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Thursday, November 22, 2018

Using heaven to balance the books

I'm going to comment on a couple of posts by atheist blogger Jonathan Pearce:



It might be objected that I'm exploiting his misfortune. However, he chose to publicize his condition and showcase his condition as a personal illustration of the argument from evil. He threw down the gauntlet. It's not disrespectful to take his argument seriously enough to offer a serious response. 


As many of you know, I’ve recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As is my wont, I would like to see how this works within the light of some theology and philosophy of religion, especially in the context of the problem of evil. The problem of evil it is, of course, how we understand the nature of suffering in terms of an all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful God.

I don't know what he means by "all-loving". The argument from evil employs three stereotypical divine attributes, two of which are omniscience/all-knowing and omnipotence, all-powerful, so, as a matter of verbal parity, a recent custom has sprung up of applying the same prefix to the third attribute (goodness or love or benevolence). 

Love is a divine attribute, which–like all God's attributes–is an essential attribute (I distinguish attributes from relations). Does "all-loving" mean God is loves everyone? God is equally loving? God's love overrides all other divine attributes? I don't think God is "all-loving" in any of those senses. God's love is characterizes by all of God's other attributes, including his other moral attributes. 

Here are the options as I see them:

God exists, but it appears that he doesn’t like me very much. This might be because I am a bad person or because I don’t believe in him, and am thus a bad person (or both). Either way, he has knowingly allowed me to develop this condition. The condition developed naturally but he didn’t see it as necessary or good to stop it in any way.

Christian believers and unbelievers alike suffer from degenerative illnesses, so that of itself says nothing about God's attitude towards them. 

This is very similar to the last one but he has knowingly planned for me to develop this condition. This differs in that it is not omission but explicitly willed action. Take that, Pearce!

Actually, I don't think there's any ultimate difference between those two options. If God knowingly allows a condition, then he had a reason to allow it. It was better to allow it than prevent it. So on either view he willed the outcome. It wasn't an unplanned event, but something he intended to happen. If he intended for it not to happen, it lay within his power to prevent it. 

In both option 3. and option 4., it appears that the development of the condition can be seen in one of three ways:

a) I deserved it and, therefore, it is some form of retribution or punishment.

That's sometimes a reason for illness. 

However, the fall causes a general liability to suffering, because God withdraws the providential protection he'd be expected to exercise towards humans in an unfallen world. 

So suffering isn't necessarily or presumptively for a specific sin. No one-to-one correspondence between individual sin and individual suffering. 

b) I deserved it inasmuch as the conditions serve to bring about a greater good. Something about me getting MS means that the universe is or will be a better place.

Not necessarily a greater good, but a second-order good that wouldn't obtain apart from that condition. 

c) I didn’t necessarily deserve it, per se, but the existence of MS in the world offers a benefit in some capacity. There is a greater good that comes about as a result of having MS in the universe as opposed to not having it. I’m just one of the unlucky ones who happens to have developed the condition. It’s nothing personal, it’s just a case that I am being used instrumentally for the greater good of the universe. In some way. Over some time period.

Demerit removes the prima facie immunity to harm–compared to an absolutely innocent victim. 

Of course, the confusion comes in with much of this if we see God as being omniscient such that he has full divine foreknowledge of all future events, irrespective of free will. If I deserved this, as in option a) above, and he designed the world with the full foreknowledge that I would be who I would be for whatever reason there might be for this, then there is little sense to be made of the whole scenario. It appears to be a case of setting a test for humanity, but has full knowledge of the results of that test. So what, I wonder, would be the point of setting such a test?

Although God knows the test results in advance, humans don't. They, not he, learn from the test (assuming we characterize it that way). 

