripping perennial questions. Read either on its own or alongside the primary materials it deftly covers, students and scholars will find this volume a terrific resource for understanding the challenges to religious belief raised by evil.

Leseprobe

Key Concepts in Philosophy

Heather Battaly,

Virtue

Lisa Bortolotti,

Irrationality

Joseph Keim Campbell,

Free Will

Roy T. Cook,

Paradoxes

Douglas Edwards,

Properties

Bryan Frances,

Disagreement

Douglas Kutach,

Causation

Ian Evans and Nicolas D. Smith,

Knowledge

Joshua Weisberg,

Consciousness

Chase Wrenn,

Truth

Copyright © Daniel Speak 2015

The right of Daniel Speak to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6406-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6407-1 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-1795-4 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-1794-7 (mobi)

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For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

For my wife, Lori Speak, whose love and friendship remind me that evil will not have the last word

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Emma Hutchinson of Polity Press for her initial vision, wise counsel, and constant encouragement at each stage of this project. This book owes a great deal to the many students, both undergraduate and graduate, who have taken courses with me on the topic of the problem of evil over the past few years. I have learned particularly from Katherine Brown, Curtis Holtzen, Derek von Barandy, and Alex Zambrano. Two initially anonymous reviewers for Polity Press provided extremely useful feedback on a draft of the book. Raymond VanArragon in particular, who was kind enough to come out from behind his anonymity, made a substantial contribution to the overall quality of the manuscript and saved me from a number of embarrassments – including confusing the names of an influential human ecologist and a left-handed Houston Rockets shooting guard. Manuel Vargas read the entire manuscript and provided terrific suggestions throughout. A second special thanks to Katherine Brown for extraordinary copy editing and the construction of the index.

It was a great pleasure to serve as a Visiting Research Fellow at Biola University's Center for Christian Thought during the spring of 2013 and as a Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University's Center for Philosophy of Religion during the 2013/14 academic year. Both opportunities afforded me great freedom to work on this project while also providing me with nearly unlimited philosophical inspiration. Finally, I would like to thank Loyola Marymount University, the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, and the LMU Department of Philosophy for the sabbatical time that allowed me to take advantage of the various fellowship opportunities that made writing this book such a pleasure.

1The Problem(s) of Evil

It is hard to know in advance what kind of suffering a person will have to see or experience before becoming gripped by the problem of evil. Bad-things-happening-to-children does, however, constitute a pretty reliable recipe for getting the attention of most people. I can report that my own sensitivities to the issues taken up in this book were profoundly heightened by having a child of my own and becoming, as a result, freshly attuned to the innocent vulnerability of children. I was already disposed to feel the burden of their seemingly senseless suffering (who isn't?), even before my son was born. But after his birth, my emotional nerves seemed to have been exposed painfully to the shocking air of moral reality. Reports of starving or abused children, of children forced to become slaves or soldiers, even popular movies featuring children under threat (pretend-children that I knew would be pretend-rescued near the end of the two-hour ordeal) all placed a new and swelling weight on my psyche.

I suspect that this is at least some part of the reason that the following experience still leaps immediately to mind when I find myself considering the world's evils. A decade or so back, when our son was still quite young, my wife and I were in the habit of getting together regularly (roughly, weekly) with a group of our friends at one of our homes. A little food, a little conversation, and the kids with a baby-sitter; a good evening for everyone, typically. The last time that group ever got together, however, was tragically memorable. I showed up at the home of the host, Mary, a smidge earlier than everyone else – to find a pair of police cars and Mary out front. Before I could get my car parked, it became clear that Mary was absolutely distraught. The explanation for her state turned out to be that her four-year-old son had drowned in their backyard pool some short time prior to my arrival. The son, Joshua, had evidently either climbed over the short protective pool fence by way of some bigger toys pressed up against it or had come through the gate accidentally left open by the pool cleaner, who had been by earlier in the day. In one sense, it doesn't really matter what the precipitating cause was. In either case, Joshua was dead and someone was going to be left feeling guilty for the rest of his or her life. In fact, maybe the best result was that we were never able to diagnose exactly how Joshua got into the pool area. Though both Mary and the pool cleaner will have to share the worry that each may have been the cause, neither of them has to bear the burden of certainly having been. Thank God for small mercies.

