Polkinghorne on Dawkins, Cornwell, and Humphrys
Nov 17th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 33 Comments |
Thanks to Keith Burgess-Jackson for pointing his readers to John Polkinghorne’s review of Darwin’s Angel and In God We Doubt for the Times Literary Supplement.
In it, Polkinghorne uses the fact that Darwin’s Angel is a literary response to Dawkins’ The God Delusion as an occasion to say a few things about Dawkins and TGD himself.
Polkinghorne even has a few things to say about the Problem of Evil. As I’ve said before, I don’t think there is an answer to the Problem of Evil. But Polkinghorne’s approach is interesting.
I’m trying to figure out which premise of the Problem of Evil your theodicy (or lack thereof) is denying. To quickly and informally formalize, the Problem of Evil consists of these five premises:
1) God exists.
2) God is all-powerful.
3) God is all-knowing.
4) God is all-good.
5) Evil exists.
Pick any four, but you can’t have all five. Most theodicies (including Mr. Polkinghorne’s and C.S. Lewis’s) deny premise 5. Evil doesn’t exist. Or, in the words of Alexander Pope, “All discord, harmony, not understood / All partial evil, universal good / And spite of pride in erring reason’s spite / One truth is clear: whatever is, is right.”
I think your theodicy is a denial of premise 4, but please correct me if this is not your own understanding. Because God is timeless, he cannot have reasons for anything he does. Therefore, he is not good, at least not in any meaningful sense. Or it could be a denial of premise 2. A timeless being may not be able to make decisions in the way you or I can and, therefore, is not all-powerful.
All those premises look good to me.
Except in 1, “exists” has to be taken analogically. God doesn’t exist in the way things in the universe do. The Scholastics argued a lot about this point. God is not one member of the group of things that exist.
2 is often qualified by the claim that God doesn’t do/can’t do what is illogical. A better way of saying it is to say that there are some claims that can be made about God which can’t have any sense. “God could make a rock too big for God to lift” and “God can’t make a rock too big for God to lift” are such. “God has a reason for doing x” and “God doesn’t have a reason y” are, I claim, in the same category.
3 is fine, so long as it doesn’t imply that “God knows the future.” That’s another senseless claim, unless we replace the word “the” with “our.” I would claim, however, that God can know everything, rather than that God does know everything. Whether God does know everything is up to God, and I can’t “read God’s mind,” as it were.
4 is fine as well. But, again, divine attributes can only be said analogically. The Scholastics argued about this alot too (see here, and here). And since I don’t think we can talk with any sense about God’s reasons for doing things, I don’t see how God’s goodness can be used as a premise in any practical syllogism.
5 is obvious. I don’t see how anyone can deny it.
My claim is that the Problem of Evil cannot be solved by people who believe in a timeless God because doing so requires stating why God allows evil (given the premises you list above), and any such statement would have no sense.
Wait, I think I messed up about not being able to use God’s goodness as a premise in practical syllogisms. There may be ways in which a premise can function as something other than a “reason.”
Hmmm…
To defend those who deny premise 5, I think they can make good arguments for the claim that no evil exists (only apparent evil; we think it’s evil because we don’t understand the whole plan). C.S. Lewis in ‘A Grief Observed’ says:
“The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed–might grow tired of his vile sport–might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary for no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.”
For a literary rejoinder, see Voltaire’s ‘Candide.’
Even granting the analogical claims of the Scholastics and the timelessness of God, it still doesn’t seem senseless to me to ask why God allows evil things to occur. We have a God who has made decisions (he decided, for example, to come to Earth as Jesus, according to traditional Christian beliefs). If he is all-powerful, he could have made different decisions than he did. Timelessness, it seems to me, only implies that he makes up his mind “all at once,” so to speak, not that he doesn’t have reasons for his actions. And, if he is a good God, he will have good reasons.
Nice.
I think A Grief Observed is the best book on the problem of evil.
However, the surgeon metaphor only works for certain types of pain. Seems to me there’s plenty of cutting in life that is done by Mack the Knife, not a surgeon.
