The phrase, “Without God … everything is permitted” (also translated as “Without God … all things are lawful”) is uttered by Ivan in Book XI, chapter IV of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, although what he meant by it is a matter for debate. Recently, however, Dr. Luis Oliveira has published a paper titled, “God and gratuitous evil: Between the rock and the hard place” (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (2023): 317 – 345), in which he presents a powerful argument for a mirror image of Ivan Karamazov’s blanket assertion, and in so doing, raises a new problem of evil, which he amicably discusses with Dr. Justin Mooney in the 90-minute video displayed above, which was created as a “Majesty of Reason” podcast hosted by philosopher Joe Schmid. I was impressed by the irenic tone of the dialogue between the two guests, Dr. Mooney and Dr. Oliveira.
Dr. Oliveira’s argument rests on two premises, which he calls “Reasons” and “Symmetry” (bolding is mine – VJT):
1. If God exists, then for all actual instances of evil e, God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e. (Reasons)
2. If God has justifying moral reasons for allowing e, then we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e as well. (Symmetry)
C. So, if God exists, then for all actual instances of evil e, we have justifying moral reasons for allowing e.In a disturbing mirror image of the old Dostoevskian adage, we can re-phrase this conclusion as an equally ominous slogan: if God exists, then everything is permitted.
Most religious believers will accept the truth of premise 1, which has been upheld by theologians for the past two thousand years, although in the past three decades, there have been a few philosophers who have argued that a perfect God might allow gratuitous evil. Dr. Oliveira has no time for this view: he writes that he finds it simply incredible that a perfect God could turn around and say to a victim of gratuitous evil, “I love and care for you personally, but there is nothing that justifies my permission of this particular evil you have suffered; I knew of it, I could have prevented it, I had no justifying reason not to prevent it, and I still did nothing about it.” Although Dr. Mooney questioned premise 1 in the discussion, I have to say that my sympathies lie with Dr. Oliveira on this particular point. There are Christian philosophers who have argued that God, as the Author of Nature, is not himself a moral agent. I have written elsewhere on why I find this view philosophically unsatisfactory, and I shall not repeat myself here. The rest of this post will therefore address premise 2 of Dr. Oliveira’s argument, which he calls the Symmetry premise.
It should be said at the outset that Dr. Oliveira is not attempting to argue for atheism; rather, what he is trying to show is that theists need to take the problem of evil a lot more seriously. He does not consider the argument he presents to be a proof, but he does think that no satisfactory answer to it has yet been found, and he writes that “denying premise 2 is harder than it looks – indeed, maybe just as hard as denying the beloved premise 1.”
The crux of Dr. Oliveira’s symmetry argument is that appeals to God’s omniscient perspective, as opposed to our limited perspective, fail to explain why God might be justified in allowing an evil that we are morally bound to try to prevent. For if someone has a justified belief in the truth of premise 1, then they will conclude that whatever evils do in fact occur in the world, God must have had a justifying moral reason for allowing them. They might then reason as follows: “Even if I do nothing to stop this evil that I am able to prevent, and it occurs, there will still be a justifying reason for God allowing it.” Hence, to quote Dr. Oliveira, “there is nothing of normative importance that will be accomplished by my actions … that would not be accomplished without them.”
Nor will it do to argue (as many religious people do) that while God has a right to allow certain evils, we do not: we are therefore bound to fight them, to the best of our ability. Once again, if someone has a justified belief that that whatever evils do in fact occur in the world, God must have had a right to allowing these evils to occur. They might then reason as follows: “Even if I do nothing to stop this evil that I am able to prevent, and it occurs, God will still have a right to allow it to do so.” At this point, Dr. Oliveira appeals to a principle he calls the Principle of Authority: “If x is necessary for some greater good or for the prevention of some greater evil, and A, but not B, has a moral right to allow x, then B does not have a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing x.” (To use an analogy: if the law gives a surgeon, who knows that surgery will inevitably harm her patient, the right to decide whether it is nonetheless necessary in order to prevent an even worse outcome, then it would be quite wrong for an outsider, knowing the harm the patient will undergo in surgery, to try to prevent the surgery from going ahead.) Applied to God, this means that if He has a moral right to allow some evil to occur but we don’t, then we have no right to interfere with God’s allowing that evil, by trying to stop it ourselves.
