Intro Music: sacred music by Vivaldi.
The music is by Vivaldi. It is sacred music, written to celebrate the central paradox of Christianity, the claim that an all-loving creator shares in the awful suffering of the world he has created.
I want to present today and tomorrow one aspect of this paradox: that such a caring God should have created a world of suffering in the first place.
Introduction: there are several alleged proofs of the existence of God
There are some people who think the existence of God can be proved. And there are some people who think it cannot. There are celebrated so-called 'proofs' of the existence of God.
The ontological argument:
God is by definition a being greater than which cannot be conceived.
An existent God would be greater than a non-existent God.
So the idea of a non-existent God is a self contradiction
So God must exist.
Or the teleological argument: the world shows unambiguous signs of design
If there is design there must have been a Designer.
Or the argument that there couldn't possibly be a Universe unless Something beyond the Universe brought it into being.
Or the argument that the Universe wouldn't stay in existence unless something beyond it was sustaining it in existence.
Or the idea that we wouldn't have the idea of God unless there really were a God.
Or that from time to time things happen that could not possibly happen unless there was a Being outside nature breaking, or suspending, nature's laws.
There is also the view that it is quite inappropriate to consider proofs of God's existence. He or she exists, some people say, but his or her existence can't be proved.
whether we believe that He does is not something we can be forced to by logic.
The 'problem of evil' can be claimed as a proof that God's existence can be disproved.
This week we are to consider none of these views, but one which is highlighted less often: the view that God's existence can be disproved.
It is the argument that when we look about us, we see a world of a certain character. And this character is such that there cannot be a God.
'The problem of evil': God could not have created a world in which bad things happen
It is a world in which there is a good deal of suffering, a good number of awful things. How can a God have created a world like this? S/he couldn't, but it is, therefore there isn't.
Premise 1: God is perfectly good
One of the premises here is that a God, if there was one, would be a good God, a God who wouldn't want the world to be full of suffering. If we are thinking about a God who doesn't mind about suffering, or who positively likes it, there is no logical difficulty in thinking that the world that we see around us might have had a Creator.
Descartes explored the possibility - not very seriously it is true - of the world having been created by an Evil Demon. There is surely be nothing illogical about this fantasy of Descartes': it makes sense - awful, horrifying sense, but sense - to suggest that behind the world is an indifference to suffering, or even an enthusiasm for it.
An observation of CD Broad's has stayed with me over some years now.
He was interested in extra sensory perception, out- of -the -body experiences, things like that, and spent time exploring the alleged evidence - some of it very interesting - that is piled up behind these claims.
His conclusion was not entirely sceptical. He said that he would not be at all surprised to find himself waking up after death into a spirit world. But the prospect of life there he thought decidedly unattractive.
That when he woke he would be sorry but not really surprised.
BUZZ: Arguments against the position that the world was created by an evil demon
Gods are not always thought of as good.
It is not a new thought of course that the creator of the world might not have been a sympathetic figure. The Gods of the Greeks were human beings on a larger scale, human beings in their loves and hates, their ambitions and frustrations. The difference lay just in their power. The immortals were so much more powerful.
Pindar:
Single is the race, single
Of men and of gods;
From a single mother we both draw breath.
But a difference of power in everything
Keeps us apart;
For the one is as nothing, but the brazen sky
Stays a fixt habitation for ever.
Yet we can in greatness of mind
Or of body be like the Immortals,
Though we know not to what goal
By day or in the nights
Fate has written that we shall run.
Pictures of:
Grinning gloating gods of the Aztecs
" A people gets the gods which it deserves. The wayward and inscrutable demons who pester man [sic] are born of nameless terrors and inhibiting ignorance; the grinning, gloating ogres of the Aztecs mirrored a race brutalised by incessant war and fearful of unknown privations; before the Romans were moved by Greek influences to abandon their stubborn rusticity, their gods were prosaic, functional, and sanitary; the passion of the Jews for legalistic discipline in all departments of life and their exclusive nationalism found an appropriate champion in Jehovah." C.M.Bowra, The Greek Experience, New York and Washington, 1969, Praeger, p.42.
So of course it is not out of the question that the world might have an unsympathetic creator. This is a miserable thought, but not an illogical one.
