For Theism: Part 3

Explaining why there's evil

1 Introduction

I’m an atheist but am doing my best to make a maximally convincing case for theism. In the first two parts of this series, I’ve put forth a battery of considerations that make theism more likely. Here, I’ll address the primary reason not to be a theist, providing a brand-new theodicy as well as two existing defenses of the problem of evil.

I think these considerations might be enough to remove some of the force of the problem of evil. That said, however, they require lots of fairly implausible and ad hoc assumptions, and even then don’t even manage to predict the specific evils of the world with much probability, but instead provide a reason to think the evils of the world would be inscrutable; they are thus nowhere near a knockdown objection, but provide a reason why if a person thinks that the non-evil-related considerations overwhelmingly favor theism, evil is not an unavoidable problem. If you throw the entire metaphysical kitchen sink at the problem of evil, you are left being not totally unable to explain why there’s evil, which makes this, to my mind, more successful than other theodicies.

Before I present my theodicy, let me note why I’m dissatisfied by most other theodicies. Many theodicies like soul-building and appeals to libertarian free will suffer from the problem that there is just too much evil in the world and it’s too varied. Much of the evil in the world might be explainable by soul-building, but there’s just so much evil that no targeted explanations like soul-building can plausibly explain the sheer diversity of evils. Many evils result in death, and thus are not conducive to soul-building. Many evils are the types of things that make people more likely to perform vicious acts, such as evils of alcoholism or pedophilic sexual urges. Some evils are just annoying inconveniences—the morning stubbing of a toe—that don’t build one’s soul at all. And finally, many evils that cause people to suffer, like kids getting malaria, are obviously not worth it.

The free will defense has the same problem; lots of evils have nothing to do with free will. There are all sorts of natural evils like malaria, flesh-eating parasites, and natural disasters that aren’t explained by free will. There are all sorts of natural unrealized goods—the world could be made much better. Furthermore, Lewis’s responses to Plantinga’s free will defense are quite convincing:

1. If free will were so valuable, God would just give us the freedom to choose between various great goods rather than to bring about evil.

2. God could put people in a playpen before they could carry out extreme evil. Surely the value of Hitler’s decision to kill millions of Jews isn’t worth the death of millions of Jews.

3. God can provide freedom only selectively when people will act rightly.  It’s hard to see what would go wrong there.  

I could run through more theodicies, but the pattern should be clear. Theodicies often try to explain evil by arguing that it is valuable because it achieves some particular end. But given the sheer varied nature of the world’s evils, it’s not plausible that any project like this will ever succeed in explaining the world’s evils.

A final problem for many of these theodicies is that they have unacceptable moral implications. If, for example, one thinks that malaria is not unfortunate because it builds people’s souls, then one has no reason to try to eradicate malaria. If there is some straightforward explanation for all the world’s apparent evils, such that they’re all conducive to some greater good, then one shouldn’t try to get rid of the world’s evils.

2 The soul-binding theodicy

My solution to the problem of evil will be threefold—first, I’ll provide a new explanation for why apparent evils would plausibly exist, second I’ll defend the skeptical theist response, and third I’ll argue that an existing solution to the problem of evil has some plausibility, particularly when combined with the other two.

The first explanation is called the soul-binding theodicy. Take a moment to appreciate how cool that sounds. Could a theodicy that sounds that cool really be wrong?

Let’s start by assuming the soul theory of personal identity. On this view, the thing that makes me the same person as I was yesterday is my non-physical soul. Someone could have the same experiences as you but be a different person. The difference, on this account, between the two of you would be that though the experiences are the same, the soul experiencing it is different. The soul is what determines who experiences something.

There is independent motivation for the soul theory. The soul theory explains the intuition that there’s a fact of the matter about whether you survive radical brain shifts, for example. Whether a chair remains the same chair after undergoing significant changes seems, at some point, to be a semantic question—in contrast, whether you survive major brain changes is not a semantic question. The soul theory makes sense of this. There’s much more to be said in favor of the soul theory that I can’t hope to discuss in detail. Instead, I’ll just note that this is not a totally crazy theory and has independent motivation—it’s not invoked just to solve the problem of evil.