But, of course, that's just the point. It seems a pathetically small mercy in this context. After all, it is incredibly hard to shake the suspicion that it would have been very easy for a being with the qualities and powers typically ascribed to God to have kept Joshua from drowning. A light breeze to close the gate or the shifting of a plastic faux barbecue away from the fence is all it would have taken. If it is easier for God to put thoughts into heads than to move things around in the macro world, then a small and unobtrusive reminder for either the pool cleaner or Mary would easily have done the trick. For this reason, we can understand why Mary (or any of us who are able to sympathize with her pain and loss) might begin to wonder if God really does exist.

And now we are alive to the problem of evil – a problem constituted by an apparent tension between traditional theistic commitment, on the one hand, and an open-eyed recognition of countless instances of seemingly unjustified suffering, on the other. The family of philosophical challenges to theistic belief that we will be exploring can, in fact, be read as variations on a theme introduced in what David Hume called “Epicurus' old questions”:

Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? (1947, 196)

Obviously, this problem has a long history. Thoughtful people hoping to make sense of religious belief have almost universally run upon it in one form or another. Epicurus was raising this issue all the way back in the fourth century BCE St. Augustine famously committed a great deal of his philosophical energy to it some fifteen hundred years ago. And in the centuries since Augustine nearly every important thinker has made some effort to address it. The problem of evil would seem to have a fair claim, then, on being one of the most perennial in philosophy. To be clear, however, this book is not a historical introduction to the problem of evil. I will not be making any particular effort to trace out the history of the problem or explicate any of the important positions on it developed prior to the twentieth century. Instead, my aim will be to draw the reader into the incredibly lively contemporary debate about the problem with an eye toward getting the reader “up to speed” on the main and immediately pressing issues.

I should add that I do not pretend to be indifferent to or neutral with respect to the outcome of this debate. This introduction to the contemporary problem of evil is, rather, mildly opinionated, and this is reflected both in the content I choose to emphasize and in the substantive conclusions that I urge the reader (again, mildly) to draw. Here let me remove any obscurity regarding the conclusions I favor. In short, I will be arguing that, the force of the various versions of the problem of evil notwithstanding, theistic commitment can nevertheless be rational. Notice that this is not to say that all theistic commitment is in fact rational or that it would be irrational to draw agnostic or atheistic conclusions from the data of evil, such as it is. The claim I will be defending, then, is actually quite weak, even if it does amount to a gentle vindication of theism (on the assumption that I succeed in defending it adequately). Still, I think it is both more honest to approach the problem in this way and more likely to bear dialectical fruit – more likely, that is, to put you, the reader, in a position to appreciate the nature and structure of the ongoing debates. In any case, with my intentions made clear, I trust you will now be able to subject my arguments and conclusions to the proper scrutiny without having to do the extra armchair psychologizing about my hidden agendas. I hope that it helps to see my philosophical and religious colors unambiguously unfurled.

1.1    The Structure of the Problem

Very generally, we have noted that our problem results from an apparent tension between two commitments – theistic commitment on the one hand, and a fairly commonsensical commitment to the existence of considerable evil in the world on the other. We should now be more specific about this tension.

The problem of evil is a problem for theism. That is, it is a problem for any view that is premised on the existence of a maximally powerful and maximally good creator and sustainer of the universe. There are, obviously, many versions of theism: Christian theism, Islamic theism, Jewish theism, etc. It is a sociological fact (interesting or not, I don't know) that contemporary philosophy of religion has been driven overwhelmingly by Christian thought. We will treat this emphasis on Christian theism, however, as an inessential accident. The problem is, after all, a general philosophical one facing all forms of theism.

For this reason, we will frame the problem explicitly in terms of what we can call “common theism” – in terms of those commitments shared by (held in common among) the world's principal theistic religions.1 What are these? They aren't surprising, and I have hinted at them already. The common theist is committed to the following claims:

God exists.

God is omnipotent (there are no coherent limits to divine power).

God is omniscient (there are no coherent limits to divine knowledge).

God is omnibenevolent (there are no coherent limits to divine goodness).

