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December 09, 2005
Mill's Father and the Problem of Evil
Mill talks about his father's attitude to God and the problem of evil in his Autobiography
He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. The Sabean, or Manichean theory of a Good and an Evil principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him express surprise, that no one revived it in our time.
This passage struck me because I heard that very theory - or at least something like it - proposed on the Greyhound bus the other day. I ended up talking, as one sometimes does, to the woman in the seat next to me. She told me about her children and their desires to study computer graphics, I told her about the talk I was giving at the University of Calgary, she told me about her church, and I tried to persuade her that free will was no solution to the problem of evil. We eventually hashed out that she didn't believe that God is omnipotent. Rather, he's in a scarily well-balanced fight with the devil. The devil causes all the unnecessary natural suffering and evil and God's just trying to hold up our end the best he can.
This was more than a month ago and I've been mulling it over ever since. This strikes me as a much more attractive solution than any solution which implies that suggests there's really no unnecessary natural evil in the world.
Posted by logican at December 9, 2005 10:34 AM
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Comments
At one point, when I was thinking about this, I actually spent some time looking through verses in the Bible that talked about God's power. My impression was that there really aren't good scriptural grounds for holding that God is omnipotent, at least in the strict sense that gives rise to the Problem of Evil that we teach to undergrads.
(Are you considering changing the name of your blog to logicandlanguageandgod.net?)
Posted by: Greg Frost-Arnold at December 9, 2005 04:48 PM
'"What? Doesn't that mean, to speak with the vulgar: God is refuted, but the devil is not?" On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends. And, the Devil - who forces you to speak with the vulgar?'
Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil, 37.
God is dead would seem to imply rather the opposite. It seems it wasn't God after all, but the Devil. So who is holding up our end?
Posted by: Al at December 9, 2005 11:49 PM
Hi Gillian!
There are a few theistic philosophers who reject the doctrine of divine omnipotence. For instance, if I remember correctly, John Bishop says that the prevalence of evil shows that God is not omnipotent.
I wonder why you need to assume the existence of the devil for your theory. Perhaps evil in this world is natural, but God, who is not all-powerful, cannot eliminate it.
Yujin
Posted by: Yujin Nagasawa at December 12, 2005 06:17 AM
Funny, I was on my way to a conference the other week and I, too, had a talk on public transit with a religious type; a Children of God member, no less. Details: http://bob.seldo.com/archives/2005/12/flirty_fishing.html
Your own bus-bound interlocutor sounds like a modern version of a Zoroastrian.
The good and evil balance does make more sense than an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, until you realise its profound Occam-esque redundancy as an explanation.
Posted by: Bob at December 12, 2005 09:31 AM
Hey Yujin,
I like the point about evil being natural. But it leaves a question. Where did the evil come from? Especially the stuff that doesn't have a human source, like earthquakes and disease. Lots of theists think God created everything, but this solution to the problem of evil denies his omnipotence precisely to avoid having to say that he's allowing that kind of evil to exist. Perhaps he created the world at one time, and then it spiralled out of control later on. (Perhaps it evolved, in some loose sense.) But then why didn't he know what was going to happen? Does he also lack omniscience?
Posted by: Gillian Russell at December 12, 2005 09:21 PM
Bob wrote:
The good and evil balance does make more sense than an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, until you realise its profound Occam-esque redundancy as an explanation.
Occam doesn't prefer 'Omnipotent God' over 'God and Devil', because 'evil' is better explained (the claim goes) by 'God and Devil'. Occam only speaks to two explanations of equal explanatory power. In addition, when comparing the two explanatatory schemes, you have to weigh in the convolutions that theodicies employ to explain apparent evil in conjunction with 'Omnipotent God'. My own personal Occam always recoils at those convolutions.
Posted by: Craig Ewert at December 14, 2005 08:54 AM
what if god dont want to eliminate devil? if he did. i think it would be end of everything. Because when there is no devil there would be nothing good and also nothing bad. And everything would be same so it wouldnt be. you need bipolarity in the world.
Posted by: rudo at January 19, 2006 10:42 AM
So what's your problem with the free will defence?
Posted by: Timothy Scriven at April 7, 2006 04:23 AM
Here's one way to put it: the free-will defence isn't really addressed to the problem of evil as a whole. What the goodness of free will could plausibly explain is the existence of evil that is the result of intentional decisions to do evil. But lots of bad things in the world just aren't like that. There is evil done by mistake, and evil done by no-one in particular, such as babies eventually dying painfully of dehydration/starvation/disease after 1/3/15 days of suffering after earthquakes, hurricanes, crop failure etc. So one version of the argument is that if an omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omnisient god existed, such unnecessary natural evils wouldn't happen. They do happen. So no such god exists.
Posted by: Gillian Russell at April 8, 2006 11:36 PM
Plantinga apparently has the following answer to that, Gillian. (I've stubbornly refused to read it myself, so take with as many pinches of salt as me unsympathetically reconstructing a point second-hand needs). It's possible that all natural disasters, etc., are intentionally caused by demons. So the free-will defense does address the problem of evil as a whole, or rather it addresses the *logical* problem of evil as a whole; you may not find the demon's hypothesis very appealing, but if you admit it's possible, you admit that the free-will defense shows the logical compatibility of a theistic God with all the usual omni-bells and omni-whistles with the existence of seemingly unnecessary natural evil.
Posted by: Aidan at April 9, 2006 08:26 PM