Monday, March 23, 2020

Is God malevolent?

Atheist philosopher Stephen Law has been hawking this argument for years:


i) There's empirical evidence for angels, demons, and ghosts. 

ii) Is good the price a malevolent deity pays for evil? Why would a malevolent deity give human beings freewill? To make them morally responsible? But why would he care if humans are morally responsible? He just likes to see people suffer for his sadistic pleasure. It isn't necessary that they deserve to suffer. In fact, being evil, he'd take greater pleasure if they suffer for no good reason. If they suffer unfairly. 

iii) Law's basic argument, from what I can tell, is that the mix of good and evil in our world is equally consistent with a benevolent God or malevolent God. 

One problem with that argument is that moral good and evil are asymmetrical. It's arguable that moral good cannot exist unless it's grounded in a benevolent God. And it's arguable that moral evil can coexist with a benevolent God. 

But if that's the case, then moral good cannot exist if God is evil. By the same token, God can't be morally evil if moral evil can't exist without moral good as the standard of comparison. 

So Law's argument can't include moral good and evil. At best, he means good and evil in terms of pain and pleasure, happiness, misery, and cruelty.

v) Suppose we try to improve on his argument. Just as certain goods are contingent on certain evils, certain evils are contingent on certain goods. For instance, much suffering is the result of losing something you care about. It maybe something you used to have, or it may be a lost opportunity. Suppose we rehabilitate his argument by saying the malevolent deity gives humans experiences of happiness to make them miserable by when he deprives them of what made them happy? Does the argument go through on those terms?

A problem with that argument is that some human lives are much happier than others. In their case, the pleasant experiences greatly outweigh the unpleasant experiences. 

vi) Suppose we grant for discussion purposes that the mix of good and evil is equally consistent with the existence of a benevolent God or a malevolent God. It doesn't follow that if we can't rule out one, that rules out both candidates. Law's conclusion is fallacious. 

vii) There's also the question of why a malevolent God would take any interest in human beings. We're so inferior to him, why would he find it enjoyable to torment us? By contrast, it's not mysterious why a benevolent God would take an interest in human beings. 

5 comments:

  1. Would "malevolent God" even make sense in the western theistic tradition? My amateur understanding is that evil is not a thing or a substance, but a lacking or "privation" of something. Since God lacks nothing, he cannot be evil in this sense of the word.

    If one rejects the privation view of evil, I speculate (again speaking as an amateur trying to learn better Thomistic concepts and testing himself out here) that also the doctrine of divine simplicity also prevents God from being evil in this sense as well, for if God is simple, He cannot have an attribute of "good" with a contradictory attribute of "evil". These would (again, if I understand things correctly) contribute metaphysical "parts" to God.

    I'll leave others better trained to correct me if I'm using terms improperly or erring, but it is useful for me to try to think this way, even though it comes off as pedantic protestant stuff.

    Maybe for less pedantic stuff, I could also say I agree with the points you raise. There is an interdepenence between some "goods" and some "evils". Any attempt to argue from evils to a non-theistic conclusion would (I think) have to fully take into account all the goods as well as the alleged evils. It won't be enough to look at a few really bad cases of evil or a few really good cases of goodness; it must be done somehow in a wholistic manner. What this manner would be is something I've tried thinking about, but have never come up with a "calculus" or weighting system that could hold any water outside of trivial cases.

    BTW even as I age, I don't quite understand what the whole argument of evil really accomplishes. The atheist making the argument, even if he convinces me of the falsity of theism, now is in a position where the grounding of good and evil is gone. So why is it a good thing that I'm now an atheist vs a bad thing that I was a formerly benighted theist? In the end, I don't see how atheism doesn't lead to some view where we are glorified meat machines. Privately, atheists have told me as such, and I think independently on my own that that would be the unpleasant conclusion if followed to the end. Sure, we can stipulate or postulate some value or meaning to our life as we shake our fist in defiance at the abyss, but the abyss still remains and doesn't care if we lived our lives in defiance of it or not.

    Sorry if being too Captain Obvious here. Nothing I'm saying is original.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nice to hear from you after such a long absence!

      Delete
    2. Yes, it's good to see you around, Eric!

      Delete
  2. Thanks. I realize I badly garbled my second paragraph. What I was trying to say there was that even if (and that's a big if) one granted that God could have attributes of good and evil, these would constitute separate "parts" (wouldn't they?), which (if one accepts DDS) would be a contradiction. So I don't see how God (who in western theism is simple) could be a "mix" of good and evil. We can't say something like "God is his goodness, which is his existence, which is is evilness....". We can't say that God's evil is his goodness when looked at from another angle. (Can we?) I think what I'm writing now makes sense, unlike possibly my original second paragraph above.

    Maybe another way of putting things is that the pure goodness of God is not something I argue to but is a consequence of my thinking the classical arguments for God's existence hold water.

    (I've been on a kick about this stuff last few months and am a sophomore in the literal sense of knowing just enough to go really, really, really wrong if I'm not careful.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. It seems to me that if most people have experienced more pain, misery, and cruelty in comparison to pleasure and happiness, there would have probably been many more suicides in the history of mankind. Since most people do not attempt suicide, perhaps there’s more pleasure than pain in the lives of most people. Moreover, countless people have fought hard to ward off death.

    ReplyDelete