(Keep in mind, in addition, that on my view the term “God” here is best understood as an honorific title applied properly only to the being who created the universe – and who sustains it, if such sustenance is necessary. The term is, then, more like “Queen” and less like “Elizabeth.” Thus, “God” is not so much a proper name as the term for a position of honor that any being, with whatever name, who met the conditions would deserve.2)

Notice, now, that the common theist accepts more than the mere existence of God. The common theist also insists that God is unlimited in power, knowledge, and goodness. These further commitments are crucial because it is largely in virtue of them that the problem of evil emerges. Worldviews according to which there is some creator of the universe but which make no commitment to this being's maximal greatness simply do not have to face the problem in its stark and standard form, for reasons that we will see shortly.

In addition to the four propositions above, we will also insist that the common theist accepts

Evil exists.

It isn't perfectly clear just what “evil” is supposed to be in this context, and our ordinary talk about evil will not be of very much help. Frequently, our everyday language of evil is aimed at picking out something that is especially bad. We might say: “It is bad enough that he lied to his wife, but he also cheated on her with her best friend! That was downright evil.” Or: “Yes, she has made some moral mistakes, but she isn't evil.” With respect to our problem, however, the word “evil” doesn't apply only to particularly heinous or intensely morally disturbing events. The problem of evil, as we will be thinking of it, could also be called the problem of bad things, since it is the occurrence of anything less than good – from petty theft and the common cold all the way up to, and including, strategic genocide and the Lisbon earthquake – that generates it. The idea here is just that proposition (5) is asserting something quite bland and obvious to most folks: namely, that bad things happen in our world. It may turn out that the occurrence of some especially gruesome evils makes the problem we are facing particularly difficult to handle. But we can set this aside for now. The problem itself is not about only these most gruesome evils but about bad things in general.

With propositions (1)–(5) out in the open, we can now sharpen the blade of the problem of evil for common theism. The problem is that these propositions appear to be in philosophical tension with one another. That is, there are reasons to think that these propositions either cannot or are not likely to be true together. The principal way that philosophers have brought out these reasons has been by formulating arguments for atheism based on the propositions endorsed by the common theist. The general strategy has been, in short, to try to show that anyone who accepts propositions (2)–(5) ought to reject proposition (1). The most influential of the specific versions of these arguments from evil for atheism will be the respective topics of the next three chapters. But it will help us here just to sketch them somewhat casually.

In chapter 2, we will take up what has typically been called the “Logical” or “Deductive” argument from evil. According to this argument, propositions (1)–(5) are logically inconsistent. It is logically impossible for all of them to be true together. Thus, anyone who accepts (2)–(5) is rationally required (on pain of contradiction) to give up (1). In chapter 3, we will turn to the “Evidential” or “Inductive” argument from evil. Here the claim will be not that (1)–(5) cannot possibly be true together, but that it is unlikely that they are. According to this argument, then, one who accepts (2)–(5) should give up (1), not because it is impossible for (1) to be true, but rather because it is improbable. Chapter 4 will address what has come to be known as the argument from “Divine Hiddenness.” This argument appeals to a particular kind of evil we seem to find in abundance in the world: namely, reasonable unbelief in the existence of God. The idea here is that a good God would make sure that human beings were able to be in relationship to God. But many people seem not to be able to be in relationship to God because they are not able (try as they might) to believe that such a being exists. According to this argument, then, anyone who accepts (2)–(5) and the claim that there are reasonable people who cannot believe in God should conclude that (1) is false.

To sum up, then, the problem of evil, as we will construe it, is a family of prima facie forceful arguments for atheism premised on a philosophical tension among the five propositions characterizing common theism.

1.2    The Structure of Response

Since the contemporary problem of evil is framed in terms of particular arguments for atheism, theistic replies will have to address these arguments. Depending on who you believe bears the various burdens of proof, however, there is more than one way to address an argument you take to lead to a false conclusion. Thinking about these possible burdens of proof and the potential kinds of replies available to theists will allow us to appreciate some subtleties in the structure of response to the problem of evil.

Suppose, for example, that you have been accused of a serious crime – armed robbery, say. The prosecuting attorney brings a case against you, the conclusion of which is that you are guilty of having entered a particular store on a certain date and of using a gun to force its owner to give you the money in the cash register. What the prosecutor purports to show, we might say, is that there is a deep tension in the set of propositions describing the actual circumstances at the time of the crime that also include the proposition that you did not commit the crime. If the prosecutor were a poor rhetorician with an unfortunate and slavish commitment to philosophical jargon, he might put his point by saying that the common propositions (those accepted even by you as the defendant) make it either impossible or extremely unlikely (so unlikely as to be beyond a reasonable doubt) that you are innocent. Now, in a U.S. court of law the prosecution must prove its case to establish your guilt, since you are stipulated to be innocent until proven guilty. This means that your innocence can be established simply by demonstrating that the prosecution has not made its case. All you have to do is show that the argument from what everyone accepts to your guilt can reasonably be thought to fail.

