The Problem of Evil

"Heavy Moments with Ursa"


EVIL = LIVE

It's common to divide the evil in the world into two types: natural evil and moral evil. I don't think we can say that natural evil is truly evil at all.

As someone has already pointed out, evil implies intent. I dunno, I think it's crapulous to ascribe an intent to things like geology and evolution. I can't see mama nature scheming over a cauldron like a Shakespearean hag to make sure lots of baby fish die.

The only true evil in the world, I think, springs entirely from abuse of the free will.

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I agree. However, questions arise.

What (who) defines "abuse"?

Does yesterday's free-will choice become evil if you would choose to act differently with what you learned today? Is it abuse of free will to value your own self more than another? Is it abuse of free will to choose to abstain whenever possible? Is is abuse of free will to choose to allow someone else to make decisions for you?

Who defines "abuse" of free will? Who determines what's evil? The only answer is ultimately a personal "I do," for everyone who asks.

--
In my world an earthquake that kills a person is not evil. A person that kills a person is evil. It is the choice to kill a person that creates evil.

My satisfaction breaks down when we add prudentials: conditions. It is evil to kill somone to prevent that person from killing others. But which is worse; how evil is evil?

Would I rather live in a world where
< I killed the attacker of my child>
or
<I withheld action and the attacker killed my child>
?
For me the answer is obvious. I would choose the evil of killing the attacker. However, it is evil to have killed that attacker. There are lesser and greater evils.

Jinny,

Ok - if you say that 'natural evil' is not evil at all, then that could be construed as defining your terms to suit your argument.

Ok - suppose we call it instead, something else. Blobby.

So if someone has their leg blown off by a terrorist bomb, it's the result of human evil; if they have their leg bitten off by a shark, it's the result of natural blobby.

It doesn't alter the fact that if an omnipotent, omniscient deity presides over a world in which blobby is rampant, then I would have to say that the deity in question is, as it were, rather partial to a bit of blobby.

Surely, if you do not imply intent when it comes to natural processes, you are also implying that God is not omniscient. Surely when it created everything it was aware of the outcome of the processes it had set in motion?

Bwah? You lost me. An omniscient God could certainly intentionally create a world with blobby.

Are you saying belief in an omni^3 God must include belief that this God intended people to die from natural disasters? No argument here. A world with blobby doesn't forbid a deity with omniscience or omnipotence or omnipresence. Given a world with blobby simply makes it impossible for an omni^3 being to exist without blobbyness.

God is not Mr Blobby.

Ricercar,

Yes, indeed, that is the point I was making. Given the omni>3 stuff, and given blobbiness, then clearly God either (1) deliberately excluded from its own knowledge the way things were going to turn out, thereby being both self-deluded and irresponsible or (2) has elements of the blobby in its own makeup.

Both of those alternatives seem to be to be totally unlike the deity that most people worship.

Jinny,

How do you know?

Selador, as you seem genuninely interested in the positivist perspective, I will make a feeble attempt to explain it.

Pascal's Wager was a first stab at taking a rational approach to whether to believe. He said: if god exists and I do believe, then heaven. If god exists and I don't believe then eternal damnation. If no god and I don't believe, no problem. If no god and I do believe then I have wasted some time on it. Given the "payoffs" as laid out here, the cost of eternal damnation is higher than wasting some time so I'll believe.

Many holes have been poked in this one. A trivial one is "suppose god rewards those who don't believe" which is possible given an inscrutable god.

A more central approach is known as Hempel's ghost. Right here in the room with you is a ghost. It has no measurable effect upon anything, it is not available to our senses, etc. Hempel's contention is that the question "is there a ghost in the room?" is ill-posed - somewhat akin to "when did you stop beating your wife?" to a person who never did. In other words, the question "when?" presupposes that beating had occurred in the past; if it hadn't then the question is, in some sense, unawerable in that "I didn't" is an ambiguous answer.

So put as suscinctly as I can, logical positivism claims that the question "Does god exist" is ill-posed and unanswerable and thus remains outside the realm of inquiry. One easy "out" to this is that sure, the god's existence is a matter of faith.

