Is God Good?, Part I
Friday, December 16, 2011
Follow up to: The Meaning of Morality; The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time; The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully, Part II; The Great Problem of Evil, Part III; and God, Babies, Hell, and Justice
Author’s Note: As a result of feedback with others who have read this, I now recognize this essay as misleadingly incomplete and partially inaccurate. I keep it up as a record of how I have previously thought, but do not stand by all of it.
Most religious people suggest that the God they worship is not only a pretty good guy, but ultimately benevolent, all-loving, and morally perfect — a being capable of doing no wrong to anyone. Some of these people suggest that this God is so benevolent and perfect that he actually is the very moral standard by which benevolence and moral perfection is measured — that our idea of moral goodness comes from this god.
I don’t think either of these claims work — based on what we know about God’s character from observing the world, we know he cannot be good, and because of this and several other reasons, we definitely don’t get our morality from God. In this essay, I explain what all the previous essays on God’s malevolence have been pointing to, and once and for all make the case that God is decidedly malevolent, and thus not worth worship, with the inevitable conclusion that many religions are false.
What Does It Mean to Be Good?
So when we’re saying God is “good”, what is it that we’re actually saying? As I wrote in “The Meaning of Morality”, there are a variety of possible claims — we could be saying that God is good because he follows God’s commands, that God is good because our culture approves of him, that God is good because he always acts to maximize the well-being of conscious creatures, that God is good because he follows his rational duty, that God is good because he does what people would agree to if signing a hypothetical social contract, that God is good because he is of virtuous character, etc. The possibilities are endless.
However, I prefer to use a specific definition of “good” that works for our purposes: God will never allow any needless suffering. Why use this definition instead of another one? As I point out in “The Folly of Debating Definitions”, it ultimately doesn’t matter, as long as this definition works. And it is the one that matters, if God is making people suffer pointlessly, he is worthy of condemnation — he is cruel and malevolent, and fundamentally opposed to love and compassion.
Some people might ask why we should care about whether God is compassionate, as long as he is right by some other definition. But I think this is a connotation that is being smuggled, that we should care about this other definition if it results in needless suffering. Needless suffering is just that — something that we are just better off without.
Can We Judge God?
This actually gives us a basis to judge God — we can see if God causes any needless suffering, and if he does, then we judge him to not be good. Some people will find this objectionable in itself, though — why are we allowed to judge God?
Judging is matching something to an external standard, and seeing if it meets that standard. This type of judging is the same kind of thing as judging Hulk Hogan to be strong or judging Michael Jordan to be tall. And taking any kind of stance to these questions — is Hulk Hogan strong? is God good? — must involve judging, since we are describing God according to a definition, which is a standard that is either met or not met.
Thus it is impossible not to judge God, since saying God has any characteristic means we’re judging him. If we say God is good, we are judging that God meets the minimal defining characteristics of goodness. If we say God is worth worshipping, we are saying he meets our standards for what we want to worship.
If we say God is all-powerful, we say that God meets the standard of being capable of doing anything that is logically possible. And the final clincher: even if we say that God cannot be judged, we are judging God to be the kind of thing that meets the characteristics of something that cannot be judged!
Saying that God meets a certain definition is hardly heresy, it is something completely unavoidable. Thus not only can we judge God, we must judge God, and we have a basis to do so. God either allows needless suffering to happen or he does not, and the answer to this question has implications. So how is this question answered?
Why We’re Forced to Appeal to Mystery
Here is where things get a bit awkward, though — when we actually look at the state of the world and the beliefs of Christianity, things don’t look so good. There seems to be an awful lot of needless suffering, which I’ve argued for in other essays:
- In “The Great Problem of Evil”, I point to birth defects that lead to the suffering and death of babies, deaths from preventable diseases like smallpox and malaria, and deaths from institutionalized cruelty like the Holocaust.
- Another instance of needless suffering I didn’t mention, but want to include now, is that of animal suffering prior to the arise of humans — see John Loftus’s “The Darwinian Problem of Evil” for the really short version and Paul Draper’s “Natural Selection and the Problem of Evil” for the really long version.
- In “The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time”, I point to the Devil, and the fact that God allows the Devil to continue to cause suffering, and the fact that God has still not brought his perfect kingdom to Earth.
- In “The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully” I point to the massive amount of suffering God commands in the Bible, including outright genocide and infanticide, and the rape and murder of women, all culminating in the punishing of Job for what God himself admits to be without reason.
- Lastly, in “God, Babies, Hell, and Justice”, I point to the unnecessarily harsh punishment of Hell, which constitutes infinite punishment for finite sins.
