Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 8/30/2010

Question
QUESTION: Dear expert,


I heard about a theodicy stating that

"evil (here i only consider natural evil -distaters, sickness, malformation-, not that from human) is necessary for us to strengthen our character in a powerful way. So that's compatible with God perfect goodness.

Indeed a person who has faced many natural calamity is emotionnal stronger and can overcome future hardship more easily than a person who nothing bad happened to."


Is this theodicy correct?
Can't we state that since God is Omnipotent, he could have found a way to greatly improve our character without so much suffering?



         Sincerely

ANSWER: I can't remember if I've linked this one yet, but I do an overview of the Problem of Evil here[1] (especially of interest is what I call the “Life's a Test” and “Mysterious Ways” theodicies). I think I have more things to say about it though so I will attempt to go into greater detail.


Evidential Problem of Evil:
This theodicy immediately fails what is called the Evidential Problem of Evil, in which one would not infer from the existence of what appears to be evil the existence of an especially powerful benevolent Being. The Evidential Problem of Evil is a problem for any argument for God which has established his nature as Creator but not established His powers or His benevolence (usually this is characteristic of teleological or cosmological arguments for God). Logical positivists[2] (I'm not sure I would count myself amongst them) would go as far to say that the Evidential Problem of Evil applies to any argument for God, that is the evidence in the world outweighs any metaphysical construct.

The Evidential argument says that at the very least, we would not infer from natural disaster that any intelligent force that could be secretly behind them would successfully improve moral character in the process. If someone told you that they beat, abused, and tortured their children so that the children would be raised with more moral character, than you would do whatever it was in your power to stop this man. Your complaint against this man would not just be that you don't think he is manipulative enough to accomplish his goals in shaping the personality of his children, but that his goals are contrary to yours and come at too great a price. You would not hold him up to be a role model, much less tolerate his way of life. One point that I had failed to make last time I wrote on this is that someone who claims that “suffering is the way to build character” is someone who has a rather disturbing way to think about the world that I wholly reject (take for instance, the theology of Mother Teresa[3][4][5]).

Even if you knew God was a being who worked in mysterious ways for the better good, you would still be lost. If an intelligent earthquake destroys houses, should we learn from the event not to build houses? Or that building houses builds good character and we should build them when we don't need them? Should we ask what building material is God's favorite? Should we live in Churches? Live in boats? If God is so incomprehensible, there is no good way to make use of the information that there is a God.


Logical Problem of Evil:
Logical Problem of Evil, states that it is impossible for evil to coexist with God so it counters the conclusion of arguments claiming to show the existence of an all-powerful benevolent God (which implies there must be an argument with). This is a harder problem to convince a believer of, but I still do not think the “soul-making” theodicy does not save God from the Logical Problem of Evil. While there is at least one study I know of that contends that hardship and piety are correlated[6][7], there has to be something more for humanity to aspire to than to have their advances in civilization undone and their sanity tested. You identified the most important point: “since God is Omnipotent, he could have found a way to greatly improve our character without so much suffering”. The problem with the soul-making theodicy is that there are more effective and less cruel ways to influence someone's character and if God is perfect we would expect him to use those ways. Often the response is that these other ways of influencing people violate their “Free Will”(whatever that means, see “Free Will & Original Sin” section[1]), but you will see below that I take pains to show from my argument that there is not violation of free will (whatever that means).

If we live in a world in which God has sanctioned our free will (WTM) than it follows that our interactions in this world cannot impinge on the free will of others (WTM). People can influence each other, as a friend, as a psychologist, as a teacher, or as a priest and people can change as a result without having their free will harmed (WTM). If you are not sure how easily people can be manipulated, go see a magician, mentalist, or hypnotist show. Moreover, we know people can be exposed to a variety of life situations and not have their free will violated (WTM), especially because this is the chief manner in which the “soul-making” theodicy claims that souls are changed.

