Aug 27, 2007 - himself as God's barrister, giving a story that exonerates his client in a way that is more than merely logically consistent, but rather may well be ...
Ars Disputandi Volume 7 (2007) : 1566–5399
Daniel J. Hill ,
The Problem of Evil By Peter van Inwagen The Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St Andrews in 2003; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; xiv + 183, hb. £ 18.99; -13: 978–0–19–924560–4.
[1]
A new book by Peter van Inwagen is always to be welcomed since, quite apart from the content, van Inwagen must be the clearest writer and best stylist in analytic philosophy, at least since the passing of W. V. Quine. In style this new book does not disappoint: ‘Now, Aunt Harriet, don’t go jumping to conclusions’ is vintage van Inwagen, as is this telling paragraph from p. 62: No one can tell me that Mill wasn’t enjoying himself when he wrote the words “exhibits to excess the revolting spectacle of a jesuitical defense of moral enormities”. (Perhaps he was enjoying himself so much that his attention was diverted from the question, “What would it be to exhibit a revolting spectacle in moderation?”). [2]
In content the book is, as its subtitle indicates, the edited text of his Gifford Lectures from 2003. Those lectures were themselves based on the Wilde Lectures from 2000, which were in turn an expanded version of the F.D. Maurice Lectures at the University of London from 1999. Other lectures that are related to the book’s material that van Inwagen gave are the Stewart Lectures at Princeton from 2002. So it may well be that many readers of this review (like the reviewer) first came across the content in spoken form. The chapters of the book wear their origin on their sleeve, frequently using phrases such as ‘in the previous lecture’. [3] In the first chapter, van Inwagen rejects as not useful the distinction between the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil, focussing instead on the distinction between the global argument and the local argument. [4] In the second chapter, van Inwagen lays out a fairly standard conception of God by describing the individual attributes that he is assuming that God possesses, though it seems to me that some of the details of his treatment are worth discussion. [5] For example, van Inwagen defines ‘omniscience’ thus: ‘an omnipotent being is also omniscient if it knows everything it is able to know’ (p. 82). It is not explained why the definition is framed only for an omnipotent being, but the definition will not suffice in full generality (‘a being is omniscient if it knows everything it is able to know’), as it would then be subject to a version of Plantinga’s famous McEar objection: it is metaphysically possible that there be a being, McStupid, that is able to know only that it is McStupid, which fact it does know. c August 27, 2007, Ars Disputandi. If you would like to cite this article, please do so as follows:
Daniel J. Hill, ‘Review of The Problem of Evil,’ Ars Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi.org] 7 (2007), paragraph number.
Daniel J. Hill: Review of The Problem of Evil
McStupid would thus wrongly qualify as omniscient under the generalized definition. It may be to avoid this objection that van Inwagen defines ‘omniscience’ only for omnipotent beings, but does this move in fact escape the objection? If ‘omnipotence’ is defined to allow it to be the case that an omnipotent being may suffer from necessary limitations (such as God’s supposed powerlessness to do wrong or to forget or to limit himself) then it would appear prima facie metaphysically possible that McStupid be omnipotent while yet remaining necessarily ignorant of everything bar the fact that he was McStupid. (Of course in this case McStupid would not be able to use his omnipotence very profitably.) [6] Van Inwagen rejects the doctrine that God foreknows future free actions. While he seems to think that this is only a minor adjustment to the concept of God, it seems to me to have instead far-reaching consequences: not only, on van Inwagen’s definition, does God not know what his free creatures will freely do in the future, but also, since all of his own actions are free (apart from actions that he has promised to do or must do from his nature) then, assuming that God is in time (p. 81), he cannot know, for the most part, what he will freely do in the future. But then his knowledge of the future is a great deal less than is commonly assumed by theists. Further, since God cannot risk believing something that might turn out to be false he will have far fewer beliefs about the future