Justin: First, if theistic evolution is true, pain and pleasure only exist because God has indirectly guided (or permitted) blind processes to fashion bodies with that capacity. God, being morally perfect and unburdened by the very biological laws over which she is sovereign, wouldn't permit pain (even biologically useful pain) without powerful moral reasons. A mere biological reason wouldn't suffice because an omnipotent God is capable of creating humans without biologically useful pain or pleasure. Therefore, we have much more reason to be surprised that pain and pleasure systematically contribute to biological goals in this way on theism than we do on atheism.
Randal: God would only create a diversity of species through evolutionary means if doing so was consistent with his perfect moral nature. So if one has independent reasons to believe God exists, reasons such as I've provided, and if one believes an evolutionary account of biological diversity is correct, then it follows that the biological reasons for pain and pleasure are consistent with God's moral nature.
What's so surprising about that?
Justin: Nothing in my argument should be interpreted as my claiming that theism is inconsistent with there being some biological reasons for some pain and pleasure. Moreover, simply noting that if theism were true, then all suffering must be consistent with God's nature (morally justified in some way) does nothing to address the question of whether the evidence I've mentioned about the systematic yet blind role pain plays with respect to the biological goals of survival and reproduction supports theism or atheism.
So, remember how I mentioned that much of pain and pleasure fails to be biologically useful?
Randal: Yes, yes, I do.
Justin: Well, on atheistic evolution, the processes at work are wholly blind, imperfect, and incapable of fine-tuning experiences of pain and pleasure so that they only occur when biologically useful. On theism, however, these pain receptors need not be so blind to the circumstances. On theism, God could fine-tune pain receptors to deliver only a painful sensation when it would contribute to the biological goals of the organism.
It's often asserted that God is capable of fine-tuning the cosmological constants for the existence of life, but the issue of God's suspicious failure to fine-tune pain receptors is rarely ever discussed.
In the actual world, the family trapped in the burning house will experience the hell of the heat. The man on his deathbed will experience the hell of being slowly eaten by his infection. The torture victim will feel every excruciating rip of pain before his captors eventually end his life.
These examples of pain are as real and deeply felt as they are useless with respect to biological goals.
These examples are also much easier to explain on atheism, whereas on theism we have to assume that in every case there also happens to be moral justifications. That's a huge detail that the theist must saddle himself with. The atheist, on the other hand, is entirely unsurprised that our pain receptors so clearly seem crafted by an indifferent and blind process rather than a morally perfect, omniscient God.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND MATERIAL CREATION: WHICH IS MORE SURPRISING?
Randal: Well, I don't think that's much for the theist to saddle himself with. After all, if the meticulously provident deity of classical theism exists, then the moral justification for all evils that occur follows naturally. Your reasoning is like a person saying “But if God exists then he created planets and nebulae and stars and black holes! That's a huge detail that the theist must saddle himself with.” No, no, it isn't. If God exists then it follows naturally that he created all those things. And if God exists then it follows naturally that every evil has a moral justification.
I must say that this line of argument strikes me as ironic given how extraordinary it is that pain, and conscious states in general, should exist at all within an atheistic universe. Consider, according to the theist consciousness is basic, for God is himself a disembodied mind that brings both matter and finite embodied minds into existence. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that God should produce a universe with conscious minds. By contrast, on atheism the emergence of consciousness is completely unexpected and inexplicable. So as I said, it seems rather ironic that you're appealing to the fact of pain to support atheism when that fact entails the more general fact of consciousness, which is already extremely surprising on atheism but not on theism.
Justin: Let me first agree that, when it comes to conscious states, I too find them less likely to arise on atheism than on theism because theism entails God's conscious states. But admitting this is not at all inconsistent with my argument. There is nothing improper about identifying a general statement that supports one hypothesis while many of its known details lend strong support to an entirely different, incompatible hypothesis.
I tend to see your worry regarding conscious states and their ability to arise on atheism as a parallel to an argument in the opposite direction. If, as you say, conscious states are basic on theism, then for that and other reasons, it is the physical that is unexpected and inexplicable on theism. It's not at all obvious to me that these concerns do anything other than cancel each other out.
Randal: I'm glad you agree that the existence of consciousness is more surprising on atheism than on theism. But I don't agree that the theist faces a comparable problem as regards the alleged surprising existence of matter. To argue your case, you need to provide some basis to believe that if God creates he is more likely to actualize nonphysical or immaterial substances than physical or material ones. But how would you justify that claim?
Justin: Well, no, that's not necessary. See, I think the problem goes further back than that. One of the most basic questions to ask is whether or not God, if she existed, would create anything in the first place. I'm certainly not the first person to point out that it's not remotely obvious why God would ever choose to create any finite thing outside of her morally and ontologically perfect self. The second and equally strange assumption that God, if she ever actually chose to create, would create physical stuff rather than “nonphysical” stuff is also far from obvious.
