Problem of Evil (again): Logic [intro]

[Magnanimity]

Thank you for the kind comments. I do think you overstate the favor universal restoration has been shown by the Greeks. As far as I know, it has always been a minority position.

At certain periods of church history, and in certain geographical locations, it has certainly been a minority position. For example, in the Latin-speaking West, it has always been a minority position from what I can tell. But, Newman’s criterion that any legitimate development of doctrine requires that the belief needed to be present in some seminal fashion early on is satisfied regarding Hell. You could do a quick Google search for Early fathers of the church that advocated open universalism or at least held theologies that were compatible with it. The list is not short. Saint Augustine even acknowledged in his own day that the “tenderhearted“ universalists were “indeed very many.”

But I don’t want to derail this thread. I just want to note that I’ve been looking into this issue for quite some time now. And the general trend holds true that for those who only read the New Testament in Latin, they tended to take the word a aternos and run with it. The Greek word is open to much more flexibility from what I gather. But we can leave this particular matter at that.

think my arguments above (starting in post# 72) are sufficient to show that God is under no obligation for men to obtain their final end in him. Doing so or not in no way increases or decreases his perfection or goodness.

Yes, as I noted in the other thread related to this one, I have encountered this response before. God is not a moral agent, we are told, and therefore moral obligations are not applicable to him. And yet, the “to bring about a greater good“ defense against the problem of evil I think necessarily fails with regard to an eternal-hell. One could ask the simple question of Jane who is in eternal hell, what is the greater good that is being served by her perpetual, neverending and inescapable suffering and torment? If the Thomist or Augustinian says “justice” is what is being served, then the concept of justice would have to become so equivocal as to mean something altogether different from what humans mean by the concept. There is no court or judge On earth that would condemn a human to a never ending prison sentence. In fact, humans would commonly hold this to be immoral, if not unconscionable. The worst we seem to do is give life sentences in prison or capital punishment, but of course these great punishments have nothing to do with eternity.

On the Augustinian-Thomistic conception of hell, the all-good God quite literally holds Jane in existence to perpetually suffer in conscious torment with no possibility of escape or parole. You may think that that does not suggest something that would impugn the “goodness” of the divine being, but I take it that most of humanity would probably disagree with you.

 

[Magnanimity]

I feel compelled to bring up an important historical note here. I participate in a lot of threads on Hell within the forums. It is an odd, almost ‘dirty little secret’ of the Catholic Church that the fathers of Vatican II, the most preeminent theologians of the 20th century, were either explicit universalists like Rahner, or they held to theology that was completely open to the salvation of all, in the end. This latter group would include Von Balthasar, De Lubac, Danielou, Kasper and even Joseph Ratzinger. And what phenomenon led to the fathers of Vatican II opening themselves up to the possibility of universalism? The Ressourcement, the return to the early fathers. This is simply data, it’s an inescapable fact of Catholic 20th century theology. But I do find it remarkably odd that many Catholics remain unaware of these facts.

But the central point of contention here is that the existence of eternal-hell most definitely seems to cut against the idea of a God who is ever willing the good of all others. One would need to define precisely what he means when he suggests that God is willing the good of Jane in her eternal damnation.

 

[Neithan]

They introduce ideas that contradict observed reality.

How does it contradict observed reality?

 

[Neithan]

But the central point of contention here is that the existence of eternal-hell most definitely seems to cut against the idea of a God who is ever willing the good of all others. One would need to define precisely what he means when he suggests that God is willing the good of Jane in her eternal damnation.

Hell is — ontologically — entirely consonant with God’s willing the good if goodness=being. God wills Jane to exist and his immutable will doesn’t change if Jane does not will the good in return.

Have you read Spe Salvi? It’s my favourite encyclical. From paragraph 45:

With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell [37].

 

[Magnanimity]

Have you read Spe Salvi ? It’s my favourite encyclical.