Finally, a religious person might suggest that God has a duty never to interfere with actions by free agents that cause evils, no matter how horrendous those evils may be. (This proposal is rather like the Prime Directive in Star Trek, although I should note that it did have exceptions that permitted intervention.) If this is true, then it would morally justify God’s allowing horrendous evils to occur. In response, Dr. Oliveira argues that we have no good grounds for believing that God has any such universally binding duty. Why should God be morally bound to respect the choices of free agents under all possible circumstances, irrespective of the harm they cause to other agents?
I’d like to make five brief comments in reply. (I may elaborate on these comments in a future essay.) First, I am not at all convinced by Dr. Oliveira’s argument that my having a justified belief in premise 1 (that for each and every evil that occurs, God has justifying moral reasons for allowing it) excuses me from trying to stop the evils happening all around me, as “there is nothing of normative importance that will be accomplished by my actions … that would not be accomplished without them.” I have to say that I find the term “normative importance,” which is employed by Dr. Oliveira three times in his essay, unacceptably vague. As far as I can tell, it has to with ensuring that no moral evils occur which are pointless, or the permission of which is pointless. And from a God’s-eye view, we might say: that’s what matters most. However, this definition of “normative importance” overlooks the moral significance of the moral norms that pertain to cultivation of virtue in human moral agents. For example, it seems quite plausible to argue that my individual acts of preventing the evils that confront me in my daily life will help build my character. And if this is not normatively significant, then I ask: what is?
This brings me to my second point, which is that although God is a moral agent, He is not a member of society. The individuals who are born into a given society develop their moral character by interacting with the other members of that society: family members, relatives and friends, and fellow citizens. A vital part of this moral development involves coming to the aid of those in need. A person who fails to do this is rightly judged to be a morally stunted individual: cold, heartless and lacking in concern for others. No human being can cultivate a good moral character by doing nothing when confronted with a preventable social evil which is afflicting people in their community. Only by striving to remove this evil and assist those who are harmed by it can one demonstrate compassion and a concern for social justice. God, on the other hand, is not defined within the framework of any human society. God is essentially loving, but God, unlike us, does not need to grow in virtue by helping others. Hence God will not become morally stunted by failing to prevent people from suffering evil, so long as there is a genuinely justifiable reason for Him not to do so.
My third point in response to Dr. Oliveira is that I consider his Principle of Authority to be defectively worded. The reader will recall that the principle states that if some evil (call it x) is necessary for some greater good or for the prevention of some greater evil, and A, but not B, has a moral right to allow x, then B does not have a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing x. However, under the popular “free will” theodicy, it is not necessarily the case that all evils contribute to the greater good or to the prevention of some greater evil. Rather, it is the toleration of these evils that contributes to the greater good (or the prevention of a worse evil). That means we can get rid of the antecedent of the principle. That leaves us with the Truncated Principle of Authority, which says that if A, but not B, has a moral right to allow some evil x, then B does not have a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing x. The last phrase is oddly worded. What does it mean to interfere with someone’s allowing something? To prevent it? In that case, why not just say so? But the real source of the problem lies with the letter x: does it denote a particular evil or a class of evils? If the latter, then the principle loses its plausibility. If A, but not B, has a moral right to allow some class of evils, then it simply isn’t true that B does not have a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing this class of evils by preventing a particular occurrence of the evil in question. For example, let us picture a community where the Governor, Mayor or relevant person in charge decides to tolerate social evils such as public drunkenness, drug addiction or prostitution, on the grounds that attempting to stamp out these evils might make things worse – say, by leading to an increase in organized crime. Does it follow that the individual citizens of this community have no right to try and stop members of their own families from becoming drunkards, drug addicts or prostitutes? I think not. An individual could consistently agree with the leader’s decision to tolerate these social vices as a general category of evils, while striving to prevent them from springing up within their own family. The Principle of Authority needs some further work, if it is to be deployed in an argument attempting to undermine the religious believer’s claim that while God has the authority to allow certain evils, we don’t – which is why we’re still bound to combat them.
