Recently, the Youtuber Skydivephil (whose real name is Phil Halper) posted a 24-minute video critiquing Christian philosopher Michael Jones (who goes by the moniker Inspiring Philosophy) regarding the problem of animal suffering. Viewers can watch it here:

Michael Jones, Than Christopoulos and philosopher Trent Dougherty (who has written a book on the problem of animal suffering, in which he acknowledges its gravity but argues that animals will be abundantly recompensed in the afterlife and that God will also endow them with reason, and that once they are able to understand the spiritual significance of what happened to them on Earth, they will retrospectively consent to the suffering they were compelled to endure on Earth) then posted a two-hour point-by-point reply to Halper, which can be viewed below (the first hour is more than sufficient to get the overall picture of what they’re saying). I thought their reply was rather unfair on several points; hence the title of this post.

Here is my reply to Michael, Than and Trent:

I have to say: you guys are not being fair to your opponent, Phil Harper. You are completely misconstruing what Phil Harper was saying in his video. As someone with a Ph.D. in philosophy, it was perfectly clear to me that when Phil said “X is bad,” he meant “X is MORALLY bad,” not “X is a bad state of affairs.” Therefore, the inference from “X is bad” to “A perfectly good God would not command X” is entirely valid. Also, it’s simply not true to say (as Michael does) that utilitarianism is purely a normative theory of ethics. It’s also meta-ethical: unlike emotivism, it claims that morality is something objective, rather than subjective. Then, it defines what we objectively ought to do in terms of the greatest good of the greatest number, and directs people to live their lives accordingly. (Think of writers like Peter Singer and Sam Harris, for instance.) That’s quite different from emotivism, which makes no pretense of telling people what they ought to do.

By the way, it’s highly contentious to claim, as Trent did, that Descartes viewed animals as nothing more than automatons. Certainly, that’s the traditional reading of Descartes, but it has been vigorously contested by several philosophers in the past thirty years, who have argued that what Descartes really taught was that animals have feelings but are not conscious of them. But it’s certainly true that many medical researchers, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, performed vivisection on dogs while they were still conscious, in order to investigate phenomena such as blood circulation. In other words, they inflicted horrendous suffering on dogs. This, I would respectfully submit, is not soul-making evil but soul-breaking evil. If you attempt to justify God’s allowing this suffering by appealing to “the greater good” or “the grand scheme of things,” then it is you who are utilitarians, not Phil.

I might also point out that Michael’s and Than’s claim that God could prevent extreme animal suffering only by performing miracles is simply false. God could easily cause suffering animals to lose consciousness when their pain exceeds a certain threshold, without having to violate any laws of nature. (This is especially obvious if, like most Christian philosophers, you’re a concurrentist [i.e. someone who holds that causal agents are only able to produce their effects if God actively co-operates with them as a concurrent cause, and not merely as a remote First Cause at the end of a long chain]: all God needs to do is withhold His active assistance in keeping the animal conscious, and the animal will black out automatically, even if finite causal agents in the natural realm are still operating normally.) So, why doesn’t God make animals undergoing extreme torment black out? I’m a Christian myself, but I’m honest enough to recognize that this is a real problem, and I don’t claim to have any pat answers. I don’t know.

Trent cites the example of people who have gone through Auschwitz and retained their faith in God as counter-examples to the claim that horrendous suffering is soul-breaking. Two points in reply: first, as horrible as Auschwitz was (I’ve been there), I can think of other forms of suffering that are even worse. Take the tortures that Christians endured during the Tokugawa Shogunate: they were lowered into a boiling pit, then lifted out of the pit, and asked to recant Christianity. If they refused, they were lowered into the pit again, and re-interrogated: “Do you recant?” They endured this interrogation for days on end, and in the process, their flesh was horribly blistered and burned. Practically everyone who was subjected to this torture ended up recanting – including even Jesuit priests. After enduring this torture, they were spiritually shattered people. Their faith was gone. This, I submit, was not a soul-making experience, but a soul-breaking one. Another example is solitary confinement. Lock anyone up for 14 days without any human contact, and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll go mad. Madness is not a soul-making experience. Second, as the Christian philosopher William Dembski points out in his book, “The End of Christianity” (B&H Academic, Nashville, 2009, p. 31) “If the earth is indeed a place for soul-making, how many great souls does it produce? Is it not a tiny, tiny minority? How many flunk out of Hick’s school of soul-making?” And does anyone imagine that dogs become better dogs by being cut open while conscious?