Generally when faced with someone who causes suffering, like shooting a woman in the chest, we look for some justification that would explain why this person did such a thing. For instance, we recognize that people are allowed to shoot woman who attempt to shoot them first, or put them in grave danger. God, who is accused of causing suffering, can get the same excuses — simply name a reason that God allowed the suffering that we would recognize as “worth it”.
However, we do not have those reasons. All of these essays meticulously rebut any possible excuse that justifies the kind of suffering that God permits or directly causes, so at the end of the day we’re left with only one kind of appeal — that while we have no idea why God is allowing needless suffering, it doesn’t make him uncompassionate. We’re ultimately forced to appeal to mystery to defend God’s goodness because we have no other out since all actual justifications fail.
However, these appeals to mystery fail as well, so we’re left with the Problem of Evil, and the inevitable conclusion that God is not good, and thus many religions are false.
The Unknowable Purpose is Unreasonable
One common explanation for why God is good despite all the apparent suffering in the world is that this suffering isn’t needless, but rather God has a grand purpose for this suffering, and that this purpose would completely justify anything God has done and makes him out to be the perfectly compassionate guy he is said to be, if only we knew what the purpose was. And that’s just it… we don’t know what the purpose is. That’s why they call it the Unknown Purpose Defense.
This sounds suspicious, of course. Isn’t it convenient that God has an unknown purpose that we just don’t know about? And isn’t not having a justification in itself a problem? Why would an all-powerful God not be able to give us a justification, and why would an all-good God not want to? So then we have to find a justification for why God is keeping his purpose hidden from us (or why he doesn’t reveal himself at all). And then we would need a justification for why the justification for why God is keeping his purpose hidden is itself being hidden. And so on, infinitely.
Imagine if the same justification was extended to beings other than God, such as any criminal. Imagine that same guy accused of shooting the woman in the chest — he doesn’t offer any excuse of self-defense or any other justifying circumstances, but instead says “Oh, I have a purpose for my shooting that justifies it, you just don’t know what it is.” Sure, it’s possible, but we would hardly take it on face value. If we wouldn’t accept the unknown purpose from the shooter on trial, we shouldn’t accept it in defense of God.
Lastly, there’s another reason we can’t accept an unknown purpose defense though, and that’s because we could use it to defend anything as true. Can zebras fly? It seems like they cannot — we have never observed a zebra who is capable of flight and we know of no method that could allow a zebra to fly. But a ha! What if there is an unknown reason why zebras can fly, and it is simply unknown to us. Until you can disprove the existence of this unknown reason, I’m justified in thinking that zebras can fly!
Just like in the case of the shooter and in the case of the zebra flying hypothesis, the mere possibility of an unknown reason should not be enough to say that God is good. And we should be immensely surprised that a God who can do anything is so limited that not only is he forced to make people suffer horribly, he cannot tell us why he does so. So the unknown purpose defense is unreasonable for multiple reasons.
The Circular Nature of God
Another common justification for God is that we know he is obviously good based on his perfect nature, so we needn’t let all the suffering and problems bother us. Instead, we can just be reassured by God’s all-good nature that all the suffering is for the best, all part of his perfect plan.
This sounds tempting because it puts us at ease and we want to believe it. We want to think that everything will be ok, so we don’t have to worry. However, just because we want to believe it doesn’t make it true. And here, there is a clear problem: this defense of God is circular. We can’t use God’s all-good nature to defend against accusations that he might not have an all-good nature, that’s claiming that we can know God is good because God is good.
The goodness of God is exactly what is in question by the Problem of Evil, so it makes no sense to dismiss the Problem of Evil by asserting the goodness of God. Additionally, it makes no sense to appeal to what the Bible says about God’s nature as a defense against the Problem of Evil, because that’s the same circularity one-step removed. How do we know to trust the Bible’s description of God’s nature, unless God is good? And why doesn’t the Bible explain what God’s purpose is behind all of the suffering he allows or is directly responsible for?
But there’s another reason why we shouldn’t use the Bible’s claim that God is good to excuse his behavior: would we use testimony about Hitler’s compassionate character in Mein Kampf to excuse the Holocaust? Hardly, the evil of the Holocaust makes it so we should demand more than just a mere “yeah, I’m a good guy” as an explanation, and we definitely wouldn’t trust the man responsible for the Holocaust to testify himself about his character. Likewise, we shouldn’t use the Bible to justify God’s character.
We cannot use any claim that God is good, even on the authority of the Bible or God himself, to resolve the Problem of Evil — doing so is circular. Instead, we need an actual reason for why God allowed the suffering.
Intermission
There is a large amount of suffering that God either allows (The Holocaust, Epidermolysis Bullosa, Smallpox, Animal predation prior to humans) or is directly responsible (Hell, Satan, Biblical genocide and rape, the treatment of Job), and it seems highly likely that this suffering is pointless, unjustified by any excuse.