Fourth, although the Prime Directive fails to supply a plausible reason for why God should never interfere with actions by free agents that cause evils, I can think of one theodicy that would require God to step back in the vast majority of cases. I’ll call it the NDE theodicy, as I’ve noticed that it features in a number of NDE reports by people who have come back from the brink of death, although it can also be found in Theosophy. The idea is that human souls are reincarnated until they have fully acquired the moral virtues. Prior to each incarnation, however, each soul chooses the family and the community it will be born into and the individual limitations that it will suffer from, such as physical or mental disabilities and emotional problems. By consenting to be born into a certain family or community, the soul knows full well that it is exposing itself to the risk of being afflicted by certain evils – some of them horrendous evils – but chooses to do so anyway. Perhaps the soul, prior to being born, might even tell God, “If I’m in a desperate situation, don’t help me. I want to learn from the experience,” and God, after asking the soul, “Are you sure?”, might reluctantly acquiesce with that soul’s choice. Alternatively, the soul may request divine assistance if it finds itself in a really bad situation. Cases will vary. The point is that God arguably has a duty to respect the informed choices of individuals to either undergo or risk undergoing certain evils. If there were anything that constrained God’s freedom to intervene to prevent evils occurring in the world, this would be it.
Finally, I should point out that attempts to build theodicies that are capable of accounting for all of the different kinds of evils we see in the world come at an enormous epistemic cost: they require their advocates to believe a lot of metaphysically extravagant tenets, for which there is not an iota of scientific evidence. In the previous paragraph, belief in the pre-existence and reincarnation of souls was required to explain why God does not prevent people from suffering the often horrendous consequences of bad agents’ wicked acts. That’s quite an assumption. And if we’re going to account for animal suffering, will we have to entertain the idea that animals are reincarnated too, and that in between incarnations, while contemplating where and in what form they will be born next, they magically cease to be brute beasts and become rational agents, capable of planning their next birth? The mind boggles. (Another alternative is Trent Dougherty’s theodicy in which animals, resurrected to eternal life in some future Paradise, retrospectively consent to the hideous suffering they have endured on earth, but I have to say I find this proposal morally problematic, as it involves God not only turning a blind eye to but actually causing the systemic evil resulting from the operation of natural selection, for a period of billions of years, and only afterwards asking His creatures to consent to this suffering as the price of their future immortality. In reply, I would argue that the end doesn’t justify the means. If I were a resurrected fawn who’d died a painful and lingering death in a forest fire, I’d be inclined to tell God, “You should have asked me first.”)
I seem to have ended up drawing a similar conclusion to Dr. Oliveira: namely, that believers in a morally perfect God really have their work cut out for them. In short: it may be impossible for us to come up with a solution (or solutions) to the problem of evil which is at once morally satisfying, metaphysically plausible and empirically well-grounded. Does that reflect the limitations of our moral intuitions, our metaphysical intuitions or our scientific knowledge? What do readers think?
Hi Vincent,
I’ve just started your OP. I’ll go through it as time permits, but I’ve already hit a snag of sorts. Premise 1 reads
There are implicit assumptions built into that premise. It’s probably a good idea to make them explicit and also to consider the consequences for Oliveira’s argument if they don’t hold.
The easiest way to expose them is to ask under what conditions Premise 1 wouldn’t hold. I can think of at least three:
Various combinations of those are possible. The implicit assumptions in Premise 1 therefore seem to be their opposites:
Under those assumptions, I think Premise 1 holds.
Interesting things happen if they don’t all hold.
Also:
One thing that isn’t mentioned enough in these arguments is that it isn’t only a question of moral necessity. There’s also the fact that a perfectly loving God would want to prevent unnecessary suffering even if it weren’t morally obligatory.