I don’t think you can actually say that “God decided to come to earth.” That would require past-tense statements about God’s “internal” activity.
Nor do I think you can sensefully say that God decides things “all at once” or “it takes no time for God to do anything.” That’s like saying “Democracy is colorless” or “affirmation is not sticky.” Color/democracy, and affirmation/stickiness simply don’t belong together at all. They cannot be sensefully joined either by affirmation or negation.
Your conception of God reminds me of Alan Moore’s graphic novel ‘Watchmen.’ (I thought it was brilliant when I read it in the late ’80s, but it’s a Cold War novel and very much of its time, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anybody now.)
In ‘Watchmen,’ there is a character called Jon Osterman. Due to an accident involving a nuclear power reactor, he becomes nearly omnipotent and “timeless,” in the sense that everything happens to him simultaneously. He therefore already knows all of his own future. In fact, he is experiencing it simultaneously with his past and his present. At one point, another character remarks that this can’t be true, since he had expressed surprise at an event. His response was, “Everything is preordained. Even my reactions.” She says, “And you just act them out? You’re just a puppet following a script?” He replies, “We’re all puppets. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.”
Moore’s solution to the Problem of Evil in a world with a godlike being was that Osterman was not all-powerful. He wasn’t making any decisions at all. I’m not sure if what you’re saying about God is analogous to this or not, but it seems that way to me.
That’s cool sounding. I love it when artists take on philosophical issues like this.
The difference between the character you describe and God is that God is the Creator. Describing anything as controling God would be senseless. There is nothing beyond God to control God if God is the Creator of all.
The limitations I’m describing are limitations on language, not God, so we couldn’t know what we were saying if we said God was controlled by strings.
I find it fun to play at the edges of conceptuality like this. I appreciate your indulging me.
Oh, and Vonnegut tries to deal with what beings who are outside time would be like in Slaughterhouse V too. I wasn’t convinced, but it was still a fascinating book.
Vonnegut did something very similar in Sirens of Titan as well. Vonnegut, of course, believes in predestination.
If you’re only describing limitations on language rather than limitations on God, then I can’t take it too seriously as an argument. If God had a choice in creating the universe, then God “decided” to create the universe, even if it was only an analogical “decision” with no duration in time. It’s not clear that you’re saying anything that resolves the Problem of Evil.
I’m not resolving the problem of evil at all. My point is it can’t be resolved, and that we know why it can’t be resolved: any theodicy by definition must make a senseless claim about God, and therefore be senseless itself.
The only way to resolve it with any sense is to deny that it’s an actual problem by denying one of the premises you listed. And that’s not a resolution of the problem. It’s a statement that the problem isn’t one. Which is fine if you think that one of the premises is actually false.
My position is that the problem of evil is a problem, that it can’t be resolved, and that I can tell you why it can’t be resolved. It can’t be resolved because the nature of the God about whom any answer must speak makes all such answers senseless.
Also, I think I have not made my understanding of language clear. My “school” is phenomenology. “We” see language as having the primary function of revealing the world (or reality, taken as something to be thought about, experienced, and spoken about).
Language is one thing you use to present the world to yourself and to others (other ways would be experience and pictures, to name two). You only argue about language as a way of figuring out how we deal with/understand/present the world.
I don’t believe in a Wittgensteinian representational theory of language, therefore, in which arguments about language are an end in themselves.
I see what you’re saying about not resolving the Problem, but the Problem of Evil is a logical contradiction. The five premises cannot all be true simultaneously. One of them must be false. So your position is, then, that it’s possible for logical contradictions to exist or that the five premises above do not constitute a logical contradiction? I’m not trying to be combative here; I’m just trying to understand your reasoning.
By the way, I apologize if my language above inadvertently gave offense. Please believe me that when I “attack” an argument, it is never my intent to attack the person who’s making it. I love your site because I greatly enjoy following your reasoning and I admire your intellectual curiosity.
Thanks Andrew!
