Tag Archives: Anselm

Evil, Pain, and Suffering

Does the Existence of Gratuitous Evil Prove That a Good God Does Not Exist?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Although most philosophers of religion have conceded that the logical problem of evil (i.e., an all-powerful, all-good God cannot logically exist if evil exists) has been effectively answered by theists, there is still a battle over the evidential problem of evil. The problem for theists, as stated in the evidential argument, is that an all-powerful, all-good God could do a lot more to reduce the gratuitous evil in the world, and since he does not, it is more rational to believe that he does not exist.

David Baggett and Jerry Walls write that for the anti-theist to make the case that “there are far more sufferings than are morally justified, he needs an argument that a good God would not create the actual world.” Can the case be made that it would have been better for God not to create the world than to create the actual world we live in? Baggett and Walls think that it is doubtful.

His case would require more than showing that there are many instances of excessive sufferings, which seems true, but that there are more and worse of those than there are countervailing or parallel goods overall. And the case of whether there are depends on the evidence for Anselmian theology. To the extent that independent reasons exist for such theology, we have more grounds for doubting [the anti-theist’s] insistence that we’re rationally constrained to give up theistic belief.

Anselmian theology holds that God is the greatest conceivable being – all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect in every way. The anti-theist must show that this particular conception of God fails to explain how the world could contain the evil it does. Baggett and Walls argue that it

is plausible to think that there would be a great number of occasions during which God would not intervene to stop people from exercising their wills in terrible ways if he went to the trouble of creating a world featuring such freedom. By parity of reasoning, the case is similar with a world of stable natural laws, assuming that God saw its creation as valuable enough to effect in the first place.

Assuming that God sees value in creating a world of meaningful freedom and stable order, it is doubtful that he would intervene often to thwart people’s evil expressions of freedom or disrupt the natural order unless the overall balance between goods and evils in the world began to tip in the direction toward evils.

But how can there be any counterbalancing goods in the face of evils such as child torture? Aren’t there simply some evils which are so gratuitous that there can be no possible ultimate justification for God allowing them? For Baggett and Walls, gratuitous suffering does not entail ultimately unjustifiable suffering.

Consequently, we accept that a good God wouldn’t allow suffering for which there aren’t morally sufficient reasons, but we reject the notion that . . . problematic gratuitous sufferings are simply to be equated with ultimately unjustifiable sufferings. The distinction between gratuitous suffering and ultimately unjustified suffering may rest on how much value we place on certain intrinsic goods.

The anti-theist must

genuinely leave open enough room for the intrinsic good of God’s allowing the actual world to “play out.” If [the anti-theist] can’t accommodate this actual world, his concession to the potential value of free will amounts to very little. He insists that, even if God went to the trouble of creating a world with free will and stable natural laws, he would not allow a world like this one, even though creating a world with traits like physical laws and meaningful free will introduces the possibility of great suffering. This is, needless to say, a highly ambitious claim, and one we find unpersuasive.

Although in principle reason does rule out some things for a good God—unconditional reprobation, a command to torture children for fun, and certain qualitative and quantitative evils—the claim that this world belongs in that category is far from obvious, to put it mildly.

God has created a world with free will and stable natural laws, and therefore great suffering may occur and does occur. The anti-theist, to persuade us that God would not create the world we live in, must somehow show that God has insufficient moral reasons for allowing the evil we see around us. It seems impossible to ever demonstrate this, given the Anselmian God, and so the evidential argument from evil fails.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this post, we looked at Edward Feser’s first 2 gradations of conceptions of God.  In this second part, we will finish looking at the last three gradations and than talk about why this is important.

Grade 3: God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated.  The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops.

None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense.  Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He  is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person.  But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc.  Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.

According to Feser, “Grade 3 is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers.”  Grade 3 captures Aquinas’s doctrine of analogous language to describe God.  “God is not personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense in which a human being is, but He can nevertheless correctly be described in these terms if they are understood analogously.”

Grade 4: God as understood by someone who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.

Here, Feser is referring to an experience that Aquinas reported late in life where he experienced God in a deeply profound way that made him feel like all his previous conceptions of God were totally inadequate.

Grade 5: God as [those in heaven] know him now, i.e., as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.

Feser adds that grades 4 and 5 are only attainable if “granted supernaturally by God,” while grade 3 is “about the best we can do with unaided reason.”

So where does this leave us?  I think I want to address two audiences.  First, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that skeptics should address when they are challenging the attributes of the Christian God.  A skeptic who is constantly challenging grade 1 or grade 2 is not dealing with the best of Christian philosophy and theology; he is ducking the fight to score easy points.

Second, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that every Christian adult should attempt to understand.  Merely stopping at grade 1 or grade 2 is an intellectual cop-out.  Grade 3 stretches human reason about as far as it can go and so it represents the apex of Christian theology.  That’s where all Christians should want to be, at the apex.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Is God a bearded old man living in the sky somewhere or is he completely unknowable?  Both of these conceptions of God are held by various religious believers.  When presenting a Christian conception of God on this blog, we have striven to follow the traditional, mainstream views of the church as elucidated by Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and similar thinkers.  If I were a skeptic of Christianity and wanted to critique the Christian conception of God, this is the conception I would address.

Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition, laments that very often skeptics do not even attempt to engage the traditional conception of God, but a much simpler conception.  To help readers understand his point, he offers five gradations of conceptions of God, from simple to more complete.

Grade 1: God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.

Feser notes that Grade 1 “represents a child’s conception of God, and perhaps that of some uneducated adults.”  This does not mean that Grade 1 is totally without merit.  “Some individuals, and certainly young children, find it difficult to understand God in anything but grade 1 terms, and such imagery can be more or less useful in giving them at least a rudimentary idea of Him.”

Grade 2: God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours.  He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space.  Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations.  He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to “go away” from it, but he nevertheless may decide to intervene in its operations from time to time.

Feser explains that “Grade 2 represents the conception of some educated religious believers, of popular apologetics, and of arguments like Paley’s ‘Design argument.'”  Grade 2 is better than Grade 1 because it eliminates the “limitations inherent in physical imagery, which cannot apply to God.”

There are are three more grades to go and we will cover them in part 2 of the post.