Next, assume that for one to have my soul they have to have a roughly similar psychology to me. My soul could not, for example, be implanted in an octopus’s body—we’re just too psychologically different. I couldn’t trade souls with Napoleon, for example—a soul can’t just bind to any type of mind, it must bind to a mind of a certain type.

Third, assume that the most valuable endeavor is the beatific vision “The immediate knowledge of God which the angelic spirits and the souls of the just enjoy in Heaven.” This is more valuable than any other experience—it is to other pleasures what aleph null is to normal numbers; the value of a single moment of it can never be reached merely by compiling together other types of pleasures. A single second of it is more valuable than the sum of all valuable experiences on earth.

You might wonder: if God exists, why doesn’t he just give everyone the beatific vision immediately? If this is maximally valuable, why not give it to everyone? The answer lies in the third assumption: in order to remain the same person over time, we have to be roughly psychologically continuous. But the beatific vision is so far above us that we can’t immediately be given the beatific vision. Instead, our minds have to be slowly molded over a long period of time so that eventually we can appreciate the beatific vision.

This gives us an explanation of why there is evil. Evil arises because bad experiences sometimes help us pursue the beatific vision. Just as it would be hard to predict what sequence of experiences would make us maximally appreciate a painting that we’d see 500 years from now, especially if we don’t know the interim experiences, if we grant these assumptions, it’s hard to predict which sequence of experiences would be the quickest path to the beatific vision. Therefore, if we grant these assumptions, evil stops being a mystery on theism—it may not be especially predicted but it isn’t terribly unlikely. Ultimately, we’re not in a position to guess which experiences we’d have.

This theodicy has an advantage over various theodicies like the soul-building theodicy. First, it has a much cooler name. Second, it explains why those evils, while tragic in the short term, are worth it. It’s not plausible that a kid getting cancer is worth it because it builds people’s souls so much. In contrast, if we grant the unparalleled value of the beatific vision, it is valuable enough to outweigh bad things.

You might object that it’s not plausible that every evil in the world is conducive to appreciation of beatific vision. Is it plausible that, for instance, my getting shampoo in my eyes a few days ago in a way that was irritating for a few minutes but that turned out unremarkable will make me access the beatific vision more quickly or in a more valuable way? In response to this, three points are in order:

First, various experiences have unpredictable ripple effects. If that experience delayed when I fell asleep by a few minutes which changed when I woke up which changed my psychology over the course of the next day, which changed the words I wrote, which changed the psychology slightly of the hundreds of millions of people who read my articles, this could produce a big effect. Even small things spill over.

Second, even if it seems like in this life many evils don’t have vindicating side effects, we’re not in a position to guess whether they will in the long run. In the afterlife, with vastly greater cognitive powers, where we will be very different psychologically, it’s hard to predict whether, for example, our memory of specific events will turn out valuable.

Third and most decisively, particular bad things may not have a greater purpose that makes them worthwhile, but may instead be caused by other things that have a greater purpose. Being mistreated may not be valuable, but perhaps it follows from free will, and that free will is valuable. Similarly, having regular laws of nature, not being aware of God while having a competent psychology, and being able to enter into relationships with other people may be valuable but those may require that some evils occur.

You might object that this theodicy is quite improbable as it requires four separate unlikely things. This is true, however, if the outside evidence for theism is sufficiently decisive, that should be enough to diffuse this objection. This is especially so when it’s part of a cumulative explanation of evil.

There are many more objections to this view that also apply to skeptical theism. Given that this view claims that we’re not in a position to ascertain what evils would exist, many objections to skeptical theism will apply here also. In the next section, I’ll reply to many of these objections as I will defend skeptical theism more broadly.

3 Skeptical theism

Skeptical theism claims that we are just not in a position to guess whether there is a perfect being. Bergmann provides several skeptical theist theses:

STI: We have no good reason for thinking that the possible goods we know of are representative of the possible goods there are.