Are the five premises as a whole logically contradictory? A logical contradiction is when one and the same attribute is both affirmed and denied of a subject simultaneously. Right?
(So “God is good and God is not good” is logically contradictory.)
You would hold, I assume, that (some of) the premises entail a conclusion that contradicts one of the premises. If that’s the case I’d have to see the argument to tell whether I’m accepting a contradiction.
As to whether I think contradictions can exist: I believe that contradictions, if they exist, point to transcendence in the context of which they cease to be contradictions. Cryptic statement. Sorry. I need to go eat dinner or I’d write more. :-)
Wow!
Great Stuff. I’ve always meant to read the Watchman. Frank Hebert’s Dune books also feature a nearly omniscient character who seems strangely weighed down by his “power”.
It seems to me that there are many ways that it’s useful to talk about about God thinking and deciding. What he does may have important differences from our puny, mortal, limited version of it. But if we give up on the idea of God thinking and deciding stuff it seems to me that we have to give up on a whole lot of other stuff. It seems to me that the God we end up with is so “other” that it’s hard to even figure out if he’s worthy of worship… furthermore, it’s hard to see how the things which look like decisions of God in the biblical account square up with this understanding.
While none of these things as arguments per se against the truth of Mr. Tillman’s argument, I think they are important repurcussions that ought to be wieghed into the equation.
As for the problem of evil: I’m going to start by copying the 5 premises from above so I don’t have to keep scrolling up:
1) God exists.
2) God is all-powerful.
3) God is all-knowing.
4) God is all-good.
5) Evil exists.
I agree that this appears to be a contradiction. It seems like those of us either owe an explanation for why a contradiction might have a possibility of existing (is Micah taking that route?) or of explaining why it’s not a contradiction despite appearances (this is the route that makes more sense to me.)
It is true that evil could only exist if God allowed it; the whole thing seems to hinge on the assumption that God should not allow it. There are two problems, I think, with this assumption.
The first is that the assumption is based on us presuming that we have a full grasp of the alternatives to allowing evil to exist. I’m not sure that we do. (Does anybody remember David Bowie, as the Goblin King, saying to the whiny girl in Labrynth “You keep saying things aren’t fair. I’m beggining to wonder what your basis for comparison is.” … that’s probably not an exact quote.)
The second problem is that even if we did have a grasp of it, a theodicy is all well and good for our abstract discussion, but can be incredibly insesitive, crass, and intellectualizing to someone in the middle of real pain.
For these reasons I think I’m sympathetic to the position that God says a theodicy is impossible. I find this to be an interesting reading of Job. (The two sentences above are my understanding of Micah’s position. I hope he’ll correct me if I’m wrong.)
All of the above notwithstanding, I do think it can be fruitful to work out a theodicy– or atleast work toward one. It might be right that we can’t establish a complete theodicy, but I think we can work toward one. (In the same way that we can make claims about God’s nature but should never expect to author a complete and exhausative account of God’s nature.)
I think it’s fruitful to begin with both the free-will and the soul-making theodicy. I think these sketch out complemtary understandings of the reason that evil exists.
The free-will theodicy states that God valued free will above nearly everything else. He wanted to create beings in his image and freedom of choice is an important aspect of this. If we are truly free we must be free to choose evil. Because our ancestors did choose evil, (as represented by disobeying God and eating from the tree in the garden) evil in excess of that which is caused by men entered into our experience. (I.E. if we hadn’t fallen from Eden there wouldn’t be earthquakes, plagues, etc.)
The soul-making theodicy is related to the points above about the surgeon. In short, I think the humankind proved that it needed to be taught things the hard way when it fell. When our actions are not in harmony with what God expects, he allows the pain to shape and mold us in ways he hopes will draw us closer to him and his expectations.
Thanks Jeff! Nice points.
The “working toward a theodicy” thing seems to be Polkinghorne’s approach. So you’re in good company.