Thus we need to find some sort of reason why God is good despite not having this excuse. But God cannot be justified with an unknowable purpose, nor can he be justified with an appeal to his allegedly good character. So what can God be justified by? This essay is now long enough that I really need to split into multiple parts, so I’m doing so now.
In the next essay, I’ll explain why God can’t be justified by an appeal to his infallibility, then explain why we can’t just ignore the problem because of God’s authority and alleged right of God to do whatever he wants with his creation. Then I will tackle issues of God’s nature, all leading to the conclusion that God must either be malevolent or nonexistent.
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Saying that God is evil is either self-contradictory, or non-sensical.
1. God is the definition of good. If God would think that red-stripes zebras was a good think, that’d be a good think. The zebra will not have much to say about it. Evil is something that is contrary to this ‘God’ will. Pretty much end of story here.
2. If we, as humans, come up with a definition of good, chances are that God will fall out of what good means. But what would be the point of that?
If there is a God and God created the Universe, gave you reason and air to breath, what’s the purpose of you trying to prove that God is evil? He obviously also gave you the freedom to do this and allows you to. You don’t get hit by a lighting while thinking or writing posts like this. But, again, where does it leads to? If this God, whom we presume to exists, keeps every single lepton in your body in existence (in the metaphysical/ontological sense), do you try to prove that God is doing something wrong?
If there is no God, a 20yo guy has “better” (sic!) things to do than writing long posts like this. :) On Christmas.
I think theists overlook the fact that even if God designs the world in such a way that ethics could be the topic of an empirical investigation, it wouldn’t matter much. Why? Because to human beings, ethics is nothing more than a mixture of culture, upbringing, beliefs, etc. The religious concern that morality would decay unless ethics genuinely existed (that is, supervened upon actions or reduced in some way) is entirely invalid. It would be as important as pink unicorns that sprinkle pixie dust on numbers that increases the value of each and every number by one so 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 3, and so on. Could this ever matter at all? The answer is no. To us, 1 is still 1, 2 is still 2, etc.
Until theistic ethics can be constructed meaningfully (no, I don’t mean physically or empirically by this), it is not reasonable to call God good. Even if we did exist in a world where God made everything he did correct regardless of the laws he set on us, that wouldn’t matter. Atheists would still proceed to call him evil. There is no meaningful aspect to any set of ethics that do not acknowledge its existence as a mental construction of humans. What I’m trying to say is that it wouldn’t matter whether or not we could “verify” whether something was good or bad by putting it under a microscope. Morality is a conceptual thing, not a physical actuality.
Cristian, that situation you present about God giving us all these rights may as well be analogous to the scenario of slave masters and their slaves. Even if someone has control over you or is responsible for your existence or well-being does not necessarily you mean you owe them anything. I think this is where Yahweh messed up with the whole Jesus rising from the dead thing…
Peter, I will be honest and say that I haven’t bothered to read this one completely, but I think you’re focusing far too much on the problem of evil and God’s benevolence. If you’d like to stress the point later on, you can refer readers to your previous essays on the topic or straighten them out via comments. I think you should now focus on why atheism is the best alternative to theism, and focus on some arguments theists give against atheism and some of its ideas (e.g., evolution, Big Bang cosmology, string theory and m-theory, etc).
@Cristian:
That simply is just not how definitions work, though, because redefining words does not change the underlying reality. God either causes unnecessary suffering or he does not, whether or not this has the added label “good” changes nothing about his behavior. This is why I would charge you with smuggling connotations.
You might say “evil” is what is contrary to God’s will. Sure, that’s a definition, but it is not what I mean when I say “evil” — I think of evil as that which causes needless suffering. We have two different definitions of “evil”.
All I need to conclude is God causes unnecessary suffering. Do you agree to this?
It’s for these reasons why I’d consider myself a moral revisionists — I honestly think throwing around words like “good” and “evil” only seek to confuse us and obfuscate the fact that unnecessary suffering exists and that I want to get rid of it.
~
In this instance, it would mean that God is causing unnecessary suffering. If God is supposed to be benevolent / loving / compassionate / caring by any standard, he wouldn’t do this. And merely saying God is compassionate by a standard of whatever God does is automatically compassionate no matter what — I ask, what is the point of that?
Is there anything God could do that you would deem malevolent? It seems like God could get away with anything, because whatever his will is, goes.
~
I enjoyed writing this, and I did it late at night when I had little else to do. One might ask the same about why you’re commenting here, even if God exists. We all have fun with academic exercises.
