Catholic philosopher (and former atheist) Edward Feser might be many things, but he certainly isn’t dull. Nor is he afraid of grappling with the big questions. In the latest issue of First Things, he discusses the problem of evil in a wide-ranging interview with Connor Grubaugh, where he talks about his three favorite books in the field of contemporary analytic philosophy. Feser (who is Associate Professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College) is a Thomist, for whom the claim that the existence of evil and suffering constitutes evidence against God’s existence reflects a faulty conception of the relationship between creature and Creator. God is not just a Being who interacts with us on a personal level; rather, He is the very Author of our existence. And just as an author (such as J. K. Rowling) has no obligations to the characters in her stories, so too, God has no obligations towards us. Consequently there can be no question of Him ever doing us an injustice.
In today’s essay, I’d like to explain why I think Professor Feser’s solution is unsatisfactory, and why I think the problem of evil is much more serious than Feser supposes. I won’t be proposing my own solution, however. All I can do is briefly outline how I believe the problem can be defused, and why I don’t think it’s fatal for theism.
Back to Feser’s interview. Feser begins by nominating Brian Davies’s The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil as one of his favorite books on analytical philosophy, from a Thomistic perspective. He explains why:
This is the best book in print on the problem of evil. It develops two key Thomistic insights: First, you cannot properly understand the problem of evil without understanding the nature of God’s causal relationship to the world. Second, you cannot properly understand the problem of evil if you conceive of God in anthropomorphic terms—as something like a human agent, only bigger and stronger. If the world is like a story, God is not a character in the story alongside other characters; he is like the author of the story. And just as it makes no sense to think of an author as being unjust to his characters, neither does it make sense to think of God as being unjust to his creatures. While God is perfectly good, it is a deep mistake to think that this entails that he is a kind of cosmic Boy Scout, and that the problem of evil is a question about whether he deserves all his merit badges. Davies also shows how, from a Thomistic point of view, the approach to the problem of evil taken by contemporary philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne is misguided and presupposes too anthropomorphic a conception of God…
…[T]oo many people think of God’s goodness as if it were a kind of super-virtuousness. As Davies likes to put it, they think of it as if it were a matter of God’s being unusually “well-behaved.” It’s as if they look at God as a heroic character in the novel, whereas the atheist who is troubled by the suffering in the world looks at God as a villainous character who behaves badly. But God is not a character in the novel in the first place.
There are several problems with this statement. First of all, for a Christian, Professor Feser’s assertion that God is not a character in the novel is contradicted by the fact of the Incarnation, when God became man and lived among us. Feser would surely acknowledge this, and I imagine his response would be that in mounting the above defense of God’s goodness in a world marred by evil, he is merely defending classical theism (belief in a simple, transcendent, timeless, infinite Creator), rather than the more specific claims of Christianity. Feser might add that evil – both natural and moral – predates the Incarnation, and that even after the Fall, God did not have to choose to live among us. Classical theists maintain that even in a world without Christ, belief in God would still be rational. We therefore need to look for a more general solution to the problem of evil than the Incarnation.
The second problem with Feser’s “author-character” analogy is that he himself has exposed its fatal flaw. Several years ago, he wrote a post in response to a tentative suggestion of mine that maybe we are all characters in a story written by God – not an ordinary story, but an interactive one, which allows us to interact with our Author, rather like the Tamagotchi electronic pets of the 1990s, which asked their owner to feed them and “died” if their owner neglected them. Thus although we exist within God’s storybook, we possess genuine (God-given) libertarian agency: we actually write some of the story ourselves.
In response, Feser argued that while God’s causality is basically like that of the author of the story who decides that the characters will interact in such-and-such a way (rather than that of a mere character in the story), nevertheless “the world is not literally a mere story and we are not literally fictional characters.” For one thing, argued Feser, “there is an obvious difference between us and fictional characters: we exist and they don’t.” What’s more, “the characters in a story do not literally ‘interact’ with the author … for the simple reason that they do not exist and thus cannot interact with anything.” Finally, “because the characters do not exist but are purely fictional, they are not true causes the way real things are. Everything they seem to do is really done by their author.” What this means is that if the storybook analogy were literally true, none of us really act at all: rather, it is God Who really performs our actions. The storybook analogy is bad theology, too: “If we and everything else in the universe are, in effect, mere ideas in the mind of a divine Author, then the distinction between God and the world collapses.”