I’m cribbing here from Wikipedia here, so bear that in mind, but I’m far too lazy to develop my own argument. Here is the logical Problem of Evil as it has been understood by philosophers and theologians at least back to Epicurus:
1. God exists. (premise)
2. God is omnipotent and omniscient. (premise — or true by definition of the word “God”)
3. God is all-benevolent. (premise — or true by definition)
4. All-benevolent beings are opposed to all evil. (premise — or true by definition)
5. All-benevolent beings who can eliminate evil will do so immediately when they become aware of it. (premise)
6. God is opposed to all evil. (conclusion from 3 and 4)
7. God can eliminate evil completely and immediately. (conclusion from 2)
1. Whatever the end result of suffering is, God can bring it about by ways that do not include suffering. (conclusion from 2)
2. God has no reason not to eliminate evil. (conclusion from 7.1)
3. God has no reason not to act immediately. (conclusion from 5)
8. God will eliminate evil completely and immediately. (conclusion from 6, 7.2 and 7.3)
9. Evil exists, has existed, and probably will always exist. (premise)
10. Items 8 and 9 are contradictory; therefore, one or more of the premises is false: either God does not exist, evil does not exist, or God is not simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent.
If I developed this myself, I might clean it up a little, but its basics are about right. Most theodicies are designed to explain away evil. Jeff’s free will argument, which he explained very well, is an extremely popular method. The problem that remains is that there is also natural evil which causes suffering: earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, mental illness, disease, etc. Why does a just God allow this? This is where Lewis and others use the “God as a surgeon” metaphor (Jeff’s soul-making method above). We need suffering to perfect us and everything will be all right in the end. (In a way, this seems to require a consequentialist ethics, although I’m not committed to that judgment.) As Jeff says, this can also seem insensitive, crass, intellectualizing, or what have you, but that objection is merely emotional bullying and doesn’t have to be taken seriously. (Though I have heard it used as an objection to a theodicy more times than I’m going to bother counting.)
I think there are exactly five theodicies available, with probably an infinite amount of variation.
1) God does not exist. No problem.
2) God exists, but he’s not all-powerful. He knows about evil and wants to do something about it, but he doesn’t have the power to do anything. His hands are tied.
3) God exists, but he’s not all-knowing. He could eliminate evil and he wants to, but he doesn’t know it exists. (Thomas Paine’s Deism, expressed in Age of Reason, seems to have taken this form. God wound up the Universe and then walked away. I might be putting words into his mouth, though.)
4) God exists, but he’s not omnibenevolent. He knows about evil and he could eliminate it, but he doesn’t care that much.
5) Evil doesn’t exist. Everything that we think is evil is, in fact, for a higher good.
The fifth tactic is the one taken by almost all Christian theodicies. I think a lot can be said for the second tactic though. (Obviously, Christians are denied the atheist first tactic.) Polkinghorne’s theodicy is either of the fifth or second type; I’m not 100% clear. Another way to resolve the problem would be to dispute either premise 4 (“all-benevolent beings are opposed to all evil”) or premise 5 (“all-benevolent beings who can eliminate evil will do so immediately when they become aware of it”) above. I will argue, though, that any attempt to do that is no longer in keeping with our common sense definition of good. I.e. I think that such a tactic ultimately rests on tactic 4 above (“God is not omnibenevolent”). While God may be “all-good” in his own godlike way, he is not all-good in our common sense morality definition. (And since this is the only definition of good we can understand, we have to jettison God’s omnibenevolence.)
Sorry about the formatting, points 1, 2, and 3 after point 7 should have been indented.
[...] Second, on John Polkinghorne’s review of some books on atheism (and a discussion of the Problem of Evil): Polkinghorne on Dawkins, Cornwell, and Humphrys [...]
It’s important to point out the costs of appealing to unknown or ad hoc explanations for evil. Once you do this sort of thing, you’ve basically ended the discussion, because of course you can ALWAYS imagine some story that justifies any seemingly evil act. In other words, I agree with Andrew that if there is some sort of grander god-purpose good that we just aren’t capable of understanding, it still doesn’t really matter insofar as anyone wants to talk about morality as anyone here on earth understands it (i.e. don’t hurt people, don’t rape, don’t cause suffering, etc.)