I am embarrassed to say that whereas I’ve read some of the works of Cardinal Ratzinger, I never read any of his encyclicals as pope.

Hell is — ontologically — entirely consonant with God’s willing the good if goodness=being. God wills Jane to exist

Oh but Wes introduced the all important caveat—the formal cause. God doesn’t merely will our act of existing, he wills us to exist according to our natures and inasmuch as we act according to our natures, therein lies the good for us. Wes wrote above (quite accurately I might add) that, according to the Thomistic picture, “He wills things to be as they are, to have their natures, and to operate according to their natures. And insofar as those natures are fulfilled they are good.”

St Augustine knows that God made us for Himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. And Aquinas affirms that beatitude is humanity’s natural final end. So, it’s not that God is willing the act of existence of Jane in eternal damnation that is the problem. It’s that Jane is forever thwarted of her orientation, forever bereft of the Good, always to bear the horrific burden of a restless heart and never to reach her final end…

St Gregory of Nyssa had it right when he said in his Great Catechism, “the only evil is estrangement from the good.”

 

[Wesrock]

FiveLinden:

So how would you, in context, explain the fact that literally uncounted numbers of non-humans have suffered painful lives and agonising deaths over hundreds of millions of years each with no hope whatsoever of any sort of countervailing eternal life and eternal bliss? I see the ‘problem of pain’ as discussed by most CAFers as ignoring the obvious insurmountable problem for Christians: the pain experienced by animals.

First of all I don’t think you have clearly made a response to the question which was about the pain experienced by virtually all non-human living things capable of pain. How could an all-loving and all-powerful God create or allow such a thing?

While a hasty treatment – perhaps why it seems to have been glossed over – I did explain how a perfectly good God could create such a thing with no contradiction to his nature. And I explained also how God’s act of creation is to be understood as good and loving.

Your response suggests in a number of ways that if God did it it must be good since, if I get the logic, God can do no other. I have of course no response to this, since there can be no response to such an argument any more than one could respond to an argument that ‘God did not will it, we just don’t know why he let’s it happen’ or ‘God only makes it look like animals feel pain, in fact they are experiencing pleasure’. We can all construct these ‘no defence’ arguments but they are not, in my view, rational. They introduce ideas that contradict observed reality.

Again, it seems you glossed over my argument. “God can do no other” was not the argument, it was the conclusion. That and that the world in any possible state of creation neither lessens nor increases his goodness. My entire post was drawing out the logic of how “badness” in the world, including things happening to people and to animals that cause pain, is not in contradiction with the Divine Goodness, which means the Problem of Evil has no force, because you can have a God which is perfectly good, omnipotent, and omniscient while also having a reality with badness in it.

And I never asserted that animals do not feel pain.

 

[Wesrock]

But the best expression of the problem comes from none other than Charles Darwin:

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”

Charles Darwin was a smart man, but that doesn’t make him either a theologian or a philosopher.

I respect an appreciate the effort you have gone to in responding to my post but feel that, in summary, you are simply saying ‘it’s a mystery’.

If that’s what you think I’m saying, then I’m afraid my posts have done no good. I claim that there is a clear line of reason, which is understandable by you and me, that shows how badness (including moral evil and pain) is not in contradiction with Divine Goodness, and furthermore how to understand, via a clear line of reason, the act of creation as an act of goodness and love.

 

[MPat]

OK. We’ll go with one of the solutions for the problem of evil as being: Animals that are eaten alive go to pet heaven.

If anyone ask, I’ll mention you as the author. Problem solved.

Feel free to do that.

It would be great if I would be thus indirectly bringing joy to others.

But, um, may I remind you that laughter, while good, and even very good, is not a replacement for an actual refutation, an argument?

To cite Plato’s “Gorgias”: “Do you laugh, Polus? Well, this is a new kind of refutation-when any one says anything, instead of refuting him to laugh at him.”…

Sure, there is no reason to ignore the laughter: try to find out, what exactly it is that you find funny. Was something unexpected? Does that indicate some problem with the argument? Or does that indicate some part where it is your expectations that are wrong?