As for my greater goals, I seek to understand religion. I want to provide people with reasons for why I think religion is mistaken. I want to understand how we know when we’re mistaken and how people come to make mistakes, so I can both make less of them myself, and help other people to do so. I also want to be able to speak out against religion when I think it does harm. I think that this works toward making the world a better place.
More on all of this forthcoming in future essays, as always.
@Thinking Emotions:
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Put aside the actual words that we use to describe things — “evil”, “good”, and “morality” — and just look at the world itself. These words seem to be not doing us much good.
We know that humans and nearly all other animals are quite capable of suffering. We also know that every being capable of suffering has been observed to want this suffering to go away, unless it provides us with something better. Thus we have a term for suffering that does not provide us with something better — needless suffering. We don’t want needless suffering.
This needless suffering can be inflicted by beings. God is one of these beings that is capable of inflicting needless suffering. Thus this becomes an empirical question: does God inflict needless suffering? I think the answer is yes, and this small essay series is going to be the last in my quest to demonstrate this.
Additionally, this empirical fact sits uncomfortably with the claim that God is the embodiment of love and compassion, which — if these words are to have any meaning whatsoever — indicate that God will not be inflicting needless suffering. This gives rise to a contradiction within religious claims — God is said to be something he is demonstrated to not be. Thus, a basis for rejecting such religions.
As for calling God evil? God cannot be evil if he doesn’t exist, but his fictional character can have that description, and we could state the conditional that “if God did exist, he would be evil”. Here, evil just means that we have reasons to condemn God. Given that I think we have strong reasons to condemn anyone who causes needless suffering and given that God, if he were to exist, definitely does so, we do have reasons to condemn God. Thus, God is evil.
It’s easy to see how God could have not been evil, so the charge is hardly arbitrary — demonstrate that God would not be responsible for needless suffering were he to exist.
~
Perhaps, though I can make two promises:
(1) I’m almost done. This should be one of the very last things I will say on the issue for quite some time. I forsee two or three more essays on this, max, and then I will go to the referral/comment method.
(2) I have motives for writing about this topic at this time. I choose to keep these motives hidden for additionally hidden reasons — maybe I have some sort of unknown purpose? Having hidden motives is as close as I can get to being a supervillan without harming anybody.
~
I intend to do this, also, but I’m going to be wary of not re-inventing the wheel. A lot has already been said on these issues, and I feel like I only what to repeat them if I can offer actual insight in the issue.
I definitely have more stuff on cosmology forthcoming. I have stuff on the design argument forthcoming. I have stuff on faith forthcoming. I then have maybe five other unrelated essays justifying atheism against theism forthcoming. Then, I’m going to move my focus to other things — probably ethics.
Oh, cool. I figured you would have had all of this figured out already, but I was just throwing suggestions around. The conditional of “if God does exist, he is evil” has already been a reality to me for a long time. God, if he exists, is clearly malevolent. You point this out yourself, but I don’t think we even need to delve that deeply into the Bible to realize that God is certainly less than omniscient and omnibenevolent. At least, the Christian God is.
Some Christians try to say that we shouldn’t restrict God’s antics to just the Bible, but that’s troubling for a number of reasons. If we start talking about a God that is prima facie very different from the Christian God, then I feel like we’re no longer talking about that particular god; we’ve created an entirely new one (any God that is benevolent in the least is vastly different from the Christian deity). Nevertheless, talking about God and his actions in this world seems pretty useless anyway. If something happens that we find confusing or troubling, our best bet is to solve it physically (whether this means using “science” or not, I don’t really know or care).
LOL! Very subtle!
All I’m saying is that if you and I, and many other atheists for that matter, are conceiving of the Christian God correctly, then he is certainly not benevolent. There is no loophole to get out of it like many Christians think. Free will defense, skeptical theism, might makes right, etc. You’re familiar with all of them, I’m sure. The only way to escape from it is to posit an entirely new god.
What I was saying with the whole “ethics don’t actually exist” is that ethics have no physical reality. They supervene on physical properties and actions, I think. After all, we can’t observe “good” or “bad” particles floating around and attaching themselves to heroes and villains respectively. I think it’s pretty obvious that what happens in reality is neutral or meaningless until it enters the human brain. Ethics are a mental creation, yeah? I went further to say that even if God designed the world in such a way that there were these “ethical particles” floating around and that what we thought was good was actually bad, that wouldn’t matter since ethics is entirely mental.
Do you understand me now? I apologize if it seems like I’m not reading you. I’ve read your essays concerning your positions on God and his nature. I’m with you 100%. I believe what I’m saying is similar to what many naturalists are inclined to believe about morality.
Now that I’ve read this essay, I can tell you that it’s not quite as redundant as it seemed. It actually seemed as a pretty good followup to your previous writings, and it’s certainly a worthy addition to the series.