You can imagine, however, wanting something more than bare innocence under the law. For various reasons that have to do with your interests beyond your legal standing, you might be unsatisfied with having shown only that the prosecution didn't succeed in establishing your guilt. You might want, after all, positive vindication – you might, that is, hope to demonstrate to all and sundry that you did not in fact rob the store. What would it take to do this? It isn't easy to say, exactly. At the very least, though, you would have to show (to everyone who matters to you) not only that the appearance of your guilt was only an appearance but also how you are innocent – why it is quite reasonable to believe in your innocence despite the appearances.

So, these are two different ways to respond to an argument for the claim that you robbed the store, and they parallel the two different ways that theists can respond to an argument from evil for atheism. The theist can respond by attempting to show that the atheologian (the proponent of an argument for atheism) has not made her case and, therefore, that theistic commitment is “innocent” – not guilty of irrationality. If the theist responds in this way, then he is offering what has come to be called a DEFENSE. However, like you in your armed robbery case, the theist may want more in response to the problem of evil. The theist may not be satisfied with the Scotch verdict of “not proven” for atheism and, again for various reasons, might want to go on to provide a positive vindication of theism in the face of evil. If the theist attempts a positive vindication, then he is offering what has come to be called a THEODICY.

Somewhat more carefully, then, we can characterize these two types of responses to arguments from evil for atheism in the following ways.

A Defense

: shows

that

a particular argument from evil can reasonably be thought to fail (i.e., that the argument has not made it unreasonable to believe that the propositions of the theistic set obtain together). Thus, it shows that God may have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evils to which the argument appeals.

A Theodicy

: shows

how

the theist can accommodate the evils to which a particular argument appeals (i.e., how the propositions of the theistic set can reasonably be thought to obtain together). Thus, it shows what God's morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evils to which the argument appeals might very well be – that is, what they can reasonably be thought to be.

1.3    A Very Brief Précis

It could probably go without saying that, in general, defense is considerably less demanding than theodicy. Parrying a particular argument from evil is clearly easier than constructing a positive justification for God's permission of all the evils we find in the world. It is also worth noting that the lion's share of my response to the various problems of evil (especially in the next three chapters) will be offered in the spirit of defense rather than of theodicy. In chapter 2, for example, I will explore and defend the “free will defense” (especially as it has been developed by Alvin Plantinga) in response to the Logical Problem of Evil.

The defense I will muster, in chapter 3, in response to the Evidential Problem of Evil will have a number of independent (but potentially mutually supporting) prongs, chief among which is a prominent skeptical maneuver. The skeptical theist (who deploys this skeptical maneuver) is not skeptical about theism but instead about the value judgments that animate the Evidential Problem of Evil. Thus, according to skeptical theism we are (and should have expected ourselves to be) largely in the dark about what goods God is promoting and what evils God is avoiding by allowing a particular bad thing to occur. If this is right, then it is very difficult for the Evidential Problem to get off the ground.

In chapter 4 I turn to the Problem of Divine Hiddenness. As I mentioned above, the main issue here is that the existence of reasonable people who appear to be incapable of believing that God exists constitutes a very distinctive kind of evil that counts evidentially against the existence of that God. Here my defense will build on the defensive maneuvers of chapter 3, but also add a further consideration about the possibility of relationship with God without belief that God exists.

One natural question to ask, however, is whether defense is enough. In chapter 5, then, we will address the project of theodicy directly, asking in particular (and among other things) if the theist can rest content without one – provided, of course, that she has a compelling defense. I will be arguing (perhaps unsurprisingly) that as desirable as a theodicy might be under some conditions, a forceful defense is nevertheless enough to protect the basic rationality of theistic belief.