I take it that for the purposes of Oliveira’s argument, he’s making the implicit assumptions I outlined above.
That’s it for now.
vjtorley:
That sounds internally inconsistent to me. It states that B doesn’t have a moral right to allow x, but it also states that B doesn’t have “a moral right to interfere with A’s allowing x”. But if B refrains from interfering, as required, then B has allowed x. (Both A and B have allowed x in that case.) B is forbidden from allowing x, and B is required to allow x. A contradiction.
How can I be forbidden to allow something and required to allow it at the same time? What am I missing here?
My reading is that x is none of B’s moral business. Sounds like A possesses all of the moral rights here, and B can go pound sand. In other words, the Principle of Authority is that A is the authority and B is irrelevant. After all, x is necessary. B is a spectator.
Flint:
The problem is that choosing to be a spectator is tantamount to allowing x, which B doesn’t have the moral right to do. The Principle says “A, but not B, has a moral right to allow x”. If B can’t allow x, then B is morally obligated to disallow x — that is, to prevent it. The opposite of allowing is preventing.
So B is obligated to prevent x. But what if A wants to allow x, which is A’s moral right? In that case, B’s prevention of x is interfering with A’s desire to allow x, in violation of the Principle. It’s a Catch 22 — B can’t allow x, but B can’t prevent it either.
Concrete example: A villain is about to push an old lady off a bridge into the frigid waters of the Housatonic, where she will die. God and I are observing. God has the moral right to allow the murder, and he chooses to do so in order to achieve some greater good. I don’t have the right to allow the murder, so I am obligated to prevent it. I tackle the villain, the lady survives, and I have fulfilled my obligation. But in so doing, I have interfered with God’s choice to allow the murder to happen, which puts me in violation of the Principle. I’m forbidden from allowing the murder, and I’m forbidden from preventing it. It’s an impossible situation.
I haven’t watched the video or read the paper, so I don’t know how Oliveira employs the Principle or what he intended it to say. I just think it’s incoherent as written.
Sounds like, in your world, anything not mandatory must therefore be prohibited. Not in my world. In my world, the opposite of either preventing or allowing is minding my own business.
Even in Congress, you don’t need to vote yes or no. You can abstain, you can arrange to be absent, you can vote “present”. Back in the 60s, the radicals preached that “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Everyone must take sides! I never accepted that philosophy. I believe that you have to pick your battles.
Flint:
Not at all. Come on over to my world and I’ll show you around.
The villain is about to push the old lady off the bridge. I have the power to stop him. I decide, “I’m just going to mind my own business and do nothing.” By doing nothing, I am allowing him to push the lady off the bridge. But I don’t have the moral right to do so. The wording in the Principle is “A, but not B, has a moral right to allow x”.
Put simply, if I don’t prevent the villain from pushing her off the bridge, I am allowing it to happen.
I think your confusion is that you see “allowing” as requiring some sort of affirmative action to make the murder happen. It doesn’t. If I passively sit back and do nothing, I am allowing the murder. My options aren’t “allow, prevent, or do nothing”. They are “allow or prevent.” If I can’t allow, I must prevent. But if I prevent, and God wants to allow, I have violated the Principle. I’m screwed either way.
Thanks you for posting a less problematic post due to its length….
I hope you have realized by now what the audience is at TSZ…
There are a lot of people I know personally who lost their “faith” after they learned the details of convid panicdemic…
Unfortunately, some of them are no longer with us…
BTW: My dear friend decided to build his new live in Japan after he was fired from is hospital job in Canada… He surprisingly loves it. He married a Japanese girl who can’t cook but is lovely…. he built his new life there and he ain’t coming to Canada…
J-Mac, to vjtorley:
I think that’s one of the reasons he posts here.
How do you sleep at night knowing the countless evils that, by your inaction, you are allowing to happen?