Now to throw in a bit of parsimony and humanism, if the world's phenomena have two explanations, one which includes a deity and once which doesn't, Occam's razor suggests that we should prefer the explanation that does not add "unnecessary" premises. This is purely a pragmatic stance but one that seems to have served us reasonably well.

The best text I can point to on the subject for the educated layman is Richard Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design". To people who accept that argument, life is but a happy accident and so all "blobbiness" is actually just "natural evil" as defined above.

As to the question of whether an omni^3 being is self-consistent, one need only look as parasitology for evidence that the support is weak. Others have noted above that intent matters. One of my "favorite" parasites is hatched in the gut of sheep, thence excreted and the larvae attack ants where they promptly burrow into the ant's brain and cause the ant to climb to the tip of a blade of grass during dawn and dusk to be grazed upon by sheep. I find it hard to believe that an organism so small as to live within a ant's body is capable of any intent at all, yet it acts so "self interested" that it even keeps the ant from climbing in the mid-day to prevent the ant from cooking in the sun. So the parasite "saves" the ant from baking only to make it more effective as sheep food.

I know that many people find the arguments I've listed above and all of Dawkins' work to be morally repugnant. But, just because we find something displeasing doesn't affect the truth of the matter. Nevertheless, I don't wish to force my beliefs on anyone anymore than I like having random religions proselytize to me. But you did ask, so that is my quick answer. One point that Dawkins does make quite clear is that just because nature is amoral does not imply that we should be as well; in fact he argues the opposite, that given our ability of moral judgement we should strive toward moral conduct despite a relatively indifferent universe.

Malachi,

Many thanks for your efforts in posting that. Yes, it was interesting, and I pretty much agree with all the points raised. I particularly like Pascal's self-interested pragmatism!

But I still would describe myself as an atheist. In respect of the invisible ghost analogy, someone might believe there is an invisible ghost in the room, and clearly there is no way of actually knowing whether it is the case or not. But on the other hand, bearing in mind one's experience of life, it is pretty safe to say that the likelihood of there being an invisible ghost present is very small indeed.

If the person with you says that the invisible ghost is talking to them, then your view on whether or not something was actually there would depend very much on the reliability of the human mind in assessing intangibles. And that is not very high. And if the room was full of people, some of whom were talking to the invisible ghost, and others were in communication with different invisible beings, and all of them claimed that their invisible being was the only one in the room, then you would not be wrong to conclude that the likelihood of the invisible ghost actually existing was so small as to be negligible.

IMV, the universe was just as likely to have been created by the Tooth Fairy as by anything we would recognise as God.

It is not totally outside the bounds of probability that when I die I might suddenly find myself at the foot of a great throne, and mutter 'Oh, shit!' to myself. But I think the likelihood of that happening is so small that it can be discounted. As I said, I could equally find myself at the foot of the Tooth Fairy, or even Mr Blobby, which is an interesting thought.

However, what I am expecting is Nirvana - oblivion, without the effort. The 'afterlife' is another interesting thing. Religious people tend to talk about eternal life, without having any real mental model which would give 'eternity' any kind of real meaning. Once you start to think about it, you would realise that eternal consciousness would be the worst possible, unimaginably horrible thing - something that literally makes me cringe to think about it. If anybody wants that they are welcome to it.

I liked Dawkins' point you quoted at the end about the amorality of nature not indicating that Man should be immoral. Yes, the universe is indifferent, but we have been created with moral values (on the lower, human level, they are imperatives; on a higher level they are devices for holding together human society and therefore preserving the species). We have a choice as to whether we live according to our inbuilt moral dictates or whether to ignore them for our personal advantage.

Personally I would like to see people behave in a moral and ethical manner because of their own personal convictions rather than because of a code that is imposed through fear.

Anyway, many thanks Malachi, for a very interesting posting.

I've started a thread for discussion of the existence of God-- I'll probably start it rolling with an overview of the classical "proofs".

Hope to see some of you there .