It’s sort of how I feel about some theological descriptions of “love”: the thing being described is utterly alien to the actual emotion, and its only the emotion that really means anything to me in terms of understanding what love is. Ditch that, and you’ve ditched love.
By the way, Jeff, if you are old enough to remember the Reagan presidency well (i.e. at least 30, preferably at least a little older), then I do recommend Watchmen. It is the only comic book I have ever liked in my life. (And I’ve read many of the most highly touted since I have a lot of “geeky” friends, not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
The reason I don’t recommend it to younger people is because one of the central premises of the book is the inevitability of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Since this turned out not to be an inevitability after all, the book is horribly dated. However, if you remember the Reagan presidency, you remember a time when almost everybody believed such a war was inevitable. (This is somewhat in keeping with Mr. Tillman’s post about prophets of doom.)
It’s late so I’ll only submit five verses for now. Please forgive me!
Mat. 19:17
Mat. 19:26
Eze. 6
Heb. 12:1-11
Rom. 8:28
Prv. 10:20
Rev. 21:1-8
To be continued…
Thanks Andrew.
I am indeed old enough to remember the Reagan presidency. (36 next week. Ouch!) I’ll check Watchmen out.
I think that a lot depends on where you come down for the definition of Evil; there is a view that Evil and Good are equal and opposites. This view is a popular one in the culture at large. It seems to me it creeped into Christianity through Zorastrianism. I don’t believe this view of evil is consistent with a biblical world view.
I don’t deny that evil exists. I just think it’s a losing proposition; inherently weaker than good. In fact, I would submit that God is able to even use Evil for his ultimate purposes. Therefore, I would reject premises 4 and 5 above.
I think the existence of evil in the natural world has a few ramifications to it.
One is that if we lived in a more moral way we would not reap as much destruction from the natural world as we do. If we did not poison our environment with carcinogens, for example, we would considerably lower our cancer rates. If we did not engage in global warming there would be fewer tsunami’s. If we were more equitible in our distrubution of resources people would live in more secure shelters and would have an easier time of escaping disaster areas.
I know that there are specific people who suffer for all of our errors (sins, whatever you want to call it) and recognize the moral challenges around this.
Secondly, I think natural disasters are further explained by the fact that we impacted the whole of creation when we chose to live out of harmony with God and had ourselves thrown out of creation… The presence of physical evil ultimately does reduce itself to moral failings, I guess.
Les-
I’d be interested to hear how you assemble that particular group of verses.
Thanks to all as usual!
Andrew–
First, you seem to have laid out the basics there. Thank you! I have always been of the opinion most Christian theodicies were attempts to refute 7.2 and 7.3 (and some, I think repulsively, to refute 7.1) by providing possible “reasons” God might allow evil, but you seem to be saying they’re attempts to refute 9. Do I read you correctly?
I think my claim is that 7.2 and 7.3 are senseless, and therefore no conclusion can be drawn. And therefore 10 is unjustified. And therefore the Problem of Evil is of some kind other than logical contradiction.
Les–
The point you seem to be making with the collection of verses you list is that the Bible portrays God as punishing evil, disciplining for the sake of improvement, and guiding things toward a happy end?
Jeff–
Well said about evil being “a losing proposition.”
Your response to Andrew on natural evil is interesting. But people were dying from hurricanes long before human-caused global warming (“if such a thing exists,” he said skeptically).
The Fall is the traditional culprit for the problem of natural evil in Christianity, though I suppose what you’re proposing is a modification of that. Interesting.
If I’m proposing a modification of the view that the fall is the cause for evil, it’s a minor one. I’d still locate much of the problem of natural of evil with the fall.
I wrestle and struggle with the idea that evil is a legacy and that the consequences for lousy decisions are sometimes paid for by innocents… But this seems like the clearest possibility to me. Given that, I’d say that we exaccerbate the problems of natual evil in a variety of ways. One is global warming (which I do buy) but there’s gazillions of low tech examples.