I’m left with two questions, though. You seem to take a sort of “common sense” approach to morality. Would you agree or disagree with this? You want to leave all the words and definitions out of it and instead go for a basic sense of right and wrong, correct? Don’t worry — I’m not leading this anywhere.
Secondly, isn’t judging someone different from stating facts about them? For example, “John is tall” is different from stating “John is 5’9”.” If we hear that John is tall, tall could mean anything to us. But when we state that he is 5’9”, we may say that he is average height for an adult male or maybe even short. So, what we need to do is measure God’s goodness in some way, presumably by his actions. It would seem that we can negate God’s goodness on grounds of his wicked actions. Is this a good paraphrase of your position?
Peter, suffering is not evil. It is, as you say, only when it’s unnecessary.
When is it unnecessary? When there is no reason behind it. When is there no reason behind it? Who can tell? Can you tell? You can tell only what you know. You can’t tell so much about the things you don’t know. You can extrapolate, but the moment you do that, you’re on slippery grounds.
Do you know what comes after death? I suppose you don’t, just like most of us. Does God know? If He exists, He does. Is God more entitled to be the one to tell what’s reasonable or not, what’s necessary or unnecessary?
One good point you make is about hidden reasons. But there is yet unknown reasons for suffering and there is completely inaccessible reasons. I am pretty sure that most of the suffering in the world falls under the yet unknown reasons, and suffering is sometimes a push for us to find those reasons.
@Christian Pascu
“I am pretty sure that most of the suffering in the world falls under the yet unknown reasons, and suffering is sometimes a push for us to find those reasons”
How are you pretty sure?
No, suffering isn’t evil. Inflicting it or carelessly allowing it when it is in your ability to stop it, however, might be. If the president is given a message that the Chinese military will bomb Arkansas and does absolutely nothing about it, shouldn’t he be held responsible? Let’s go a step further and say that the armed services is more than capable of stopping this bombing run, and that the president also knows this. If he doesn’t do anything, whose fault is it for the deaths and suffering in Arkansas? Sure, the Chinese partly, but the president shares some blame too.
If you read Peter’s essay about God being a malevolent bully, you can also find evidence of God inflicting needless suffering as well. I think the idea of necessary suffering is an oxymoron. It is nearly never healthy to suffer (aside from surgeries or medical treatment), and what does not kill us certainly makes us weaker. This is why I always make a weird face when Christians insist that we don’t know that it’s needless suffering, therefore we can’t say anything about it. I think both camps make a heavy assumption, but I find that if God is omnibenevolent, then it follows that he should clearly be good. This is not the message many atheists receive, and even after of trying to see God as good, we ultimately can’t.
I imagine this is where you’ll throw in the apologist, Pascal inspired nonsense of “If you have an open heart and mind, with cognitive faculties that are undamaged, you will come to accept the Lord.”
@Thinking Emotions, on the role of this essay:
No worries; I do appreciate the feedback. Often it is much needed in keeping me grounded and making sure what I am doing is following a big picture and actually achieving my broader goals. It’s easy to get caught up in each individual essay.
~
You’d think that, but the problem proves very resilient as more and more evidence is marshaled and dismissed via various objections (which always seem to be post hoc, ad hoc, unjustified rationalizations). I think through my four essays pointed at suffering that I’ve finally got the argument unambiguously and unwaveringly pinned down to an appeal to mystery — sure you can use some excuses (free will, soul making, etc.) to explain some suffering, but you can’t use it to explain it all.
Thus, as I explain in this very essay, we’re forced to appeal to mystery — there just is no other out. Then, if I can finally squish all these appeals to mystery, there will be noting left and the Problem of Evil prevails. At least that’s my goal to see it through.
~
This is definitely a bit of an issue as I’ve focused heavily on the Christian Bible and Hell as a key component of my suffering. But I think “The Great Problem of Evil” does hold its ground against any omnipontent-omniscient-omnibenevolent force, whatever that may be and whichever religion endorses it.
But even if the problem of evil were to just apply to debunk Christianity, I think that still would be a big deal, given the sheer number of Christians and the large influence Christianity has on politics and culture. It seems that nowadays, the other religions aren’t even defended philosophically anymore to anywhere near the magnitude or depth.
~
I agree. If a deity of the type surviving the problem of evil (omniscience + omnipotence, but no omnibenevolence) does exist, there probably is not much use condemning it — that won’t make it decide to help us. And if it doesn’t exist, there is no use in appealing to it, either.
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Yes, thanks for the clarifications!
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No worries. You at least admitted upfront that you hadn’t read the entire essay, which I found was a refreshingly honest way to frame your preliminary feedback.
~
Thanks! Do you think on further reflection that the language of the essay itself makes it clear what the role of this essay is and why I wrote it? Or should I go back and edit it to make that more clear?