Trent’s claim that a trillion years of bliss in the afterlife would obviate the suffering endured by animals on Earth, no matter how horrendous, is also a thoroughly utilitarian one. The fact is that in this scenario, God is allowing animals to undergo soul-breaking suffering, and using these animals (who are morally significant beings) as means to His own ends, without their consent. And that, I would contend, is morally wrong. And it’s not just me. Vince Vitale and William Dembski are two very different Christian philosophers who would not view this justification as an adequate one. As Dembski put it in his essay, “Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science” (Version 2.3, 15 March 2007): “[A]ccording to Whorton’s Perfect Purpose Paradigm, God creates a world of suffering not in response to human sin but to accomplish some future end (i.e., “the Master’s plan”). But this makes human suffering a means to an end. And even if this end is lofty, it is still the case that we are being used. Used is used, and there is no way to make this palatable, much less compatible with human dignity. That’s why Kant taught that we must treat fellow human beings not as means but as ends in themselves. And that’s why, unless human suffering is permitted by God because, at some level, we have brought it on ourselves, Whorton’s Perfect Purpose Paradigm commits an end-justifies-the-means fallacy.” (p. 26) That’s utilitarianism. Dembski’s point about human suffering is equally valid for animals, if you grant (as Trent does) that animals are morally significant in and of themselves.

For my part, I wouldn’t wish a broken spirit or feelings of utter despair on my worst enemy, even for a moment. And I would never regard the infliction of such soul-breaking feelings on humans or animals as morally justified, merely because it’s followed by an enormous amount and/or duration of happiness. That doesn’t make it right.

One solution that would resolve the theological problem of horrendous suffering in animals is to suppose that animals themselves actively consent to undergo horrendous suffering in some lofty spiritual realm, before they are born on Earth. Hence no injustice is done to them when God allows them to undergo this suffering. Some Hindus, Theosophists and New Agers believe this. However, it’s not a Christian belief. And this solution is also highly implausible on the face of it, as it supposes that the animals which endure this suffering are, in reality, metaphysical giants: in other words, rational moral agents. It also makes their animality something which they merely assume, like a disguise, while they live on Earth: in other words, cats are not really cats but disembodied spirit beings. Do we really want to relate to animals like that? I’m not at all sure that we should.

Another solution, proposed by Philip Goff, is that God cannot create animals (or at least, the animals in our world) without causing some degree of suffering. This would explain a lot of the natural evil that we find in the world, but not the cases of horrendous suffering I discussed above.

On the subject of Jainism, which you ridicule Phil for appealing to: ahimsa (or non-violence) is a key virtue not only in Jainism, but also in Indian religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. We’re talking about billions of people here, not a tiny group. As for Christianity being responsible for belief in the virtue of compassion in the West: you could certainly argue that, but if you’re honest, you’ll also have to acknowledge that it got its ethic of compassion from Judaism. As to whether Christianity is eco-friendly: while there are plenty of eco-friendly Christian thinkers (Pope Francis, for instance), the undeniable fact is that the language of Genesis 1:28, where God tells the man and the woman to subdue the Earth, envisages the Earth as a hostile adversary to be subjugated, rather than our Mother and our home. As pastor Christopher Brown aptly puts it in an article on his blog, Poiesis Theou: “First the word “subdue”. In Hebrew this is kabash. You can’t get around it; it does mean “subdue” or “enslave”, and even in the harshest instances “molest” or “rape.” But here’s the catch: it only means this when the party being subdued is already hostile. Hence it’s used to speak of military enemies in scripture. Not to subdue an attacking army would lead to death. Hence, we subdue the earth because without such subjugation the harshness of nature would yield death for us rather than life.” I rest my case.

Finally, on the subject of the origins of science: it is simply absurd to argue that the ancient Greeks (who learned how to predict eclipses, figured out the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and created the science of biology) did not do science. (On this point, you really should read classicist Richard Carrier’s essay, “The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Greece”.) It’s true that 14th-century Christianity (especially the work of thinkers like John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and Peter of Ailly) had a lot to do with the origin of modern science, but it is fallacious to infer from this fact that Christianity’s holy book cannot be anti-scientific. It’s arguable that Christianity helped further the growth of science for reasons that were largely independent of the Bible.

There are overwhelming reasons to believe in God, notwithstanding the problem of animal suffering. For my part, I believe that deep down, each of us is somehow aware that we live in a “moraliverse,” not a “materiverse”: in other words, a world where moral facts about things we should and should not do are fundamental facts. I would also argue that morality makes no sense without persons who are moral agents, and that if morality is written on the face of the cosmos, that argues that we live in a world where personhood is fundamental, and not just an epiphenomenon of matter. And since no finite person is ontologically basic enough to ground the cosmos, we are forced to postulate that we live in a cosmos which is the handiwork of a Being Who is moral to the core. But why such a Being would allow animals to endure the suffering that they do is a huge mystery, and I have to acknowledge no solution proposed to date is really satisfactory.

Ideas, anyone?