There aren’t many natural disasters which are truly unexpected; we all know that Earthquakes hit California, we all know that blizzards come to Maine. When we don’t support those hit by disasters we make their suffering worse.
What’s the secret to generating these debates? This is really interesting stuff.
Micah, yes, that is what I’m saying, but I’d certainly be willing to concede that this is a purely semantic distinction of no particular importance. I do have good reasons for my view. When, for example, I refuse to loan my brother-in-law (an inveterate gambler) money, this inflicts suffering on him. From his perspective, I am engaged in an evil act. From my perspective, I am doing good since the suffering is for his own good. Thus, no evil act exists. However, if you would rather say that it is an evil act which is used to create even greater good, then I don’t have a very large quarrel with this, since the distinction seems to be purely semantic to me. I believe most Christians are making a similar analogy for why God permits evil.
Your own theodicy (such as it is) I’m not sure I can refute. However, you’re surely aware that what it amounts to is saying that God can do absolutely anything (including creating a world where there is no good at all) and retain his goodness since God is timeless and therefore can’t possibly have any motivations whatsoever (either good or evil). Personally, I believe this boils down to tactic 4. God is not all-good.
Jeff–
Sounds right to me, except the part where your comment seems to say that by not doing something we make something happen. It would seem to be by not doing something we don’t make the situation better. Having the chance to make something better is more appealing to me than being threatened with making something worse, even if the act it leads me to is the same.
Andrew–
I don’t think the issue is semantic when it comes to whether there is or isn’t evil. The fact that something has a good consequence doesn’t make it good, does it? The Christians I resonate most with are attempting to justify God’s not interfering with the evil, not to explain away the evil as not being really evil.
It seems to me you’re seeing something here that I’m not, though, and since I don’t see myself as being one of the Christians who takes this approach, I guess the issue doesn’t really matter that much to me. :-)
I find it interesting that my approach could be referred to as a theodicy, when I see it as almost the opposite: I take myself as claiming theodicies are impossible. *grin*
God’s creating a world without good doesn’t seem like a problem. It could be morally neutral. Which is fine.
As to whether God can do anything: an action’s goodness and badness do not depend entirely (or even primarily) on the motivation that leads to them (unless you’re Kant, in which case they do. But Kant is wrong. *chuckle*).
God can’t do anything evil if God is good. And I think God is good. God’s goodness is a description of God’s nature, not God’s motivations. God does good. That’s just what God does.
If I’ve said anything to contradict that, then I should be more careful (oh the wonders of exploring the logical consequences of one’s own thought! I appreciate your help). :-D
Let me work this out. You said: “Sounds right to me except where your comment seems to say that by not doing something we make something happen. It would seem to be by not doing something we don’t make the situation better. Having the chance to make something better is more appealing to me than being threatened with making something worse, even if the act it leads me to is the same.”
Is the “not doing” failing to support people in disaster ridden areas? Is the “something happen” the misery that ensues?
Is the position that you’re taking here that sins of omission are less serious than sins of comission? (I’m not picking a fight with this position yet, I’m just trying to make sure I’m keeping up with you… And I think I might have missed your point entirely. Would you try one more time for me?)
Right. Except maybe the “less serious” part. I’m not sure about that. It’s just a matter of exactly what a person’s responsible for.
Give me until after Thanksgiving and I’m fairly sure I can rephrase the Problem from Evil so that there are no mentions of “reasons” and it still leads to a contradiction. Briefly: There is (pointless) evil. God does nothing to stop it. And this leads to a contradiction with God’s good nature and ability to stop it. I think you would have to take the line Jeff suggested it — that it is not an evil act not to stop pointless evil which one can stop. I.e. that there are no such things as sins of omission. This line is a possible theodicy, I suppose.