@Thinking Emotions, on ethics and evil, part 1/2:
Right. But you don’t even need to suppose ethics or some fabled objective morality in order to prove the Problem of Evil. I’ve long held this position, though I worry that it was more counter-intuitive than I thought, and that perhaps I should have defended this position more clearly back when I first started writing on God and suffering, rather than leaving it as scattered endnotes in five different locations.
I think there’s a good chance you do agree with me on this, but I feel like I should make it clear anyway. I think the crux of the matter is the question “Does God cause or allow needless suffering?”. The answer to this question is empirical, and is counterfactually yes, should God exist. All this means is the statement “If God exists, God causes or allows needless suffering”* is true.
(*For further clarification: “God” is the specifically Christian God of the Bible, “exists” is in the literal/physical sense, “causes” is a direct act to bring about the effect, “allows” is a decision to not act to stop the effect when such action was possible, and “needless suffering” is suffering that is not logically necessary for a higher good. More on needless suffering a bit further in the comment, since it seems to be a source of some confusion.)
We can make additional definitions that supervene on this — we can say that needless suffering is “bad” or “evil” or “unethical” or “immoral”. But I don’t think any of these words tell us anything about suffering. I am not against needless suffering because it is evil, I am against evil because it is needless suffering. So I choose to just cut out the middle-man word because it causes confusion and pushes the level of abstraction higher than it needs to be. The moment I say “God is evil”, I introduce all sorts of debates about what evil refers to, whereas if I say “God causes or allows needless suffering”, the debate is relatively more straightforward.
Now we might ask what it is about needless suffering that gives it the normative tinge — in what sense is God mistaken for causing/allowing needless suffering? I think an act is only mistaken if it is an act that does not further the goals of the agent, so if God is some bizarrely malevolent entity that just enjoys causing suffering, then there is no way we can actually say God was mistaken in causing suffering and ought to have done something else.
This might make me sound like some sort of relativist/nihilist, but I have three more things to say:
(1) We still have strong reason to condemn a malevolent God and want such a being to not exist, since we don’t like other beings that cause needless suffering for kicks. This condemnation is still justified, rational, and objective — it’s just also relative to us. The relativity does not diminish the strength of the complaint, so the condemnation aspect is not diminished at all, even if we abandon the use of moral terminology.
(2) There simply is no justified, objective fact of the matter that a perfectly malevolent entity is mistaken in causing suffering, so all theories are on equal ground with me here, moral terminology or not. This goes doubly so for Christianity’s Divine Command Theory, since a hypothetically malevolent God would be the grounding for malevolent commands.
(3) Even if we don’t use moral terminology, I still think all humans are mistaken if they endorse malevolent acts or act malevolently, since I think that ultimately all goals actually held by humans are most furthered by compassion. No human is authentically malevolent, not even psychopaths. Thus compassion is the only rational act for a human. I expect a lot of questioning on this point, but I’ll have to kick it down to essays dedicated to it itself.
You can see all of this stated with different details in “Web of Beliefs and My Philosophy”.
~
I think so, though I don’t think there is one predominant conception of ethics among naturalists.
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I think so. If I put it in terms of what it is you ought to do, you might be compelled to actually eradicate these evil-particles, assuming that you value having less evil-particles in the world, so they could matter in that sense.
Though, I suppose in another sense you’re right that everything reduces to brain states — the only reason you have to eradicate evil-particles is that you have a brain state that corresponds with the value of having less evil-particles. If there were no brains capable of suffering and having values, there would be no one to care about the evil-particles, and you’re right that evil-particles are not intrinsically evil in themselves — that would be some sort of map-territory error.
However, I think it is misleading to say that you’re only eradicating the evil-particles to fulfill your brain state, because that seems to again put us on the wrong level of abstraction, conceptually akin to cooking by putting the actual recipe in the oven and cooking it instead of the ingredients.
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This depends on what meaning you have for “evil”. The way I’ve seen it commonly used is that evil does require an intent to inflict, and thus suffering cannot be evil. And there is nothing intrinsic in suffering itself that makes it evil, for all the reasons you’ve said and I’ve just agreed to and articulated.
However, needless suffering can be evil in the sense that even if it wasn’t inflicted or carelessly allowed by an actual person, we still want to get rid of it. It’s something we don’t want around.
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I really want to continue and finish up a few more responses to what has been said here to complete the picture, but I sadly ran out of time. I should be able to come back and finish in a few hours.
@Thinking Emotions, on ethics and evil, part 2/2:
… continued from above
The thing I call needless suffering (aka unnecessary/undesired/unneeded/gratuitous suffering) is different from necessary suffering in that sometimes you must suffer to get something else you want more. You give the example of surgeries and medical treatment, but there is more — exercising can be painful, even brushing your teeth takes up my time I’d rather spend doing other things, and refraining from stealing makes me lose out on opportunities for money.