For Feser, as a Thomist, the reason why fictional characters cannot be said to exist is that God has not bestowed their essences with the fire of existence, which would endow them with objective reality, making them participants in God’s Unlimited Being. Phoenixes have fully-fledged essences; what they lack is existence, since God has not bothered to create them. (For my own part, I find the Scholastic essence-existence distinction philosophically muddled, and I explain the non-existence of phoenixes by virtue of the fact that no matter in our universe currently happens to realize the form of a living phoenix – a form which, incidentally, is inadequately defined, as the bird’s anatomy and biological processes are nowhere specified in its definition. But I digress.)
The key point, however, is that despite Feser’s insistence that “we are not literally fictional characters,” Feser’s storybook analogy is fundamental to his account of why God is not culpable for allowing evil to exist: as he puts it in his interview with First Things, “just as it makes no sense to think of an author as being unjust to his characters, neither does it make sense to think of God as being unjust to his creatures.” Unfortunately, Feser never tells us why it doesn’t make sense to speak of an author as being unjust to his characters. One obvious answer to this question is: “because the characters are fictional, not real.” But if that’s the answer, then an atheist could retort that since human beings, unlike Voldemort and Draco Malfoy, are real, it is possible after all for God to act unjustly towards His human creatures. Only human authors have no obligations towards their characters, because they are not real.
Another possible answer to the question of why an author can never act unjustly towards his characters is simply that they depend entirely on the author for their being (with a small “b.”) But the premise, “B depends entirely on A” in no way implies the conclusion, “A has no obligations towards B.” All that follows is that A has no enforceable obligations towards B – at least, none that B can enforce. But an unenforceable obligation is still an obligation. Additionally, there seems to be nothing preventing A from voluntarily assuming obligations towards B, in the very act of creating B. (For instance, A might promise to protect B from other characters that might harm him.) In that case, if A fails to meet those responsibilities then he could be said to have failed in His duty towards B, and to have committed an injustice towards B, by breaking his promise to B.
I can think of no other reason why Feser would maintain that an author can never act unjustly towards his characters. That being the case, it is by no means evident that God’s being the Creator of the universe geets Him off the hook, morally speaking, as far as culpability for natural and moral evil is concerned.
I might also add that if it makes no sense to speak of an author being unjust to his characters, as Professor Feser contends, then by the same token, it makes no sense to speak of his being just in His dealings with them. Yet Feser, as a devout Catholic, believes that God is perfectly just, that He rewards the virtuous in the hereafter and that He punishes evildoers in Hell. This doesn’t fit the storybook analogy: J. K. Rowling, for instance, may have written her book with a happy ending for Harry Potter and a not-so-happy ending for the characters who attempted to harm him, but it would be absurd to speak of her as “punishing” Voldemort, or for that matter, Draco Malfoy. Authors don’t punish their characters; nor do they reward them.
Another obvious flaw in the storybook analogy for God’s relationship to us is that when an author writes a book, the interaction is all one-way: from author to book. The characters have no say as to how they will end up in the story. Humans, on the other hand, can interact with their Creator, in prayer. (That was why I preferred the Tamagotchi analogy to the storybook analogy, as the characters can ask their owner to feed them.) What’s more, the choices humans make in this life will (according to many theists) affect their fate in the hereafter. Unlike the characters in a novel, we do have a say in our future destiny.
However, the biggest flaw in Professor Feser’s storybook analogy is that it fails to account for the fact that humans can defy the will of their Maker, by sinning. Now, Aquinas writes that God “in no way wills the evil of sin, which is the privation of right order towards the divine good” (Summa Theologica I, q. 19, a. 9) – a statement to which Feser would surely assent. However, this vitiates the analogy between God and the author of a storybook, as an individual named Thomas points out in a comment on Feser’s latest article in First Things:
The author metaphor is a poor one for the relation between God, and particularly ill-suited for the problem of evil…
God can cause the free choices of a human being without determining that choice to this or that; authors cannot. Authors are equally the cause of a character’s good deeds and misdeeds, and a novel’s characters cannot be said to defy the will of the novelist. Human beings, on the other hand, can defy the will of God…
If the author metaphor is useful at all in the context of the context of the problem of evil, it is only by contrasting God with a novelist.