All God needs to do is the same thing, but better. If God is perfect we can expect him to be the best emotional manipulator, the best rational speech-maker, and the best minder reader (a perfect mind-reader actually, since God is omniscient[8]). He also has complete control over every event in our lives, since he is all-powerful. Given the circumstances, we should expect God to either to have a 100% success rate, or an overwhelming proportion of people going to heaven (say, only 1 out of a million go to Hell). It is pretty clear that God is not a perfect soul-crafter by the definitions that religion offers of what a pious soul looks like (consistent ethical action, belief in God, participation in certain rituals, etc) or how to advance the soul (participate in their religion). If God is a perfect soul-crafter, than the religion (that people are using the notion of God to support) suddenly becomes superfluous and you can feel free to live without God knowing that if there is one he will take your soul to heaven anyway.

Giving God more freedom to manipulate us still, there is no reason to have humans share a common reality and for one person's choices to affect what happens to another (which would presumably produce a suboptimal result). After all, God is simply building and testing our character and by traditional Christian morality, our intentions are as good as our actions[9][10][11]. The only mind that needs to exist is one's own mind and this implies Solipsism[12]. While if we realize that we live in a Solipsist universe than we know our actions don't matter, breaking the connection between our actions and our intentions and making the universe inadequate to build one's soul. However we could never know whether or not the rest of the universe is imaginary so whether God decides to make the universe a Solipsist one is independent of what humans decide about it. Now if you argue that God implies Solipsism to a believer than they may well respond “God clearly managed to save my soul and you just admitted that no one else's soul necessarily counts”. In that case just say that if they hope to convince anyone else that they ought to either argue that there is a good reason for God to make a common reality for everyone and/or that there is reason to suspect that even people who explicitly reject God are pious enough to make it to heaven.


In the meantime, how could people fault you for your own take at soul-crafting: Spending your days attempting to be the best person you can, and having good reasons to disagree with their ancient definition of how such a person necessarily has to behave.


Links:
[1] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/12/Best-best.htm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3tUuA7WBRE
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKkcDgeYBdk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pei8lSiv6s
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Missionary-Position-Mother-Teresa-Practice/dp/185984054X/r
[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/dec/08/religion-society-greg
[7] http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf
[8] http://www.whatthebibleteaches.com/wbt_070.htm
[9] http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%205:27-28
[10] http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John%203:15
[11] http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James%204:2
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you very much.

Others ideas come to my mind on this subject:


Iit's easy to notice that those calamities aren't right distributed:
for instance some people lived in horrible pain from their birth, whereas others had almost "hardshipless" lifes.

If one follow the reasoning of this theodicy, the latter kind of people don't deserve to be emotionnally strenghened as well?


If God lets a baby be born with some malformation, which would make its life difficult,
doctors would, when they can, fix that problem; as a result the baby would grow up as if nothing happenned, without learning anything from that malformation,

BUT doctors went against God's will because, through this malformation, God wanted the baby to get emotionnally stronger. This theodicy has some moral issues for us.



What do you think about this?
         

         Sincerely

ANSWER: "It's easy to notice that those calamities aren't right distributed:
for instance some people lived in horrible pain from their birth, whereas others had almost 'hardshipless' lifes."

Typically the believer response to this is that God know what sort of challenges are most beneficial to each person, so if God treated everyone the same that would be ignoring how special everyone is. So we have to make a modification to make this argument. We wouldn't expect hardship to be evenly distributed, but instead allocated according to some complex equation of human morality and psychological metrics. But even if this “complex equation” is unknown to us we should still expect that it would be moderately correlated with a list of things sociological metrics indicative or related to moral temperament (participation in religion, religious affiliation, criminal record, time spent volunteering, donations to charity, and/or various psychological diagnostics). We don't find any correlation between these metrics and random natural disasters (meteorological hazards, geological hazards, prevalence of disease, and/or anything which someone would pray to prevent) without confounding variables.