Now all of these things cause me to lose out and thus suffer in some very trivial sense, but it’s also clear that they get me what I want down the road. This is why I say “needless suffering is suffering that is not necessary for a higher good”. I suffer for higher goods; things I want more.
The “necessary for” part is a key point for the Problem of Evil though, because God can radically change what is necessary. He could give us all the benefits of exercise with none of the costs, for example. The point here isn’t that God should have made us perfect (I’d rather have something to strive for), but that if God can do anything that is logically possible and a world with say no diseases and no drawbacks is prima facie logically possible, the burden of proof should be on the theist to show that the world must have been this way — unknown purposes don’t fix this.
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Sounds about right. I’d like to think of it as common sense, anyway. It does seem to put a lot of the really silly debates about what “good” refers to and really get to the heart of what we care about.
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I think that’s a good paraphrase. One advantage we have here is superlatives. If we just said that God was “good”, we would be stuck — well how good is he, and how good is good enough? Translated into nonmoral language: how much needless suffering should God be able to get away with?
But we don’t have that, we have God being the best, the most good, morally perfect, flawlessly compassionate, and all-loving. This is like saying “John is the tallest” or “John is infinitely tall”. Just as finding one person taller than John kills the claim that he’s the tallest, finding one instance of needless suffering kills the claim that God is flawlessly compassionate.
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I agree with this principle — if you have it within your means to effortlessly prevent people from dying and fail to do so, there is no way in which you can claim that you value life. It gets a bit more complicated if it takes a lot of effort and risk to save lives, but the principle still stands.
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What assumption do you think I’m making?
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Sounds like some sort of argument from reasonable nonbelief is in play here.
@Cristian:
Right, I’m not claiming any sort of absolute knowledge here. But as far as we know, God has no unknown purpose, and it’s silly to defend someone with that kind of thing. See the arguments I make in the section “The Unknowable Purpose is Unreasonable” of this very essay.
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I think we can be rather certain that nothing comes after death, but of course I cannot promise absolutes. I say this on the basis that a second life after death seems to require supernatural concepts, and of course I don’t think those are coherent. I have a good summary of my reasoning against the supernatural in “Web of Beliefs and My Philosophy”.
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A being that knows everything would surely be entitled to tell me what is reasonable, but I would also need to trust him. He can’t just tell me things that make no sense, and he can’t just assert an unknowable purpose without further justification.
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Let me know when you either (1) figure out what those reasons are or (2) figure out how we can be sure there is a reason to find.
You know, when I was your age I got married, with very little knowledge about what marriage really is. I don’t know about you, but in the past 10 years since then, I’ve seen and been through a lot of suffering. And like Heidegger says, you’re not really a faithful person if you don’t take into consideration faithlessness. And I know I’ve been there. It’s not easy.
I’ve been certain of things, just to become less certain years later. I’ve also learned that some other things you figure out in time. I’ve met people that had a different and better understanding. Some of them through face-to-face encounters, others through their writings.
It’s one thing to have an academic chat about the suffering of the prisoners in the communist prisons after the second world war, and another thing to search for a reason for the suffering in your house or in your heart.
There’s nothing natural about suffering. Rocks don’t suffer. We do, for supernatural reasons and purposes. It’s the purpose that gives hope. Our lives lies within the tension between the absurdity of suffering and its possible absolute purpose.
If a kid reads quantum mechanics, will it make any sense? The same with any scared text. It takes a mind transformation, which takes a lot of time and suffering. Suffering is the core of our metamorphosis, that’s why it’s so hard, if not impossible, to understand. I’m not old enough to really understand this, but I’m old enough to know that with age I will understand more.
@Cristian:
This is a combination of “Ha, you aren’t absolutely sure about what you’re saying” and “you’ll know better when you’re older”. Neither of these two explain what the purpose is, how we know there is a purpose, and why we should accept an unknown purpose.
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But you’re still begging the question by assuming there is a reason to search for.
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Why are the reasons specifically supernatural? Why are we supernatural? What does “supernatural” mean when you say it?
We’re very different from rocks, but that doesn’t in itself mean we’re supernatural. And suffering isn’t unique to humans — lots of other animals can suffer.
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So is it something you just have to believe based on faith? If so, why do you choose to have faith that there’s a reason, instead of something else, like faith that there’s no reason?
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This sounds like fallaciously wishful thinking — there is a reason because it sure would be sad if there wasn’t a reason.
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No, but that doesn’t make a difference. With sufficient education, we can come to understand quantum mechanics at a reasonable level. The same can’t be said of God’s allegedly unknowable purpose.