ST2: We have no good reason for thinking that the possible evils we know of are representative of the possible evils there are.

ST3: We have no good reason for thinking that the entailment relations we know of between possible goods and the permission of possible evils are representative of the entailment relations there are between possible goods and the permission of possible evils.

There are various analogies that skeptical theists trot out. A skeptical theist might claim that just as a mediocre chess player would be unable to assess whether one has been playing correctly or a child may be unable to assess whether his parents acted rightly in sending him to the dentist, so too are we unable to assess whether evils serve some greater purpose. The world is a messy and complicated place and we are only able to see the first 0% of God’s infinitely long plan; we are thus not in any position to evaluate it.

These analogies have somewhat limited efficacy. A core difference between God and a chess player is that God is omnipotent; he does not need to sacrifice pawns for victory—he can achieve anything simply by an act of will. If a parent could remove their child’s tooth decay without needing to send them to the doctor, then surely they would do that!

Still, the skeptical theist can claim that God does have constraints—he is constrained by necessary laws. Just as God cannot create a square circle, he cannot overturn any necessary facts. As such, there might be various ways in which evils follow from the necessary facts; every remotely successful theodicy claims that this is so. The free will theodicy, for example, claims that a necessary consequence of morally significant free will, which is of great value, is people being able to do evil. Thus, bad things follow from necessary facts. The skeptical theist can claim, in line with ST3, that this explains many of the evils.

There have been lots of objections to skeptical theism made at various points. As such, I can’t hope to address all of them. I will address some of the important ones.

A first objection that comes from Almeida and Oppy claims that skeptical theism is too skeptical. If it’s true that there is a greater good that explains why a perfect being allows evils, that undermines our justification for thinking we should intervene to prevent evils.  If skeptical considerations are enough to make it impossible to ascertain that there are no outweighing reasons for evil, then they’d also undermine our justification for thinking an action is probably right.  Thus, skeptical theists must say that, for instance, curing a child’s cancer is not almost certainly right—we’re not in a position to know it’s right.

Here we must distinguish objective and subjective wrongness. An act is objectively wrong if it turns out to be not worth doing, while an act is subjectively wrong if it isn’t worth doing given what the agent knows. If one feeds another poison, when they have no reason to think the thing they’re feeding the person poison, that act is objectively wrong because it turned out badly but is subjectively right because knowing what they knew at the time, their action was fine.

As Bergmann and Rea note, the skeptical theist can consistently maintain that an action like curing cancer is subjectively right. Given what a person knows when they do it it is worth doing; it has all sorts of unpredictable side effects, but those cancel out in expectation, so its expected effects are significantly positive. However, it may not turn out to be objectively right because one is not in an epistemic position to figure out if it will, in the end, turn out for the best.

One is not in a position to know that it is objectively right. Given an actions many unintended side effects, the skeptical theist can consistently maintain that actions like this are hard to assess—they might not turn out for the best. But this isn’t so counterintuitive. The world is a messy, unpredictable place, we’re not in a position to guess how our actions will turn out.

One might think that it’s unintuitive that the odds that doing good things like curing cancer turns out for the best is almost exactly 50%. But this is our background information. As MacAskill and Mogenson note:

. . . our actions generate many unpredictable indirect effects, magnifying in significance over time. Why should we believe this? The primary reason is that the facts of reproductive biology intersect with the metaphysics of transworld identity in such a way as to entail the ubiquity of identity-affecting actions (Greaves 2016; Lenman 2000). By an ‘identity-affecting’ action, we mean an action whose performance affects which persons belong to the total population of everyone who ever exists.

We take Parfit (1984) to have shown that our existence is remarkably fragile across nearby possible worlds: if your parents had not conceived a child at around the time at which they did in fact conceive, then you would not exist. Almost anything we do can be expected to affect the timing of some reproductive event and thereby change which people come to exist. For example, Greaves (2016) highlights that any act impacting the local traffic will ever so slightly quicken or slow the journeys of countless people. Some of these people were going to conceive a child on the day in question. Since a difference of just a few milliseconds is likely to affect which particular sperm out of the 200 million sperm in a typical ejaculation fertilises the egg, any action that causes such a delay for sufficiently many people is likely to be identity-affecting, ensuring that someone is born who would otherwise not have existed.