Randal: As I already noted earlier in this conversation, God wouldn't create out of need.
Justin: I can agree with that.
Randal: But that is quite different from claiming God would likely not create at all, for one can create for many reasons other than need. For example, many artists bring their artistic works into being because it is of their very nature to be artists. And many theists have thought about God in an analogous sense, not that God creates out of need but rather out of the superabundant creativity of his very nature.
Justin: On the one hand, if you want to define God as creative by definition (as an artist is), you've immediately contradicted your above claim that creation was not done out of necessity. On the other, if God's creation act was a free act, then we're left to make sense of God's bizarre intentional decision to dilute the overall perfection of the most pure and perfect state of affairs that has ever existed, which is God's existing alone. If God exists, this possible world will forever be stained by her decision to bring about the finite, limited, and imperfect entities.
Randal: I didn't say God necessarily creates, though interestingly many theologians (both inside and outside the Judeo-Christian tradition) have considered creation to be a necessary expression of God's nature. And that's precisely opposite to your supposition that God wouldn't create. As for the mainstream Christian perspective, on that view creation is a natural but not necessary expression of God's nature.
And I reject your suggestion that the possible world in which God alone exists is somehow greater than the possible worlds in which God exists with a creation. I see nothing to support that claim. Indeed, your logic would suggest that God would be unable to bring any creation into existence because the creation of anything other than God would entail a dilution of overall goodness. But this claim flatly contradicts the doctrine of omnipotence.
Justin: I disagree. This doesn't contradict omnipotence because
omnipotence doesn't entail the possibility of doing something contrary to one's essential moral nature. If omnipotence did entail such a thing, then God's inability to do an evil act would equally count against her omnipotence.
Randal: And I see zero reason to think the very act of creation would violate God's moral nature.
But look, I don't want my ain't-consciousness-surprising-on-atheism rejoinder to obscure your main point here. So let's do a quick review. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that if atheism were true we would expect a crude fit between pain and the biological benefits of that pain. But if theism were true we would expect a more precise fit, since God would not want his creatures to experience unnecessary pain. Since the fit we do in fact find in nature is crude rather than precise, this favors atheism over theism. Is that correct?
Justin: I'm saying that, if theism were true, we have more reason to think that pain and pleasure wouldn't just behave like other biological mechanisms than we would on atheism. This is because of the moral significance that pain and pleasure can have on our lives.
If there is to be pain and pleasure on theism, we'd have more reason to expect them to be aimed at moral goals rather than biological goals. We'd rightly be surprised when we witness the excruciating pain of the family as they slowly die in a house fire, as God could easily “turn off” such sensations once they are not contributing to the biological goal of survival. Theism requires that all such biologically unnecessary suffering that results from poorly tuned pain receptors is connected to some moral justification. But theism is then left with explaining why moral justifications so map onto pain and pleasure in a way that perfectly resembles the systematic goal-directedness toward biological goals that we'd expect on purely Darwinian, unguided evolution.
GOD'S HIDDEN REASONS?
Randal: Tell me Justin, how do you think God should've done it? In other words, how would the world have to look for your objection to be satisfied?
Justin: The moral significance that pain and pleasure have in terms of the ability for moral agents to have good lives and affect the lives of others gives us strong reason to expect that, on theism, the bodily subsystems that produce pain and pleasure should be different from other subsystems. God could have guided evolution such that the relationship between pain and our bodies would be so that we only felt pain when, say, doing something wrong, rather than as a result of blind biological systems. The family trapped in the house fire experiencing excruciating pain before their eventual death makes more sense on the indifference entailed by Darwinian atheistic evolution than on the guiding hand of God posited by theistic evolution.
Basically, on theism, we have more reason to expect the doomed family not to experience pain.
Randal: Thanks for unpacking that a bit more. I must admit that while I definitely feel the emotional appeal of the problem of evil, I've always been deeply skeptical of the way that skeptics have relatively confident beliefs about how an infinitely knowledgeable, benevolent, and wise being should run things.
Justin: Hmm. Okay, but are you equally skeptical when theists such as yourself make claims about how an infinitely knowledgeable, benevolent, and wise being should run things? Because nearly every argument that we've so far discussed on both sides includes claims about what we should expect from such a hypothesis.
Randal: No, I'm not equally skeptical about the theist. You see, I'm seeking to do two things in our conversation. First, on the offensive, I'm providing positive arguments for the existence of God. Second, on the defensive, I'm providing objections, those undercutting and rebutting defeaters, to your arguments against the existence of God. On the defensive front, my task is to show that theism is perfectly consistent with the evidence you provide. So until you provide independent reasons for me to question my assumptions about God, I'll be happy to retain them. Moreover, those who find them persuasive are rational to adopt them.