Finally, in chapter 6, I will bring these considerations together to offer my final (but nevertheless quite tentative) conclusions about the basic rationality of theistic belief. In a last effort to support these conclusions, I will be arguing that the atheist has a problem of her own in taking evil seriously – she has what I will call the “Problem of Profound Evil.” In addition, we will return to reflect on the limitations of merely “common theism” in addressing the problems of evil. Perhaps we have been overly constrained by our commitment to abstracting away from particular religious traditions. Perhaps, that is, there are special resources within these particular religious traditions for dealing with the problem of evil. Again, the overarching conclusion I will be attempting to draw is not that the atheistic arguments from evil are without force or that the theist (either common or particular) has a demonstrably decisive reply to them. Instead, I hope to show only that even in the face of the quite challenging atheistic arguments from evil that have been developed in the contemporary debate, it can still be rational to maintain theistic commitment. More to the point of our purposes here, I aim to leave you in position to enter directly into this lively and important contemporary debate with a fuller understanding of its structure and content.

1.4    The Two Pulls of Evil

Before turning to the details in the next chapters, let me draw your attention to a frequently overlooked fact about the human experience with evil. This fact, as I am tendentiously calling it, is that our encounters with evil do not appear to pull us uniformly in the direction of unbelief. It is true, of course, that a great many people have been drawn to unbelief as a result of reflection on, or experience with, suffering and evil. At the same time, however, we should not ignore the fact that a great many people have also been drawn to theistic belief and religious commitment by such experiences. So-called “foxhole conversions” are one common instance of the pull toward religious commitment provoked by encounters with evil, but the phenomenon is quite widespread. In the face of suffering or danger or despair, many human beings find themselves reaching out to the transcendent – sometimes for help, sometimes for comfort, perhaps most deeply for explanation. And as it turns out, no small number of these people seem to discover enough of what they are looking for. The point here is that evil appears to have the power to pull us in two different directions. On the one hand, our confrontations with evil quite naturally provoke our suspicion that a maximally powerful and loving being could not permit it; down this path lies doubt and unbelief. On the other hand, these confrontations with evil can also cause us to see our profound limitations, deep ignorance, and shocking vulnerability. Seeing our own radical contingency provokes, again quite naturally, a longing to be grounded in a necessity beyond ourselves, with the full force of its buck-stopping explanatory power; down this path lies belief and commitment.

We could cull examples of the dual pull of evil from countless episodes in literary and cultural history.3 But we can see an especially illuminating comparison and contrast of both coming from the single fertile mind of Fyodor Dostoevsky – who was quite personally gripped by the problem of evil.

In fact, his literary presentation of the problem, from the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, has a claim on being the most forceful ever narrated. In chapter 4 of The Brothers Karamazov, the older brother Ivan, worldly and sophisticated, confronts the younger Alyosha, a novice monk, with the harsh realities of nineteenth-century evil. Ivan describes a series of truly horrible “current events” involving (surprise!) the grave mistreatment of children. The final story is of an eight-year-old boy who is hunted for sport and killed by dogs in front of his mother at the command of an irritated land owner. Then, after a penetrating consideration of various justifications for these sorts of evils that a religious person might be tempted to offer, Ivan concludes:

And if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole truth is not worth such a price. I do not, finally, want the mother to embrace the tormentor who let his dogs tear her son to pieces! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she wants to, let her forgive the tormentor her immeasurable maternal suffering; but she has no right to forgive the suffering of her child who was torn to pieces, she dare not forgive the tormentor, even if the child himself were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, then where is the harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who could and would have the right to forgive? I don't want harmony, for love of mankind I don't want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I'd rather remain with my unrequited suffering and unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can't afford to pay so much for admission. And I hasten to return my ticket. (1982, 245)

Now, returning one's ticket needn't be the same thing as concluding that there is no maximally good being. In fact, Ivan explicitly claims not to be giving up on the existence of God, but instead to be lodging a kind of permanent protest against the divine plan. Still, many people have taken Ivan's claims to support and describe unbelief. At the very least, they give profound expression to the pull toward unbelief we can feel as we face evil.

By contrast, Dostoevsky's short story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, published just prior to his writing The Brothers Karamazov, paints a different picture of the human response to evil. In the short story, the ridiculous man is being driven to suicide by his awareness of the meaninglessness of everything. His sense of this meaninglessness is so profound that, among other things, he finds himself completely unmoved by a child's desperate and sincere appeals for his help as he walks home to take his own life. On this night of his would-be suicide, he falls asleep with a pistol, his instrument of choice, in his hand – and has a life-changing “dream.” He dreams that he is still awake and that he holds the pistol to