Feser apparently overlooks the significance of this point. He writes that God’s being the ultimate source of all causality “is no more incompatible with human freedom than the fact that an author decides that, as part of a mystery story, a character will freely choose to commit a murder, is incompatible with the claim that the character in question really committed the murder freely.” But all that this line of argument (if it is successful) demonstrates is that the doctrine of predestination is compatible with a kind of freedom. It does not address the question of how the characters in a story can legitimately be said to defy the will of their author – and in particular, how humans can be said to defy the Will of their Maker.
I conclude that only if the human story is not pre-determined by God, but genuinely open, can humans be said to defy the will of their Maker.
So far, I have been concerned merely to argue that Professor Feser’s contention that God, as the Author of the cosmos, is not morally culpable for allowing evil, rests on a faulty analogy. However, the fact that the analogy is defective does not imply that God is morally culpable for not preventing evil. The onus is still on the atheist to explain exactly why a Transcendent Being would have such an obligation towards His sentient and/or sapient creatures.
Atheists commonly argue that if God were anything like a human parent, He would protect us from irreparable harm, regardless of whether it resulted from death, permanent injury or trauma. God would also protect us from evils (including horrific experiences) which are in no way good for us. And since God is supposed to be all-loving, all-wise and all-powerful, there is no reason why He could not accomplish all of these things right now.
In reply, a theist could point out that while God is indeed said to be more loving than any human parent, His obligations towards us are not those of a human parent. “Why not?” you may ask. The answer is that parental obligations are purely natural, arising from the fact that parents are human animals who have procreated a child, and that procreation is a basic human good which fulfills our human potential, and which may be legitimately pursued as an end in itself. While God may indeed have obligations towards His creatures, they are not natural obligations, because God’s voluntary decision to create does not spring from His nature; nor is it necessary, in order to complete or fulfill His nature. God would still be God, even if He had never chosen to make this world. He requires nothing outside Him, in order to realize His full potential.
It follows from the above reasoning that the atheistic argument that God must (if He is all-wise and all-powerful) be less loving than a human parent, because He fails to protect His creatures in ways that a human parent would normally be obliged to do, is invalid. God does not have natural parental obligations.
I argued above that God could still assume voluntary obligations towards us, in His decision to create us. Nevertheless, the precise content of those obligations, and the circumstances under which they would come into effect, remain unclear, as God has not publicly revealed them to us, so far. We are therefore not entitled to conclude from God’s silence that He is indifferent to our suffering. All we can say is that apparently, He doesn’t want to end it now.
However, there is nothing to prevent God, if He so wishes, from assuming voluntary parental obligations towards His creatures at some future date (via some Grand Restoration of the cosmos), or on an individual basis, preserving each sentient and/or sapient creature from annihilation, in some hereafter of which we have as yet no conception. If God chose either (or both) of these options, then He could fittingly be called all-loving. However, if God chose neither of these options, then such an ascription would seem pointless, as it would have no factual basis. The most we could say then would be that God is self-loving, like Aristotle’s God.
Loving or not, it cannot be denied that God is providential, in His dealings with the human race as a whole. Even in subsistence societies, life is precarious but generally not hellish: for instance, the Piraha people of the Amazon live very simply, but manage to stay extraordinarily happy: they live in the present, and do not dwell on the past or future. And the fact that we now live in a world in which the average human being will live to the age of 70, get a decent education, earn a living, fall in love, marry, procreate, and enjoy decades of good health before dying, should make us reflect. Science and free-market economics have improved our lot, but the amazing thing is that we live in a world in which so many scientific discoveries are possible, and in which knowledge can be shared rapidly. We have Providence to thank for that. Even our ability to make and use fire rests on a dazzling array of features built into the human body and the planet. Bad as things are at times, they could be much, much worse. The mere fact that any of us are able to enjoy anything at all should be a cause of wonder.