Flint:
Easily, because I don’t feel morally obligated to prevent every evil I’m capable of preventing. But why do you ask? The sentence you quoted doesn’t say anything about my moral standards:
That’s a factual statement that is independent of my moral standards. Consider the following:
And:
The second sentence is true, period. It doesn’t depend on my morality.
So again, my options aren’t “allow, prevent, or do nothing”. They are “allow or prevent”, and that leads to the logical problem I identified in the Principle as written.
vjtorley:
In fact, most if not all Christians already believe that God does interfere at least on occasion by protecting people who would otherwise be victims of evil. If God has a duty not to interfere, he’s failing his duty, if those Christians are correct.
For someone who believes in that duty, it appears that the choices are either to believe 1) that God is protecting people from evil acts, and thus failing to fulfill his duty, or else 2) that God upholds his duty by refusing to protect them, putting duty over decency.
vjtorley:
Oliveira could argue in response that it isn’t the toleration that is valuable, but rather the exercise of free will itself. If the exercise of free will is valuable, it qualifies as a good, and in some cases a greater good. The evil is the unfortunate byproduct of that good, but it is more than offset by the good itself.
So his antecedent…
…would still apply.
I agree with you that his antecedent is unnecessary, but for a different reason than you. It’s unnecessary because all that matters is whether it’s moral for A to allow x, not why it’s moral. In other words, the Principle applies under any moral system in which A is permitted to allow x, regardless of the reason for that permission. Free will theodicy is not a necessary assumption.
Agreed. But the truncation still leaves it with the logical problem I pointed out earlier. As phrased, it imposes contradictory requirements on B. B can’t allow x, but they can’t prevent it either.
Yes, I think so. Although if we’re being super careful, we might want to say that to interfere means to try to prevent, because the attempt at prevention is wrong even if it doesn’t succeed.
Good question. Maybe he thought that phrasing it his way would save the reader from having to figure out that ‘allow’ and ‘prevent’ are antonyms. That’s what tripped Flint up earlier. I personally think it would be easier to understand if he’d used ‘prevent’.
I took it to denote a particular evil, not a class of evils, because in any class of evils, some might be allowable while others were not.
vjtorley:
Problems with that theodicy:
1. It assumes that souls are imperfect and can only acquire the moral virtues by means of suffering. But why can’t God — especially if he’s perfect and omnipotent — just create souls in the desired final state from the get-go, bypassing the ordeals? The suffering is gratuitous if it isn’t actually necessary.
2. Some people are more virtuous than others simply by nature. If God can create them that way, why not everyone else? Or are we to assume that everyone starts out even and that the most moral among us are the ones who have pulled ahead of the pack by suffering the most during their reincarnation cycles?
3. Why suppose that suffering is essential to moral development?
4. Consider the toddler who dies a prolonged, agonizing death trapped under earthquake rubble. Are we really to suppose that every minute of that agony contributes to the moral development of that poor kid’s soul? Why would it? If the kid died after one hour of agony rather than 48, why wouldn’t that suffice?
5. In this scheme, why is it necessary for people to forget their prior existence as souls, during which they selected the evils they’re willing to be subjected to?
6. If souls individually select the evils they’re willing to be subjected to, how is the choreography done? On an earth teeming with billions of people, how does God arrange for everyone to suffer the evils they signed up for, no more and no less? Does God force some people to commit evils so that others can fulfill their suffering quotas? If so, how is that fair to the puppets?
So your argument is that you are NOT morally obligated to prevent evil, you can choose to do nothing, leading to your direct conclusion that you ARE morally obligated to prevent and doing nothing is not moral. Nice gig. No contradiction there, of course.
Flint:
I have no idea where you’re getting that. Let’s take a step back.
This thread is about some ideas of Luis Oliveira regarding the problem of evil. Part of Oliveira’s argument involves what he calls the Principle of Authority. We’ve discussed that principle at length in this thread, and I’ve identified what I see as an internal contradiction in its formulation.