It is not however a Christian thought.
The Christian God is a good God, the Christian Creation an expression of sublime goodness.
It is this conception, perhaps an exceptional one amongst the rich and varied library of human religious belief, that creates the 'problem' of evil'. Suffering in the world is of course a 'problem' in the sense that most of us would like to get rid of it, but it is when you put the suffering alongside belief in a good God that you have an intellectual problem. How can a good God create a world in which there is so much that isn't good?
Premise 2: God is omnipotent
There is one way: what if, though perfectly well-intentioned, wanting to produce an excellent world, the good God of Christianity didn't quite pull it off? That would surely be thinkable? There would be no contradiction between thinking that God could was perfectly good, and thinking that the world was nevertheless not completely wonderful, so long as you thought of God as limited. We would be thinking of God then as perfectly good, but not all-powerful. He would have tried to create a perfect world, but not quite succeeding.
The problem is of course that Christians are not prepared to think of God in this way. Their God, they maintain, is not only perfectly good he is perfectly powerful as well. There are no limitations on what God can do, as Christianity conceives of Him.
(If we are talking of the Christian God, we can reasonable speak of He and Him: this is the traditional way. Christians today may wish to say the traditional use of 'Him' and 'He' doesn't necessarily imply that God is male, but the tradition uses this way of talking, so perhaps we can too, so long as we are speaking of the Christian conception).
So for Christianity God is all-good, but He is all-powerful as well: He is omni-benevolent and also omnipotent.
So perhaps we do have a paradox now, an intellectual incompatibility between the character of the Creator as conceived by Christianity and the character of the Creation for which He allegedly bears responsibility.
BUZZ: Is there any way out?
We will return later to the question of whether there is indeed something wrong with the world, but for now may we just make that an assumption. The question I would like to put is: making the assumption that suffering is indeed present in the world, can we conclude without further ado that Christianity must be misconceiving of God if they take Him to be omni-benevolent and omnipotent?
Premise 3: God knows everything
Perhaps there is one half of a way out.
Supposing God wanted to create a perfect world, and was all-powerful - but didn't realise quite what was going on? Might flaws creep into creation in that way? You can imagine at any rate a benevolent dictator with the best will in the world exercising absolute dictatorial power - and yet making an awful hash of things. I won't suggest we think of Tony Blair in this connection, or John Prescott, because it's too near the election. But you will probably be able to think of examples. It is possible to want to do good, and to have the power to do good, but to lack the knowledge needed to bring off an entirely well-meant project.
So could we think that this is how the Christian God can have produced an imperfect world?
Well of course, not really, because it is also part of the Christian conception of God that He is all-knowing.
He is omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient.
Perfectly good, all-powerful and all-knowing.
If we put 'the problem of evil' then in the form of a 'proof' that God does not exist it goes like this:
A perfectly good, all powerful, omniscient God could not have produced an imperfect world. If the world is imperfect, the Christian God does not exist.
But the world is imperfect.
Therefore God, as conceived by Christianity, does not exist.
BUZZ: flaws in this argument
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Human beings have freewill and this explains how God is not responsible for bad things in the world
But some bad things do not appear to be down to the exercise of human freewill.
Though the world appears imperfect, seen in the context of eternity it is not.
It's a mystery.
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Attempts to resolve 'the problem of evil'
The Free-will argument
So it is argued that the rather mixed character of the world we encounter - some good bits, but also plenty of bad - means that there is a muddle in thinking that it could have been created by a Being with the characteristics Christianity ascribes to Him. An omni-benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient being could not be responsible for the world as we encounter it.
But, as you have pointed out, there is an answer to this, or at least a go at an answer.
It was important for God, it is said, to include within His creation some very special items. Not just important - it was the creation of these special items which was the point of the whole project. The point was to create these specials, and the rest of creation was subordinate really to this end. The rest was there so that the creation of these special items could occur.
The special items are us, of course, and we are special because we have free-will. If you create beings with free-will, it is said, it's not your fault if things go wrong. However perfect you make the world to begin with, however innocent and pure your creatures, if you endow them with free-will things can go wrong.