I’d like to conclude with two short quotes – one from Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, and the other from the Discourses of Epictetus:
I trouble not myself about the manner of future existence. I content myself with believing, even to positive conviction, that the Power that gave me existence is able to continue it, in any form and manner he pleases, either with or without this body; and it appears more probable to me that I shall continue to exist hereafter, than that I should have had existence, as I now have, before that existence began.
Any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful mind. Not to instance great things, the mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk, and wool from skins – who formed and planned this? No one, say you. O surprising irreverence and dullness! (Book I, 16)
I’d like to wish my American readers a happy Independence Day.
Alan,
Put your money where your mouth is. Show where I’ve “grossly misrepresented” your position.
Here’s my comment again, for your convenience:
Good luck.
Good luck.
Where’s my position?
For one thing, “rancour” describes an emotion, which is a physical phenomenon. “Abstract” is a grammatical category. And this is a derail. If you think there’s more to be said, the previous thread is a more suitable location. Or sandbox. Or noyau to allow you more freedom of expression.
Alan,
That’s because you have a poor understanding of the problem of evil and of the philosophy surrounding it.
To an atheist, things like earthquakes and deadly viruses are undesirable but not evil. After all, no one is responsible for them.
That’s no longer true when you bring a powerful (and especially an omnipotent) God into the picture, who is in fact responsible for those things. In that context, the phrase “natural evil” makes perfect sense.
Don’t be so quick to dismiss things that you don’t understand.
The Wikipedia article on natural evil puts it succinctly:
Deaths due to deadly viruses certainly qualify as natural evil, and it has nothing to do with whether the viruses themselves are malevolent.
Yes, but why are you telling me this? (Besides assuming you speak for all atheists). I’ve made the same distinction. The distinction is intent.
Nope, “natural” is a word, like “good” and “evil” that is meaningless without qualification.
Oh please. The simple point I made in that earlier thread and I still make is that “evil” used as a noun is a meaningless concept. The best you could offer was “The Rape of Nanking”.
Nonsense.
I guess that follows from the obvious fact that viruses are indeed not malevolent.
I’ve heard influenza was referred to as “Old Man’s Friend” in the past.
Alan,
Because you don’t understand the concept of natural evil. I’m explaining it to you by contrasting the atheist perspective, in which no one is responsible for earthquakes and deadly viruses, with the standard theistic perspective, in which someone — God — is responsible.
Your objection is silly:
The mistake is yours, because you don’t understand the concept of natural evil.
Explain it then.
Alan Fox,
Is this some fatuous category distinction between moral and natural?
ETA: I see it is. Wikipedia
Did you contribute to that page, Keiths?
keiths:
Alan:
I explained it already. If you still don’t get it, then remember:
Google is your friend.
Where? Do you agree with the Wikipedia entry I linked to?
No. Good grief, Alan.
Natural evil is an established concept in philosophy and theology. Educate yourself.
And I repeat the question: what enables one to shuffle examples of “evil” into to arbitrary categories; natural and moral? The usual antonyms to “natural” are “artificial” and “supernatural”. No, I don’t get it. Do theists find the “problem of natural evil” a testing dilemma?
Vincent and any other theist is welcome to respond.
Currently? Seems an oxymoron to me. Then I’m not an apologist or an anti-theist.
And has it come up in recent debates between theist and anti-theist big hitters (presuming there have been some)?
keiths:
Alan:
Yes, currently. Educate yourself.
And definitely not a philosopher, amateur or otherwise. That’s the problem — you bumbled into an area of your incompetence, thinking you knew what was what. You obviously didn’t.
Natural evil is a perfectly coherent (and recognized) concept. Your ignorance is just your ignorance.
Yes, you keep asserting this. I disagree for the simple reason that “evil” is a non-existent concept (except in the minds of those who think in terms of Gods and Devils). What are your reasons for claiming otherwise?
Oops! And an oxymoron.
And “moral evil” is a tautology!