That internal contradiction can be assessed without reference to my own moral code, because nothing in the Principle references my moral code. The Principle states:
That’s an if-then statement. The “if” part — the antecedent — states some conditions, and the “then” part — the consequent — states what follows if those conditions are met. The Principle is a claim that Oliveira is making, and it doesn’t reference the personal moral code of keiths, so you don’t need to know anything about my personal moral code in order to evaluate the Principle.
Substitute whoever you want for A and B, and whatever evil you want for x, and Oliveira claims that his Principle holds. In the concrete example I gave, A is God, B is me, and x is the villain’s act of pushing the old lady off the bridge. “A moral right” refers to a right under a particular but unspecified moral code. “Good” and “evil” are defined relative to that unspecified moral code.
With that in mind, we can restate Oliveira’s principle thus:
Translating that to my concrete example:
Substitute any moral code you’d like. It could be your moral code, or mine, or God’s, or Buford’s, for whom Canadian geese are the epitome of evil. Oliveira is saying that if the antecedent holds for that particular moral code, then the consequent follows.
The contradiction I’ve pointed out is that if I have don’t have the moral right under a particular moral code to allow the murder (meaning I’m obligated to try to prevent it), but God does, and God wants the murder to happen for the sake of some greater good, then the Principle tells me that I can’t thwart God’s desire by preventing the murder. I’m obligated to prevent the murder, and I’m obligated not to prevent the murder. I can’t satisfy those contradictory requirements. The Principle is flawed, as written.
That contradiction stands regardless of the moral code, so long as the antecedent conditions are met. So my personal moral beliefs are irrelevant.
You thought for some reason that they were relevant, so you said:
And:
Which was odd, because I hadn’t said anything about my own moral code. So I explained (and have now re-explained) why my own moral code is irrelevant to my discussion of the Principle.
I also answered your question about my personal moral code, even though it’s not relevant, and the answer was that I sleep just fine because I don’t feel morally obligated to prevent every evil I’m capable of preventing. I’m morally obligated to prevent some of them, but not all of them.
Somehow you concluded that
Which is incorrect. As I stated:
Note the word ‘every’. There are some evils I feel obligated to prevent, and others for which I don’t feel an obligation.
You continue:
I haven’t reached that conclusion, because it doesn’t follow from anything I’ve said. Could you explain why you think it does?
The Principle of Authority is self-contradictory, but I’ve thought about the overall question before and reached a conclusion similar to Oliveira’s. Here’s my reasoning:
Note that this conclusion depends on an additional assumption, which is that it’s the outcome that determines whether our decision was morally correct. There are moral systems in which morality is determined by something other than outcomes, and in those systems we aren’t necessarily correct in punting (in the American sense, not the British) and leaving it up to God.
I should also note that since I’m an atheist, I don’t believe that we can rely on God to do the right thing. So for me, the above conclusion doesn’t hold, and I don’t think it’s morally acceptable never to intervene. The case of the lady and the bridge is one where intervention would obviously be warranted.
Also, note that the assumption I mentioned above — that it’s the outcome that determines whether our decisions are morally correct — has uncomfortable implications if applied to the evil acts themselves. If the villain succeeds in murdering the old lady because God knows that it should be allowed in order to achieve a greater good, then we reach the uncomfortable conclusion that the villain did the right thing, despite his evil intent, because his action led to a greater good.
That’s not acceptable to most of us. My own feeling is that while outcomes matter, so does intent, and the villain’s intentions are immoral even if the world on balance becomes a better place due to the murder.
vjtorley:
My comments/questions:
1. Why does God create us in a state that requires us to build character? Why not skip to the chase and make us morally perfect from the get-go? Someone might argue that there are virtues that can only be acquired via experience, but if so, it means that God isn’t omnipotent. That’s fine logically if there are reasons to believe that God is limited in this way, but most Christians and Muslims won’t accept a non-omnipotent God.
2. If God wants to allow certain evils and prevent others, and he sometimes wants us to intervene in order to build character, why doesn’t he just tell us on a case-by-case whether he does or doesn’t want us to intervene?