If there isn't a correlation, that it could only be that God's notion of morality is incomprehensible to our values or God is deliberately hiding.  Believers sometimes refuse to accept statistical or sociological or experimental examinations of God. It may be because there is a related argument against God that goes “Why doesn't God show himself?” - anyone who believes that God has a good reason not to show himself probably also believes that God deliberately avoids any study that might show his existence. To an atheist of course, claiming that God exists, but hides when you look for him, is like claiming you have an invisible dragon in your garage[13]. The are also consequences for God hiding his usual intervention. If it was a sufficiently large study, for example, God would have to neglect those people to avoid being detected by science, even if those people were not aware that they were being observed and even if the time that data would be collected is much later (a feat some say would be impossible for God, if he is not aware of the future because he cannot know what people will do with their free will, WTM). It should go without saying that if it were just a simple matter of coming up with the right experimental method, one would expect the research to be done by now because one could win James Randi's million-dollar-challenge[14], the Templeton prize[15], the Pulitzer prize, and one or more Nobel prizes (which total over $5 million dollars for two Nobels).


“BUT doctors went against God's will because, through this malformation, God wanted the baby to get emotionnally stronger. This theodicy has some moral issues for us.”

I wish I could say that there were no individuals who believed that it was a defiance of God's will to cure people of natural ailments, but there are some Christian Scientists who believe exactly this.

The more standard believer response to this[16], however, is that medical professionals were actually executing the will of God to help the patient. Whether or not the medical professional were religious, God gets the credit for the good deed, and if they had failed to do what was in their power (what God put in their power) than this falls into the category of human evil, not natural evil (the standard theodicy for human evil, again involves “free will”[1], WTM).

In the meantime it is a worthwhile question to ask why God gets the credit for every good thing that people do and not the bad things that people do. Or another, if people are only capable of evil why God acting through people doesn't represent a violation of free will (WTM). Finally, it is not clear why God is capable of making good results come from bad natural events but not bad human actions – again, there is no reason why one human should be able to ruin God's plan for another, especially if we include Solipsism[12].


Links
[13] http://www.users.qwest.net/~jcosta3/article_dragon.htm
[14] http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
[15] http://www.templetonprize.org/abouttheprize.html (I don't endorse the conclusions that the Templeton makes when endorsing research as suitable for apologetics)
[16] http://www.promiseofgod.com/flood/ (I apologize for the obnoxious web design, but apparently this is the most popular version of the story on the web)


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you again.

I saw in your oldest answer you reviewed all theodicies.

That led le to ponder on a certain kind of "test" theodicies.
consider the one where God lets natural evil occur because they allow Him to know if you can remain a believer even in extreme situations-


What i just need to know is:

Instead of using disasters,
can't a powerful God use his mind-reading (and deepest-intentions reading) powers to deduce whether a believer's faith would die out, or not, if some calamities happenned?

I anticipate some theists response as follows:

         " such power could just "display" to God the faith-level a believer has now, He cannot predict how the tested believer's faith will be if a calamity occurs, OTHERWISE GOD WOULD VIOLATE OUR FREE-WILL,
BECAUSE such calamities may CHANGE our perspectives in UNPREDICTABLE manner (in those conditions, even a weak believer could become more faithful; and a great believer could reject God or would become hypocrite)."

But such response is right? IS what I propose is something totally imcompatible with free will?



         Sincerely  

Answer
If I am not mistaken, this is the maximum number of follow-ups that AllExperts allows for one question. If you would like to continue follow-ups on this question, feel free to contact me for a more direct conversation at jsePrometheus@gmail.com (or you don't have to pose it as a follow-up question if you just have something to talk about.) If you have a new question that you wanted me to answer after this though, I would prefer it as an AllExperts question so my answer would be public and I could refer back to it when needed.

Free Will and Omniscience:
You are correct in anticipating what the likely response to the notion of God predicting the future would be an defensive argument from “free will” (whatever that means). Whether or not it is compatible with free will (WTM), if a believer wants to define a God that is not capable of seeing the future actions of people, than I say they are free to do that. To me this is a God who is not only not omniscient, but not even "omni-competent", that is, God is probably not better than the best humans if he can't predict people's actions. So the believer loses and wins to the Problem of Evil by going this route. He (or she) loses in the sense that they admit God is not omniscient and omnipotent as one would otherwise suppose, but the win in the sense that the likelihood of is not really affected. Whether or not such a being is consistent enough with their traditional religion[17] or worth worshiping is ultimately up to the believer, though.