From the OP:
And the act of sinning is presumably evil. Or does it bear on intent? If God creates and sustains the Universe, all is done with his intent. So a natural disaster where many children drown is an evil act by God since he created and sustained the event.
phoodoo at #17: You seem to be on the track, right up to the end, where you run off the rails. Yes, the reasoning seems to lead to a contradiction, so, maybe, just maybe, there was an error in the original assumption … wonder what that could be.
But it’s not something you actually believe exits, is it?
And yet, if we follow keiths logic, this is the only world that could exist, under his loving God demands.
And that is one answer to the problem of evil .If God ,by definition, is perfectly good that He could not have an evil intent.
Not the only world that could exist ,the one the God intended to exist.
Hi Alan,
You write:
In this case, I think “natural” is being opposed to “voluntary.” I’ll try to summarize the thinking involved.
Following Augustine, it may be helpful to think of evil as a privation or defect. [Of course, not everyone agrees with Augustine on this point; I’m just using his analysis as a plausible way of bringing the two concepts of evil under a single heading, which does not use the term “evil” in any loaded sense of the word.]
On a biological level, evil may be either the lack of some organ or body part (like three-leggedness in a sheep), or the corruption or wasting away of a bodily organ, or the malfunction of an organ. All of these are privations or defects.
(Many people would add that pain is an evil, but one could argue that pain is merely a symptom of something amiss in the body, which needs to be treated.)
Imbalances or disturbances in the brain could also be described as defects, and would also qualify as instances of biological evils. (The suffering experienced by afflicted individuals would, once again, be a symptom of these underlying defects.)
Mental illness in humans or animals, when not caused by brain malfunctions, can usually be traced back to some deprivation affecting the individual’s psychological development. Under the Augustinian definition, mental illness is thus a symptom of an underlying evil: something that went amiss in the way the afflicted individual developed.
All of these evils are defects affecting an individual’s nature. We say that there is something wrong with an individual who is afflicted with one of these evils. In the case of human wickedness, it is different. Criminals sometimes come from good homes: there is nothing wrong with them, either biologically or psychologically. Yet they do bad things. The law ascribes this kind of wickedness to bad choices made by the criminals themselves. These criminals cannot claim, “My DNA made me do it,” or “My brain chemistry made me do it.” Their actions were voluntary; there is nothing wrong with their human nature, as such. From a moral standpoint, these wicked choices were also defective: the criminal pursued a goal that he/she should not have pursued. Hence they still fit under the Augustinian schema of evil as a defect. We call such evils moral evils.
So the common thread, it seems to me, is that of some defect, either in one’s nature or in one’s will. Hence the twofold division.
While it might be argued that natural evils are often good for the ecosystem as a whole, indirectly (insofar as they contribute to its functioning, when afflicted individuals die and other organisms feed on them), there is no sense in which human wickedness is good for society as a whole. The world would unequivocally be better off without it. Hence while an all-wise, all-powerful and all-loving Being might will natural evils to occur for the sake of some greater good, such a Being could never will moral evils to occur for the sake of some greater good, because there is none.
Most atheists, however, would contend that many of the natural evils found in our world, and all moral evils (or at least, all bad actions) could easily have been prevented by an all-wise, all-powerful and all-loving Being, and thus constitute powerful evidence against the existence of such a Being. My OP was written in reply to this assertion.
If one adopts an Augustinian view of evil, then “moral evil” is not a tautology. It is simply one kind of evil.
If God creates and sustains the universe, he enables natural and human agents (including morally bad ones) to do their work. Does that make Him responsible? I think it makes Him responsible for the occurrence of natural evils. (Sometimes the suffering experienced, however, is due to human stupidity – as when individuals choose to live near an active volcano.)
What about moral evils? Here, what God is doing is giving human beings a power to act in the world, and letting them exercise that power as they see fit. That does not mean that God approves of our choices; it simply means that He permits them.