And if that’s true, then the “Where is God?” objection enters into even more force — why make it so difficult to be saved, if the alternative is going to be an unjust suffering in Hell?
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That’s a sad thing to be at the core of our metamorphosis, and kind of a jerk move. But even so, what do you make of suffering that is most definitely not connected to metamorphosis, such as birth defects, fatal diseases and disasters, or the suffering of animals prior to the existence of humans?
I enjoy the personal touch and reassuring nature of your comment, but I’m starting to feel like you haven’t been reading what I’ve already said on the issue. If you did, you would be addressing what I said on why we shouldn’t accept an unknowable purpose.
If you believe evil is needless suffering, wouldn’t it then follow that needless suffering is evil? I understood the rhetoric of what you were saying, but I am confused by the meat of your statement. I know you try to simplify everything, and believe me, I truly appreciate that. These matters are frequently overcomplicated, and they are conceptually difficult to begin with.
Here’s the message I’m receiving: you find the approach of “what is the definition of evil?” as opposed to “is X evil?” more helpful. Once we define evil, it is easy to answer the latter question. If X is evil, then X in some way embodies that certain principle. In our cases, since I will gladly confirm that we do agree, it would be needless suffering.
Since the definition of evil is needless suffering, needless suffering is evil. Is anything else evil though? I guess this is the next arena we can visit, and it has two possible resolutions. Either {A} all forms of evil are reducible to some form of needless suffering or {B} needless suffering is just one general form of evil and there are others.
I agree with your (1), but (2) is bordering on gibberish to me. What are you trying to say? (3) I kind of disagree with, or at least I find unfounded. If you truly think there is no such thing as an “authentically malevolent” human being, you have obviously not read much about fellows like Ted Bundy and Ed Gein. I really don’t know how you could try to make a case for them not being authentically malevolent. The very definition of a sociopath or psychopath is the lack of empathy/compassion.
Furthermore, I think it’s usually futile when people try to liken certain ethical behaviors to rationality. The roots of this futility probably go back to ethical egoism. In this case, linking compassionate behavior with rationality is going to cause problems, most notably with semantics. What do you mean by compassionate behavior? What do you mean by rationality? Is it possible to act compassionately, but not rationally? Are all rational acts compassionate? Is it always rational to be compassionate? This assertion will raise a lot of questions and interesting discussion, and I look forward to what exactly your thoughts are on this topic.
Agreed.
Precisely. In human terms, saving lives is not always practical or possible for many reasons. But for an all-powerful, all-knowing God, it is more than possible. God has no plausible excuse.
@Thinking Emotions:
Right. To me, I see a lot of rhetoric where people are against evil, but then seeking to figure out what evil is. This leads to arguments about whether needless suffering actually is evil, or at least a question that needless suffering could have counterfactually not been evil.
Instead, I don’t care at all to talk about evil. I’d rather just talk about what I’m actually against, and see if other people are against the same thing.
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Correct.
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This is the part I find confused, and I think where we disagree. In order to ask that question “Is anything besides needless suffering evil?” you need to have a different definition of evil. This is the only way you can pattern match something with the “evil” concept.
I see the statement “is needless suffering evil?” to be tautological, and that calling needless suffering evil adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.
The way I see you playing it is that you are using a different definition of evil “that which I personally oppose” or, more normatively, “that which everyone ought to oppose”, and then are doing a pattern match “needless suffering” versus “must-oppose” and coming up with an actual insight, and leaving open a legitimate question about whether you oppose other things besides needless evil.
I find this different definition of evil completely fine, but I never see this difference acknowledged in any of the morality conversations I have. Instead, “evil” ends up with this constantly shifting and is often equivocated, leading to confusion and fallacious logic.
I don’t think you do this, but this needs to be brought out into the open. Thus I aim to, at least when doing analytic philosophy, bring it out into the open by not talking about “evil”. If I were in a conversation among friends, I would probably use the word “evil” in an attempt to speak their language.
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Basically, (2) is my assertion that claims about what someone must be compelled to do can only be justified prudentially (by appealing to the desires of the agent), and thus that if some entity genuinely desires causing suffering above all else, there is no sense in which we can say they are mistaken in causing this suffering. But I also think it can make sense to condemn someone, even if they’re doing what they ought to do.
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That’s fine. Actually it’s to be expected, because I didn’t defend (3) at all. I need not and cannot defend all of (3) here, it will take a series of essays to do so. I just offer (3) to show you where I plan on taking this morality thing.
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Oh gosh, I hope to avoid all of this. I think if I state the assertion more precisely and precede it with the appropriate prerequisites, I can avoid a lot of this. Please follow along and see how I do.