3. If character development is a concern, shouldn’t God limit evils to those necessary for such development, or the mininum required for that plus whatever evils are needed for other reasons? The evils he allows appear to be far in excess of what would be needed for character development.
4. This idea doesn’t explain why God allows evils that don’t contribute to anyone’s moral development because human intervention isn’t possible. Example: a man kidnaps a woman, drives her to a secluded spot, and then tortures, rapes and kills her. No one is around to prevent the crime, and it certainly doesn’t develop the rapist’s character, so why does God allow it?
5. What is it about helping others by preventing evil that develops character in a way that could not be achieved by other means? Couldn’t God set things up so that we could help people in other ways that would still achieve the desired character development?
6. It may be the other way around. Judging by the available evidence, God could benefit from some moral development. Perhaps he needs to help people in order to build character, in which case we shouldn’t interfere.
vjtorley,
I see that you address my #6 above in your second point, writing:
That, however, is an assumption about God that is not supported by the evidence in my opinion. He doesn’t appear very virtuous to me, and that, of course, is the problem of evil.
You wrote:
Isn’t God effectively a member of every society? If societal membership is relevant and God’s non-membership justifies his allowance of certain evils, does that mean that we’re entitled to treat those who aren’t members of our society as having less moral significance? A disturbing thing about the current situation in Minnesota is that many people seem to be more upset about ICE abusing citizens than if they limited their abuse to non-citizens.
vjtorley:
Amen. I regard theodicies as intellectually dishonest because they begin with the desired conclusion (that God is perfectly moral, omnipotent and omniscient) and then tack on whatever arbitrary assumptions are needed to prop up that conclusion.
It’s reminiscent of what inerrantists do when confronted with contradictions in the Bible. They’ll say “yes, that appears to be a contradiction, but it isn’t really a contradiction because it’s possible that…” and then offer an implausible and arbitrary scenario in which the contradiction vanishes. Example:
Mark 4:30:
Matthew 26:34:
Luke and John agree with Matthew.
It’s an obvious contradiction, but inerrantists (who can be, shall we say, creative) reconcile the accounts by proposing that there were actually two crows and two predictions by Jesus, but Mark only mentioned one of the crow/prediction pairs while Matthew, Luke and John mentioned only the other pair.
It’s absurd. Why would each of the gospel writers focus on only one crow and completely omit the other? Why did Jesus make two statements?
It occurs to me that there is a second possible harmonization: you could argue that there is only one crow. If Peter’s denial happens before the cock crows, then it also happens before the cock crows twice. Matthew, Luke and John have just added a redundant detail for no apparent reason, and Jesus repeated his statement twice, once adding that redundant detail and once omitting it. Like the first harmonization, this one is also absurd.
Which is more likely: that one of those absurd harmonizations is correct, or that this is a true contradiction? It’s the latter, obviously, but inerrantists can’t admit that, because they have already assumed their conclusion and want to hang on to it at all costs. So they hang their hats on a sliver of “it’s not impossible”. But “it’s not impossible” doesn’t mean “it’s most likely”, and it’s intellectually dishonest to claim otherwise.
As with inerrantists, so with theodicists (theodicians? theodolites?). Which is more likely: that the extravagant, arbitrary and unsupported assumptions of theodicy actually hold, or that God (if he exists at all) isn’t morally perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient? It’s the latter, obviously.
Yes, that’s mind-boggling. And if they cease to be rational agents once they’re born, then how does their suffering accomplish anything? How does it contribute to their moral development or to some other good?
Yes, it’s morally reprehensible. There’s also the question of why animals should be required to pay that price at all. Then there’s the dubious assumption that an eternity in Paradise compensates for finite suffering on earth. I’ve argued against that before, in a discussion of human suffering:
vjtorley:
Perhaps God thinks “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission”, to borrow that famous adage.
In my opinion, it reflects the fact that the assumed conclusion — that God is perfectly moral, omnipotent and omniscient — is simply false.
Vincent, you’re still a believer as far as I know. How do you deal with this problem while maintaining your faith?