than is commonly assumed by theists, and there will be humans that have true beliefs about the future that God lacks. [7] Finally on the subject of the concept of God, van Inwagen says on p. 34 that he draws the line between those that use the word ‘God’ properly and those that don’t according to whether the person using the word is ‘loyal to the idea of God as the greatest possible being’. But, again, this may need refinement as there are some theists (e.g. Brian Leftow) that accept the list of divine properties that van Inwagen details (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc.) and yet do not accept that God is the greatest possible being, because they do not accept that ‘greatest possible being’ makes any sense. They accept that ‘greatest possible person’ (for example) makes sense (and that God fulfils this description), but they do not accept that ‘greatest possible being’ makes sense, for they do not accept that there is a scale of greatness for beings per se, i.e. they do not think the expression ‘is a greater being than’ makes any sense. Still, it should be remembered that this chapter consists of preparatory material laying the ground for the free-will defence and it would be unreasonable to expect van Inwagen to solve all the problems of philosophical theology in it, nor are his formulations idiosyncratic. [8] The third chapter contains an interesting discussion of what it is for a philosophical argument to be a failure and what it is for it to be a success: van Inwagen’s criterion is the test of winning ‘assent from the members of a neutral audience who have listened to an ideal presentation of the argument’ (p. xi). He thinks that all philosophical arguments for substantive conclusions are failures when it comes to this test. [9] The heart of the book consists in van Inwagen’s response to the global argument from evil, which occupies the fourth and fifth chapters. This response takes the form of a defence rather than a theodicy, but van Inwagen’s defence Ars Disputandi 7 (2007), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org
Daniel J. Hill: Review of The Problem of Evil
is stronger than Plantinga’s. Van Inwagen does not intend merely to argue that the proposition that God exists is logically consistent with the proposition that evil exists, as Plantinga does in God, Freedom and Evil. Rather, van Inwagen sees himself as God’s barrister, giving a story that exonerates his client in a way that is more than merely logically consistent, but rather may well be true given that God exists and given the rest of what we know. But van Inwagen does not assert that his story is actually true (though he doesn’t disbelieve any of it), merely true for all we know. The story is, in essence, that humans have abused their free will and rebelled against God. In consequence, God has withdrawn from them his protection from suffering (which they had enjoyed before the fall) as he wishes them freely to choose to be reconciled to him and it is essential that they know how bad things really are for them in order that they may freely choose this. Further, the great good of free will outweighs the badness of the evil, for all we know, and, of course, it is impossible for God to cause them freely to love him. (Van Inwagen does include a brief defence of this, the libertarian analysis of ‘free will’, but it is just a summary of what he has written elsewhere.) [10] Van Inwagen’s version of the free-will defence, unlike Plantinga’s, makes no use of the idea that God has ‘middle knowledge’ that is, that God knows what free agents would have freely done in non-actual circumstances, and the idea that God has foreknowledge of future free actions. Despite his rejection of middle knowledge (p. 80), he does say at one point: ‘free will is a sufficiently great good that its existence outweighs the evils that have resulted and will result from its abuse; and God foresaw this’ (p. 72). It appears at first that what is meant here is that God knew before endowing humankind with free will precisely how much evil would in fact result from its abuse, which would involve middle knowledge. In fact, van Inwagen later (p. 90) clarifies what he means: [T]he omniscient God knew that, however much evil might result from the elected separation from himself, and consequent self-ruin, of his creatures—if it should occur—the gift of free will would be, so to speak, worth it. For the existence of an eternity of love depends on this gift, and that eternity outweighs the horrors of the very long, but in the most literal sense, temporary period of divine–human estrangement.