Note, furthermore, that this action will be causally responsible for everything this person does, for good or ill. This includes the person’s effects on later reproductive events, ensuring that the identity-affecting consequences of your actions grow quickly within the foreseeable future. More and more reproductive events will be altered. More and more people will be born who would not have existed but for your action. Everything they do will be indirectly traceable to your act. Very many of these consequences will be harmful or beneficial to other people. For example, some of these people will inevitably get into car wrecks that would not otherwise have occurred. Over the course of a typical lifetime, the average motorist in the US will be involved in three to four road accidents, and three out of every 1,000 accidents involves fatalities (Toups 2011). Somewhere down the line, therefore, we can expect that some people will die young who would otherwise have lived long and healthy lives if only you had not disturbed the traffic ever so slightly by driving to the supermarket to buy milk on that fateful day. But we arguably have equally good reason to expect that some accidents will be averted that would otherwise have occurred. Somewhere down the line, we can expect that someone’s life will be saved that would otherwise have been ended by a driver suffering a momentary lapse of attention - a driver who happens not to exist because of you. With approximately 100 people in the US dying every day in motor vehicle crashes, as time runs on and on, the number of fatal accidents caused and averted by your actions may be expected to grow and grow, running into the hundreds, the thousands, perhaps even the millions.

Given this, it’s plausible that saving a child will change the identity of every single person in the future. The people in the year 2500 will all be different people than they would have been if you hadn’t saved the child. Given this, the skeptical conclusions taken to be decisive against skeptical theism aren’t some new reductio—they’re already part of our background information. Even if one is not a skeptical theist, they should still believe them.

Second, you might worry that this is too skeptical. If we can’t know what God would do then we can’t make predictions that God would enable psychophysical harmony, for instance. However, the skeptical theist can consistently claim that God would create valuable states of affairs involving flourishing agents and that doing so requires psychophysical harmony, for instance. They then would simply claim that we can’t know which things are required for ultimately valuable states of affairs.

Furthermore, the theodicy given in Section 2 is especially immune to this worry. The soul-binding theodicy combined with plausible views about population ethics entails God would create every soul and make them into flourishing agents with valuable experiences who can learn things—which entails all the evidence I’ve given for theism in this series.

Third, you might worry that this prevents us from ruling out skepticism. If we can’t know what God would do, how do we know that we’re not brains in vats, for example? How do we know that solipsism is true? But here, the general abductive responses are appropriate. The reason to reject solipsism or the BIV hypothesis is that it’s a very poor explanation of our experiences. There might be some beings who God would put in a skeptical scenario, but that would be the vast minority.

4 Crummett’s free will defense

I’ve previously explained why I don’t find that original free will defense to be especially convincing. But Dustin Crummett has an especially good version. Crummett argues that there are various plausible views that reduce natural evils to human-caused evils. Two examples are especially prominent:

1. If the simulation hypothesis is true and we’re in a simulation then so-called natural evils are the result of malfeasance on behalf of the simulation programmers. Therefore, it’s not that God set up a world with these evils—they were just a byproduct of free will.

2. The evils in this world may be the result of demons. For demons to have morally significant free will they must be able to influence the world. But this enables them to wreak havoc.

This isn’t a full explanation. It’s still hard to see why the programmers and demons are given the free will that they are. But in combination with the other two, this can be a partial explanation—perhaps giving the demons the opportunity to act wrongly so that they later feel ashamed is more conducive to the beatific vision in the long run.

5 Conclusion

I don’t think any of these are great. They’re not super plausible, they’re sort of tenuous even when we grant lots of implausible assumptions. But they’re enough to enable a theist to have some way out of the problem of evil. If you think that the non-evil-related considerations overwhelmingly favor theism, this should maybe be enough to convince you of theism. If, however, you think things are pretty even outside of evil, you should think that theism is unlikely.