Should God stop bad human agents right away when they do something that hurts other people, as any parent or concerned citizen would? I have attempted to argue that God has no natural obligations towards us that would oblige Him to step in right away and prevent the harm, as a human being ought to do in similar circumstances, whenever he/she is able to do so. What I have not attempted to do, however, is explain God’s tardiness in bringing the world to justice. I have no idea why moral evil has continued for as long as it has, or killed as many people as it has. All I can say is that in the grand scheme of things, God still has the opportunity to put things right.
The ends justify the means
keiths,
There is no reason to use the concept weak.
The way it was done does mean it lingers. It is only for a remnant of humans to go to heaven. Its strange in the first place why satan was around and so strange how to defeat him.
Yet thats how it is.
vjtorley,
Just to say thanks for the detailed response. I have some RL stuff tomorrow but I should have time to pick up on some of your points over the weekend.
Like refusing to go on a date with someone who likes them. That kind of evil, that hurts? Or do you mean firing someone who doesn’t earn the company enough money? That evil?
Since you can’t say what is evil and what isn’t, I don’t think your talk of evil has any meaning whatsoever. Evil is anything that hurts someone else?
What about hurting an animal, is that evil? Or an animal hurting a human, is that evil?
Why does God allow that beautiful blonde cheerleader to not have sex with that 16 year old nerd? How can God be so heartless? Hopefully God still has time to rectify this tardiness and still put things right before the nerd graduates high school as a virgin.
I bet you believe your problem of dandruff, er ev..whatever, is a sophisticated one.
Agreed.
Jesus relate spiritual reality to parables. I think storybook analogies are therefore good theology.
keiths, to Alan:
walto:
Right. I don’t believe there’s a God behind earthquakes and tsunamis, or behind parasites and viruses, so for me they don’t qualify as instances of natural evil. That doesn’t mean that the concept isn’t coherent or that I can’t usefully employ it in my arguments against theists, however.
One of the best strategies for arguing against a position is to flesh out its entailments and compare them against reality. If there’s a clash between the two, then you’ve shown that there’s something wrong with the starting position.
To flesh out the entailments of your opponent’s position, you need to start from certain of his or her assumptions. These might even be assumptions that you think are false. That’s perfectly fine. You’re not arguing that they’re correct — you’re arguing that if they were correct, as your opponent believes, they would lead to entailments that clash with reality, and that your opponent’s position is therefore incorrect.
Smart people do this sort of thing routinely, but Alan has great difficulty with it, as we’ve seen in this thread and elsewhere. He can’t adopt his opponent’s position, even arguendo, because he keeps getting it mixed up with his own.
Brighter folks can figure out which assumptions to adopt arguendo, and which to dispute. They also are able to switch from one perspective to another while keeping them separate. For Alan this is extremely difficult, and it constitutes a great handicap.
Acartia:
phoodoo:
No, phoodoo, and I’ve already explained this to you:
newton:
Which leads to the repulsive beliefs of people like William Lane Craig, who says that the genocides of the Old Testament were moral because God, who is morally perfect, commanded them.
keiths,
You don’t know what explained means.
vjtorley:
That argument fails, as I explained earlier in the thread, because even if God truly has no obligation to intervene, that doesn’t prevent him from voluntarily doing so. Which, after all, would be the loving thing to do.
Imagine God saying this to the Jordanian pilot:
What sane person would describe such a God as loving?
That you would even make this argument shows what religion has done to your mind. Come on, Vincent — you’re smarter than this.
Try to do better, phoodoo.
In that case God’s commands justify an action by men, in the case of God’s non interference His lack of action does not indicate tacit approval.
Perhaps God should create more hookers, win win
I didn’t know that you were still in high school. Hopefully that cheerleader will finally notice you.
Hi keiths,
You write:
First, although I argued in my OP that God is provident, I didn’t put forward any positive arguments that God is all-loving. My argument was that He might still be all-loving, notwithstanding the evils which afflict us in this world, provided that there is either a Grand Restoration of things and/or a hereafter, in which suffering is recompensed.
Second, re the problem of evil, I can do no better than to quote from John Henry Newman’s Apologia, chapter 5:
And again, from Newman’s letter to J. R. Mozley of April 1, 1875:
Newman’s position strikes me as a very honest one. His favorite hypothesis for explaining human evil was Original Sin: “And so I argue about the world;—if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator.” I haven’t attempted to defend Original Sin in my OP, even though I find it plausible,because I know from experience that it rubs most atheists up the wrong way: it offends their sense of justice.