 

[FiveLinden]

Charles Darwin was a smart man, but that doesn’t make him either a theologian or a philosopher.

True. But he was without peer (possibly still is) as a meticulous and neutral observer of how things work in the natural world. If someone is as filled with wonder at the natural world as he was and is unable to see in its working evidence of an all-knowing and all-loving God it is most certainly worth noting.

I respect an appreciate the effort you have gone to in responding to my post but feel that, in summary, you are simply saying ‘it’s a mystery’.

If that’s what you think I’m saying, then I’m afraid my posts have done no good. I claim that there is a clear line of reason, which is understandable by you and me, that shows how badness (including moral evil and pain) is not in contradiction with Divine Goodness, and furthermore how to understand, via a clear line of reason, the act of creation as an act of goodness and love

You could help me understand the clear line of reasoning if you explain Darwin’s problem: in what way can the actions of a parasitic wasp on a caterpillar flow from an act of ‘goodness’ or of ‘love’ for the creature who will be eaten from the inside out and unable to fulfil the ‘natural role’ you believe has been assigned to it?

I ask this not to argue but out of genuine interest in how you could come to the conclusion that the creation of such creatures is an act of love, or that it is in some way ‘good’ that they have these experiences as a result of original sin, for which they are not responsible.

 

[FiveLinden]

How does it contradict observed reality?

The full paragraph you are responding to was:

“Your response suggests in a number of ways that if God did it it must be good since, if I get the logic, God can do no other. I have of course no response to this, since there can be no response to such an argument any more than one could respond to an argument that ‘God did not will it, we just don’t know why he let’s it happen’ or ‘God only makes it look like animals feel pain, in fact they are experiencing pleasure’. We can all construct these ‘no defence’ arguments but they are not, in my view, rational. They introduce ideas that contradict observed reality”.

These examples of ‘explanations’ for the experience of pain and suffering in non-humans contradict observed reality because we can all see that such pain and suffering happens; we can point to the Catholic belief that God has made his work in creation known in scripture and tradition as part of observed reality - this contradicts the 'mystery explanation. And the@Wesrock explanation that (in my summary) all that God does is good contracts observed reality in that we see bad things happening to non-human animals all the time. Therefore if God did it, observed reality is that God did something that is not good. This logic is of course rejected on a priori grounds by Catholics who are forced to say either that God is not responsible for the observed reality, that our observations are wrong, or that for reasons we cannot comprehend, our understanding is wrong. As a non-believer I refer to rely on observed reality being real.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

OK. We’ll go with one of the solutions for the problem of evil as being: Animals that are eaten alive go to pet heaven.

If anyone ask, I’ll mention you as the author. Problem solved.

Feel free to do that.

It would be great if I would be thus indirectly bringing joy to others.

But, um, may I remind you that laughter, while good, and even very good, is not a replacement for an actual refutation, an argument?

Who’s laughing? You made a serious suggestion. I’ll accept it as your proposal.

And I’ve nothing to refute. I’m an atheist. The question of evil is not a problem for me. I don’t believe the problem exists because I don’t think God exists. I knew exactly why there is pain and suffering in the world. But when I ask a general question of Catholics how they themselves approach the problem it’s not to argue against their views (unless it’s to point out any fallacies in their argument). It’s simply to find out what their answers are.

You’ve given me three. That I personally think they’re nonsensical is neither here nor there.

 

[Freddy]

You could help me understand the clear line of reasoning if you explain Darwin’s problem: in what way can the actions of a parasitic wasp on a caterpillar flow from an act of ‘goodness’ or of ‘love’ for the creature who will be eaten from the inside out and unable to fulfil the ‘natural role’ you believe has been assigned to it?