Another issue in the case of deserving this is that there appear to be far worse people on Earth than me who don’t get any kind of ill health or just desserts in this earthly life. This appears to be a case of double standards. Now, I know this sounds like I’m being conceited because I am placing myself morally above an atheistic mass murderer who has never been caught and has lived an enjoyable and fulfilled existence, but I think am not the worst person in the world… 

So he's saying that God, if there is a God, wouldn't allow him to develop MS because he's not the worst person in the world. He's not a mass murderer. 

One question is how bad must you be not to be divinely shielded from a degenerative condition? Why would that be the threshold rather than a lower threshold. 

From a Christian standpoint, it's evil to be an atheist. It's even more evil to be an atheist who spends his time convincing other people to be atheists. 

Of course, Pearce doesn't view it that way, but remember that he's discussing this from a Christian perspective (or theistic perspective) for the sake of argument. And by that yardstick, he's a very bad person.

Moreover, you don't have to directly murder people to facilitate murder. By Christian standards, many atheists facilitate murder by supporting abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. Handing someone a loaded gun doesn't get you off the hook. 

Furthermore, facilitating murder isn't the only kind of morally disqualifying behavior. Many atheists promote social pathologies like the LGBT agenda. Sure, Pearce doesn't view it that way, but the frame of reference is God's viewpoint, if God exists. 

Notice I'm not saying that's the reason he contracted MS. I'm just responding to him on his own terms. That's how he framed the issue. 

As I have mentioned many times before, you cannot use heaven to balance the books…I hear this a lot. Too much. Whether it concern babies dying early, or any other type of suffering, pain, evil or natural evil, heaven is used as a moral justification. This is wrong, and here is for why. Theists have it tough. 

Atheists have it tougher. Pearce has an incurable degenerative disease. From his perspective, there's no hope of miraculous healing. He has no hope in this life and this life is all there is, from his perspective. Nothing to look forward to in this life or the afterlife (which he rejects). It will only get worse. It will never get better in the long run. 

They have to explain away the problem of evil: why is there so much suffering in the world given an OmniGod? Of course, it often gets back to the classic defensive tactic – skeptical theism. We cannot know the mind of God, so there you go. But there might be a reason why there is so much suffering, so toddle on there, nothing to see here.

Skeptical theism doesn't mean we have no inkling why God allows evil. We can think of many reasons why God allows evil. What's inscrutable is not the rationale for evil in general, but which, of the many possible reasons, might be the particular reason in any particular case. 

And so very often, you hear heaven being trotted out, too. Why did this baby die of some cancer or another? “Oh, it doesn’t matter, because they will get an eternity in heaven.”

Let’s analogise. I walk up to you and punch you so hard in the face that I break your jaw and cause you huge amounts of pain. “It doesn’t matter, here’s $10,000.”

What I have done here is compensated you for the moral harm done. But I have not morally justified it. It is, at least as far as normal theistic ethics goes, not a case that paying you the money makes hitting you in the face a good thing to do. This would take consequentialism (that theists detest so much), and even then, many forms of consequentialism would still not see the action of punching as good, even if you eventually thought it was okay because you had $10,000. You might think it was “worth it”, but it does not make it morally good to go around morally harming people and then paying them off afterwards...That is the heaven defence. You can’t morally justify harms done to people by compensating them with heaven, even if the stay is in an eternal luxury hotel. 

i) A doctrine of eschatological compensations doesn't require consequentialism. Consequentialism is the view that good or bad consequences are the only morally salient consideration. However a non-consequentialist ethic can incorporate outcomes as one sometimes morally salient consideration.

ii) It's true that compensating someone doesn't morally justify wronging them in the first place. There is, however, an elementary difference between wronging someone and not preventing them from being wronged or harmed. There is not always a duty to prevent evil. What if preventing a lesser evil causes a greater evil? 

But this response does nothing to the diminish the theistic threat to ordinary morality: our ordinary moral obligation to prevent at least some undeserved, involuntary human suffering...

Christian theism doesn't deny our ordinary moral obligation to prevent at least some undeserved, involuntary human suffering...

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