By the way, I refer to your view as a theodicy because I believe any attempt (even one like yours) is a theodicy so long as it purports to solve the logical contradiction of the Problem of Evil. It is not clear to me that you are simply refusing to resolve it, since you do not grant the logical contradiction. Refusing to resolve it does have a long history in theology, though. I’m reasonably sure this was the tactic taken by St. Paul and St. Augustine. The Problem of Evil was a “mystery” which they didn’t really bother to resolve. Personally, I prefer the attempts of St. Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis to that. The idea that there is a logical paradox at the heart of reality is deeply irrational (and literally inconceivable).
I look forward to your rephrasing. :-)
I’d say it may not necessarily be an evil act to not stop an evil act that one could stop (seems to me this is one of the premises of the conservative view of government, for instance), not that it isn’t evil period. That’s the closest I’ll let myself get to a theodicy. But that’s a separate point from my “theodicies are senseless” argument.
I didn’t see my argument as “solving the logical contradiction of the Problem of Evil,” but I suppose that’s what it does. I think it’s more accurate to say that it shows the mistake of claiming there’s a logical contradiction. And that’s not just a linguistic point. Changing the way you put it changes which position is presented as being primary, and which as playing defense.
I do not equate all problems, confusions, or conflicts with logical contradictions, however. So while I deny that the Problem of Evil is a logical contradiction (that there is a simultaneous affirmation and denial of the same attribute of the same subject), I do not deny that it is a problem (as opposed to theodicies, which deny that there is a problem even if they don’t deny that there is evil).
I’m teaching “On Free Choice of the Will” (by St. Augustine) to one of my classes right now. He sounds very Buddhistic in this (early) text, and traces all evil to the free choice of the human will (it is being attached to the wrong things that leads to suffering/that is evil). He then justifies God having given human beings a free will by proving (to his satisfaction) that free will is a good thing. If it’s good, God should give it, he thinks.
Ultimately, Augustine claims that evil is non-existence, that it is a form of nothingness. Which is like one of the approaches you mentioned above.
There are two kinds of “mystery”:
There are mysteries that are such, even though we can’t see why they must be so. (This is the, “That is not for you to know” or “This knowledge is forbidden you,” kind of mysteries. Like when a writer makes what is about to happen in a story mysterious simply by hiding certain facts from the audience, even though the characters from whose point of view the audience is supposed to be seeing the story know those facts. Like in Ocean’s 12. Annoys me so much.)
Then there are mysteries that are mysterious, and we know exactly why they must be so.
To accept the first kind of mystery is to give up intellectual exploration because of a contingency, to submit blindly to authority (“He refuses to tell us, and I don’t feel like pushing it any more”). To accept the second kind, however, requires one to have so thoroughly explored the issue that one comes to understand (logically) why the issue must be mysterious. This is an intellectual achievement, a discovery.
Are we equating logical paradoxes and logical contradictions? If so, then I know what the former means, and agree with you. If not, I don’t know what the former means, and would like to find out.
I was reading this book on paradoxes, you see, and evidently there’s some debate about exactly what the definition of “paradox” is. I, honestly, couldn’t follow either the debate as presented by the author or the author’s own argument for his own definition.
I regard a paradox as equivalent to a contradiction. There are some so-called paradoxes, like Zeno’s Paradox, which aren’t paradoxes at all, but only apparent paradoxes, of course. (In fact, most “paradoxes” are of this kind.)
I should add that it is perfectly okay to believe in mysteries, in the sense that we don’t yet know what the resolution is, but I refuse to accept mysteries that have no possible resolution. I have yet to see an example of such a thing, for which there was not already a resolution on offer. For example, I don’t know how to solve the mind/body problem, an apparent contradiction arising from a small number of extremely plausible premises. I do know that a resolution is possible — one of the premises is false, though I don’t know which one.
Got it. Thanks.
On mysteries:
People so often link religion and mystery. If that’s a necessary connection, and the latter are only temporary, then religion can only be temporary too. Very cool. (I find that extremely interesting for some reason).
I should write a blog post about that, especially since I think the experiences of beauty and mystery are integrally linked.
Hmmmm . . .
[...] response to a discussion Mr. Stevens and I were having, beginning here, about [...]