I suspect we can all envision instances where, contrary to all expectation, extraordinary goods were borne of the most ignoble circumstances. If one considers the prospect that God is providentially active in the world, one will have grounds to view the evils that occur, as horrible as they may be in themselves, nonetheless as explicable within a larger economy in which God uses those evils to give rise to greater goods. And the fact that we cannot currently see what those goods are is not an adequate reason to think they don't exist.
Justin: I fully agree that if one is committed to belief in God, they will interpret such evils or sufferings as justified in some way. Often such persons will appeal to what they think of as a greater good and then claim (with varying degrees of success) that the suffering in question was necessary in order for God to obtain that greater good or, perhaps, to avoid some equally bad or worse instance of suffering. If theism is true, then it must be that all sufferings (or evils) that actually occur are morally best all-things-considered. Any failure to locate God's possible justifications for permitting the worst horrors in the world is merely the fault of our epistemic limitations.
Randal: I couldn't have said it better myself! Well, maybe I could have, but that was still darn good, except for the “best-all-things-considered” description.
Justin: But I'm not particularly interested in how a committed theist might seek to explain the suffering. Rather, I'm interested in the separate issue of whether or not the facts to which I've so far referred constitute evidence against theism. But this brings up an interesting point. As an aside, consider what follows from this about the following horrors that have actually happened.
If theism is true, the Holocaust was morally best, all things considered (even if we may not know God's morally good reasons for permitting this).
If theism is true, it is routinely best, all things considered, for a parent to kill their child (even if we may not know God's morally good reasons for permitting this).
If theism is true, it is morally best, all things considered, for Private Killum to torture, kill, and mutilate the Nazi POW (even if we may not know God's morally good reasons for permitting this).
The list could go on and on for all actual horrors in the world. My worry is that theists are in a bit of a moral bind here. If theism is true and horrors are often morally best all things considered, it would seem that our moral intuitions about what is a good act or state of affairs are radically confused.
Randal: I'm glad to see you haven't forgotten my Private Killum example. However, I'm not sure what you mean by saying it is morally best for these evils to occur.
Justin: Ah, allow me to explain. When I say that some actual event is morally best, all things considered, on theism, I am referring to the fact that, if theism is true, God has providentially picked a world to create and has chosen according to her infinite wisdom (and for reasons unavailable to us) to fill it with the happenings that she has. We must assume that her reasons for choosing these events (rather than some other, tamer happenings) to occur are among the best possible kinds of moral reasons.
God could have prevented the Holocaust but she didn't. We must infer then that, if God exists, the Holocaust was morally necessary for some unknown reason. A lesser evil wouldn't have been sufficient to achieve whatever mysterious moral goal God was after. The Holocaust, then, was morally best all things considered.
Randal: I have two points by way of reply. First, the fact that God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil has absolutely no implications for our moral intuitions. It does not follow that our moral intuitions are, as you say, “radically confused.” An evil act is, in itself, still an evil act, even if God still has a morally sufficient reason to allow it to occur.
Justin: Yeah, I don't think that helps. If theists have in their background knowledge the fact that, for example, murders and rapes actually happen every day all around the world and so must have been morally best, all things considered (even though we may not know why they are morally best), it will not be at all obvious to them whether or not to intervene on behalf of the ne
xt victim they see.
Randal: The fact that you keep using the term “morally best” to refer to actions that are themselves morally heinous has the whiff of a rhetorical gambit. But I fear that only perpetuates confusion. If a moral agent has morally sufficient reasons to allow an evil event to occur, that allowance does not thereby transmute the evil into something good, let alone something morally best. I said it before and I'll say it again: the act itself is still an evil even though it was allowed for a greater good.
Justin: I've not claimed that divine allowance makes some evil event into a morally good one. When I say something is morally best in this context, I mean it was the best or one of the best options available, such that, if we could see it from a God's eye view, it would be like the pain experienced by the child receiving a flu shot—best when all things are being considered.
Randal: Hey, I need to take on your suggestion that an account of God's allowing evil for greater good would undermine a basis for moral action. That seems to me to be patently false. Our ground for moral action is constituted by the moral good and our specific moral obligations and callings to live in accord with it, and I've presented a theistic case for both. In short, we have a moral obligation to prevent evil where possible, even as we know that God has a morally sufficient reason to allow the evils we fail to prevent.
I also want to come back to your statement that the evils that God allows are somehow morally best for his purposes. This simply doesn't follow. All that follows is that God has morally sufficient reasons to allow the evils that do occur. There could be an infinite number of feasible worlds that God could choose to actualize that are consistent with his moral nature and have a commensurate distribution of goods and evils to the world God in fact created.
Justin: This is why I specifically refer to the actual world context in which these actual events occur with the phrase “all things considered.”
An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar Page 21