And I believe Newman wrote somewhere else (though I cannot find the passage) that while we may be deeply troubled about the justice of God’s dealings with others, still, each of us must acknowledge that God has been good to him. I can strongly identify with Newman’s words here. Thus it may well be the case that there can be no public evidence (in this life) that God is all-loving, and that the only reason we can have for believing this doctrine is our personal experience of life, which is by its very nature incommunicable to others.
Third, there is something odd about your example, because it involves God actually talking to the Jordanian pilot, on a personal level. And it would be contradictory, I think, for a Deity to actually talk to a pilot, and say, “I’m going to let you burn,” because that’s about as impersonal a response as you can get. It would be like God blowing hot and cold at the same time. But you haven’t refuted the (more realistic) example of the pilot who has never heard the voice of God during his lifetime, and who receives Divine consolation only at the moment of death – by which time it may be too late for him to tell us about it. In any case, deathbed visions are a real phenomenon.
Those are just a few reflections.
I know Ed Feser is a big fan of Thomas Aquinas (I bought his book!) but I don’t know much about Augustine. I see (according to Wikipedia) he was a Berber from North Africa who converted to Christianity at 31 and previously had some connection with Manichaeism which may explain his attachment to mind-body dualism.
I don’t see anything synonymous between a defect, absence or atrophy and “evil” but that’s the heart of my inability to see “evil” as other than malicious or malevolent intent.
You among them? I don’t see any connection with pain and “evil”.
Well, I certainly think that psychopathy can result in sufferers behaving in ways that could be called evil. Though, if they are compelled to behave in evil ways by their psychopathy, then, in my view, they are sick – not evil.
“Something went amiss” translates as “God allowed evil to happen” if you believe this World is wholly created and sustained by God.
I agree it’s a popular defence for criminal behaviour to claim mental impairment and courts must do their best to decide on the merits of such a defence. I repeat my contention that for an act to be fairly described as evil, it must involve evil intent by the perpetrator.
I don’t.
No, I don’t see that. Putting myself in a theist pose, where I really believed (as I think Feser claims) that God, and only God creates and sustains, then all that happens is God’s will and there could be no human free will.
I’ve never given that much thought. Not sure it’s an infallible rule.
We could be ants on the sidewalk, not capable of appreciating the power and subtlety of God’s thought. Or not.
I haven’t missed that some atheists (I’d call them anti theists) think this a neat argument for there being no gods.
Sure. Semantically speaking, I think that is a misuse of the word. I keep saying “evil” (the noun) doesn’t exist in any stronger sense than as a human concept.
Can be a gamble that pays off due to the rich fertility of volcanic soil and the possibility of several lifetimes passing till the next eruption.
I guess it’s the length of the leash that’s in dispute between different theologians. I see no leash. 🙂
I think phoodoo’s reductio ad absurdam is a good theist argument against Keiths’s “God let that baby’s head get eaten” approach.
Perhaps I should elaborate on that point. I mean that antitheists seem to think that this logical argument (in Keith’s case embellished with horrific scenarios) should pose difficulties for theists. I suspect the vast majority of believers believe as they do from cultural background. The appeal is emotional. Norenzayan’s suggestion that religion is a societal bastion against the vagaries of life and has been replaced by sound secular institutions that can be trusted to be fair and equitable – he gives the prime example of Denmark – which results in the gentle fading of religion to a cultural tradition is, I find, very persuasive.
Brighter folks understand that
There is evil
is a premise in the argument from evil. If there’s no evil, there’s no argument. phoodoo has been trying to explain this to you for years now.
For much of theism the premise that there is evil is necessary and that evil resides in human nature. We must resist the evil within and turn to our better natures or else .Without that premise theism loses the power to control behavior.
Poodoo’s argument might cure the disease but it kills the patient
newton:
A fortuitous typo.
I think the major flaw in the argument is that most theists have logic as the basis for their anthropomorphic view of the divine.
Yes of course