And to follow the line of reasoning that some have put forward, that all the pain and suffering isn’t God’s doing but the fault of the fall, how does that explain creatures moving from one form of existence to another? What did parasitic wasps live on ‘before the fall’? Did lions chew the cud along with cows and then suddenly decide that meat was preferable?

This proposal I’m sure worked perfectly well when it was originally put forward as a theological concept. Nobody knew any better. But now we do, from a practical viewpoint, it makes no sense at all. How can it be treated seriously?

 

[FiveLinden]

And to follow the line of reasoning that some have put forward, that all the pain and suffering isn’t God’s doing but the fault of the fall, how does that explain creatures moving from one form of existence to another? What did parasitic wasps live on ‘before the fall’? Did lions chew the cud along with cows and then suddenly decide that meat was preferable?

This proposal I’m sure worked perfectly well when it was originally put forward as a theological concept. Nobody knew any better. But now we do, from a practical viewpoint, it makes no sense at all. How can it be treated seriously?

Well it’s ok if you are a young earth creationist. But Catholics generally reject that. This means they need to answer that question: what did all those trillions of trillions of creatures who died in agony before the fall, some actually preserved in that state as fossils, do to deserve that fate?

 

[Neithan]

The objections I’m seeing re:animal suffering are not arguing the logic anymore but appealing to emotion, authority, and — ironically — the divine fallacy.

 

[FiveLinden]

The objections I’m seeing re:animal suffering are not arguing the logic anymore but appealing to emotion, authority, and — ironically — the divine fallacy .

Don’t see this. We are not arguing about the nature of God, because we don’t believe in god(s). We are saying that Christians say that God is all-knowing and all-loving. Yet animals, in their trillions, experience pain. This is attributed to the fall, from which humans are redeemed and able to have eternal life and bliss. Yet animals, not responsible for the fall, have nothing to ‘compensate them’ for the pain. In Christian belie God knows this, could have done something about it, but did not.

This does not disprove the existence of God. It simply points to a big problem for those who believe in God as so described.

I’ve always found it interesting that whole libraries have been written on ‘the problem of pain’ by Christians and they just about invariably ignore the vast majority of pain experiences, which are those of animals.

 

[Neithan]

We are not arguing about the nature of God, because we don’t believe in god(s)

God and god(s) are not the same thing, philosophically. It’s an all-too-common equivocation but makes all the difference to logical arguments. In any case, I’m just looking for objections or counter-objections to the logic of the PoE here. You might argue that any sentient pain and a perfectly-loving God are contradictory and that a perfectly loving God would always, in all possible worlds, eliminate any sentient pain.

You’ve read @Wesrock’s objection from scholastic reasoning that demonstrates a logical consistency with pain and a perfectly loving God, but in response you’re appealing to either an emotional feeling that it just doesn’t feel right, Charles Darwin, or that you just don’t understand it, so it can’t be true.

 

[Freddy]

FiveLinden:

We are not arguing about the nature of God, because we don’t believe in god(s)

God and god(s) are not the same thing, philosophically. It’s an all-too-common equivocation but makes all the difference to logical arguments. In any case, I’m just looking for objections or counter-objections with the logic of the PoE here.

Replace evil with ‘uneccessary suffering’ and the logic is impecable.

 

[Neithan]

Replace evil with ‘uneccessary suffering’ and the logic is impecable.

There’s still the hidden premise that @MPat pointed out, that God would have eliminated unnecessary suffering.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Replace evil with ‘uneccessary suffering’ and the logic is impecable.

There’s still the hidden premise that @MPat pointed out, that God would have eliminated unnecessary suffering.

It’s not hidden. It’s your premise no. 4. So your conclusion would therefore be correct.

 

[Neithan]

It is hidden, since God’s ability to eliminate unnecessary suffering is not the same (semantically equivalent) as actually eliminating it. Neither is a desire to eliminate it the same with actually eliminating it. The atheist blogger claims (later in the essay) that the only way to make sense of that is by claiming a limited god. I disagree, but, as it stands, there is a hidden premise in his logic that requires inference.