Proposition 'P':
Consider the statement I will call proposition P for abbreviation: “Prediction of action is not enough to justify punishing/rewarding someone and that the consequences of someone's action must be real for someone to be judged upon them.”

If a believer can show that P is true they can have God have the power to predict people's actions and still get out of the scenario of God judging souls by predicting their actions. Although I had previously quoted some verses that gave a motivation for why Christians should not hold P to be true[], if one were able to establish P then it would fix a number of other objections I've raised against Christianity. It would explain why we can be certain we don't live in a Solipsist universe, because we would need to be able to affect something of value (Remember, though, I also think God doesn't need to make a Solipsist universe to accomplish his goals of crafting souls or predicting souls). Similarly I have previously wondered why a torturous sacrifice of Jesus is necessary to forgive the sins of the saved, when it all works with some sort of strange divine magic within the control of a God who gets to make the rules.

I suspect the main way one would argue for P by saying the punishment that comes with a judgment is not just retributive[18] or deterrent[19], but also vengeful[20]. If so, this could also be an attempt to solve the Problem of Hell[21], related to the Problem of Evil. The idea is that if sinners burn in Hell it is not a bad thing, but good because it is appropriate to their destructive deeds. Similarly it would be morally reprehensible for Jesus to cleanse Christians of their sins (permitting them to enter Heaven, where it apparently would have been a problem) without paying a horrific and bloody, non-symbolic price. This may also be the idea behind the old Jewish, Islamic, and pagan traditions of animal sacrifice to please a deity. This notion of vengeance, gratuitous cruelty, and vicarious redemption[22][23][24] however, is something that I find so morally unacceptable that I would not participate in any religion that advocated it and I would not recommend it to any religion. To me, therefore, it represents a highly unsatisfactory, although historical, answer to the Problem of Evil.


The Problem of Action:
There is a rephrasing of the Problem of Evil that I will call the “Problem of Action” that might shed some insight into P. The Problem of Action is “God can do everything that should be done, there should be nothing left for us to do, what do we do and why did God make us?” You can see that the main ways to think of it follow from the Problem of Evil: A) Everything is perfect and no action can be preferred to another or B) God left some things undone and suboptimal because it would violate our free will (WTM) otherwise. Either way, the existence of the Earth in its present state seems arbitrary (Why did God make Earth like this, as opposed to that?) and superfluous (Why was the Earth made).  Phrased more commonly though, the question is a bit more familiar: “Why are we here?” This is a question that religions purports to answer, but in my experience religions not only fail to answer  but fail to answer so dramatically as to make the notion of “religious morality” an incoherent one. The problem is that answering “Why are we here?” is something religion is eager to tell you what to do, but not why this situation under God's control is the way it is (Problem of Evil) or why you should do it (Dialogue of Euthyphro[25][26]). I don't typically consider theology very deep because the more rocks you turn over the fewer answers you find.


More Links:
[17]The Bible has a long tradition of claiming to make and claiming to fulfill prophecies. If we assume they actually happened, then many of these it can be argued would presumably have been fulfilled through divine force rather than prediction (for instance, Jesus resurrecting from the dead could be accomplished independent of whether other permitted him to be), while others prophecies involve predicting the actions of others (for instance, where Jesus predicts Judas' betrayal (Matthew 26:21, Luke 22:21, John 13:21) or Peter's denials of Christ (Matthew 26:34, Mark 14:30, John 13:38),) and still others involve explicit tests that are acted out as though the outcome was not know (for instance Abraham's attempted human sacrifice or Job's endurance through torture).
[18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice
[19] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_%28legal%29
[20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge
[21] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_hell
[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat#History
[23] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7UImBPq4WI
[24] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4dANEsd5so
[25] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma
[26] http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1642