But how does God foreknow that the period of divine–human estrangement will be temporary, since reconciliation depends on free actions, and free actions cannot be foreknown? It was possible that every sinful human that ever existed would freely reject God’s rescue plan. In this case, God’s plan would have failed. Further, van Inwagen admits (p. 89) that it is possible that there will be beings that will suffer eternally in Hell: how does God know that there will be sufficiently few of them that the gamble of the gift of freedom will be worth it? [11] Van Inwagen then moves on, in the sixth chapter, to consideration of local terrible evils or ‘horrors’. The defence here is that some horrors are necessary to convince humans freely to accept God’s plan of reconciliation, and there is no minimum number of horrors necessary for the achievement of this purpose. The stark consequence of this is that ‘[m]any of the horrible things that happen in the Ars Disputandi 7 (2007), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org
Daniel J. Hill: Review of The Problem of Evil
course of human life have no explanation whatever; they just happen, and, apart from considerations of efficient causation, there is no answer to the question why they happen; they are not part of God’s plan for the world; they have no meaning’ (p. 11). God had to draw a more or less arbitrary line, just as those setting prison sentences have to draw a more or less arbitrary line (e.g. 10 years for rape), such that slightly fewer horrors would have made no difference to the effectiveness of God’s plan for reconciliation, just as slightly fewer days than 10 years would make no difference to the deterrence aspect of the prison sentence for rape. Here van Inwagen presumes the falsity of epistemicist views of vagueness, according to which there is a sharp dividing line between what is and what isn’t effective for achieving God’s purpose of reconciliation and the fact that we are ignorant of that line doesn’t give us any reason to suppose that God is. (Van Inwagen does point out that if someone is convinced by epistemicism that person has a ‘simple reply to the local argument from evil’ (p. 107), viz. that the number of horrors is exactly the minimum necessary to achieve God’s purpose; van Inwagen regards this reply as extremely implausible, but no more so than epistemicism itself.) [12] It should also be noted that van Inwagen in this chapter diverges from perhaps the commoner form of defence, which argues that for all we know every horror does serve the purpose of bringing about a greater good (though van Inwagen doesn’t deny this). [13] In the seventh and penultimate chapter van Inwagen seeks to give a separate defence for the suffering of non-human animals (‘beasts’). Here he rejects free-will defences since (i) beasts suffered before humans were around and (ii) he does not accept the angelic-fall defence since, for one reason, he does not think God has a plan of atonement for fallen angels comparable to the plan he has for fallen humans. (But why, then, did God endow the angels with free will to rebel against him if he had no back-up plan of atonement for them? Was it a gamble that paid off for the good angels but not for the bad?) Van Inwagen’s defence is instead that ‘higher-level sentient creatures’ (e.g. humans) could not have evolved without the suffering of beasts, unless the world were ‘massively irregular’ (i.e. unless God were continuously intervening to prevent beasts from suffering), and that being massively irregular is ‘a defect at least as great as the defect of containing patterns of suffering morally equivalent to those found in the actual world’, whereas the good that depends on the existence of ‘higher-level sentient creatures’ is ‘of sufficient magnitude that it outweighs the patterns of suffering found in the actual world’ (p. 114). Again, van Inwagen is not asserting that this is actually true, merely that it may well be true for all anyone knows, given that God exists. [14] The last chapter contains van Inwagen’s discussion of ‘the problem of divine hiddenness’, which he convincingly distinguishes from the mainstream problems of evil. His response to this is that, were God to make himself known in the way that atheists demand, this would frustrate his plan for atonement, since it would produce only a ‘sullen compliance’. This defence is based, then, on certain empirical propositions of human psychology, for which van Inwagen argues rather plausibly, but again since it is not possible even for God to be certain Ars Disputandi 7 (2007), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org
Daniel J. Hill: Review of The Problem of Evil
that this would be the free response of his creatures, the decision not to reveal himself is for God a form of risk-management. [15] In sum, the book is an extremely well-written version of the free-will defence against the arguments from evil, with much interesting ancillary material thrown in. The lectures were originally delivered to a mixed audience rather than to an audience of specialists in the philosophy of religion, and this, combined with van Inwagen’s attention to detail and care to make sure that everything is stated in precisely the right way, may make the text tedious in parts to those already familiar with most of the standard moves in the debate here. In addition, those already familiar with van Inwagen’s essays on the subject are unlikely to find much new or surprising here. The book is especially recommended, accordingly, to those approaching the issue for the first time, or, indeed, to members of van Inwagen’s ‘audience of ideal agnostics’—if there are any such. [16] The text is well-produced by OUP, though there are some typographical errors.
Ars Disputandi 7 (2007), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org