(Leibniz says at this point:
Think of two worlds, one where people exercise their free-will in good ways, and one where they exercise their free-will in bad ways. Which is the better world? We must agree: the second, the world where all the choices are good ones. But if God is all-powerful and all knowing and all good, mustn't he have chosen to create the better alternative?
Mustn't he have chosen to create the world where as a matter of fact free-will was exercised for always for the best?
You might reply:
Yes, but how could God have known? At the choice point, when God was on the point of creating the world, he can't have known how things would turn out if he did this or did that. That's the whole problem of creating creatures with free-will. If they genuinely have free-will, you can't tell what they are going to do.
But a reply to this is that it is a concession of defeat. It concedes that God doesn't know everything, is not omniscient.
Yet omniscience is part of the traditional Christian conception of God.
If he doesn't know what choices his creatures will make when they come to exercise free-will, he isn't omniscient after all.
Is this just a play? Perhaps when God is called omniscient that doesn't mean he knows the future.
Does omniscience inlude knowledge of the future?
But what you may feel is that if he doesn't know the future, omniscience is not quite what it's cracked up to be.
The most interesting sort of knowledge you may think is knowledge about the future, and if God doesn't have any more than we do there are tremendous limits to his knowledge.
And what kind of a picture does it conjure up - God on the verge of the creation of the Universe, a major project to say the least, but not really having a clue about the consequences of his action. By that standard, Monsanto is a pussy,
The trialling of GM crops, the genetic manipulation of animals, humans are all of them the actions of wise and responsible people.
So Leibniz for one says - and Leibniz was a Christian - God is omniscient, must have known, and that since God is also all-good and all-powerful this must be, contrary to appearance, absolutely the best world possible. To this we will need to return.)
Why would an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient Creator choose to create creatures with free-will?
Another by-road to notice before we motor on.
The account we are investigating is that God created creatures with free-will, and this is why the world is imperfect. It was perfect to begin with. It then became corrupted through no imperfection in the Creator, but as a result of his creatures excercising the freedom with which he had entrusted them.
We should just pause to ask: what is the significance of the gift of freedom? This is not really relevant to the question we are pursuing, but it begs to be addressed.
Why was it important for God to create creatures with that power?
Can it have been because he was lonely? Can it have been that he needed some other being or beings capable of responding to him, of entering into a relationship with him? Was this why he created creatures with the gift of freedom? Stones wouldn't be much company. Flowers might be beautiful, animals might be loyal and affectionate, but to enter into any kind of personal relationship there perhaps needed to be a creature of a different sort.
This is sometimes suggested. Human beings are so special, it seems to be suggested, possessed of such extraordinary qualities and powers that we can understand how the Creator of the Universe might want their company.
Such is the love of God. It can't have been because he wanted someone capable of responding properly to his love. That supports the picture of a lonely being, engaging, rather in the spirit of Frankenstein, driven by isolation.
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Back to the main road.
We are not really considering why God might have chosen to create creatures capable of choice,
but rather
if this is what he did,
does we then have our explanation of how the world can be as it is
and yet be the creation of a perfect Being?
How can a perfect God have created an imperfect world? - The account we are considering is that which is not why God created creatures with free-will but that having done so there was the possibility of things going wrong, even though God himself was and remained perfect.
Against the free will argument: some bad things that happen don't appear to the fault of human beings
A good deal of what seems wrong with the world can be seen as flowing from human action, and so, if you believe in freedom of the will, and in the idea that God burdened his creatures with it, it can in principle be put at the door not of God, but of human beings able to make choices and making the wrong ones.
So the suffering caused by wars, or by human beings exploiting one another in all the many ways that make room for injustice, or by one individual
Or crime, or social injustice, or tyranny, or the wrong lyrics
- all these can be put down to humans abusing their freedom - down, in a word, to the Fall.
But can all the imperfections of the world be put down to human error, human evil, in this kind of way? Surely not. There is a certain sort of mentality which longs somehow to put illness and disease down to the human account, but they are I think not much believed today. Aids, lung cancer, more recently heart disease get blamed on human weaknesses, but by and large the play of bacteria and viruses, chemical deficiencies in the neural system, inexact copying of DNA - these are not regarded as flowing from human shortcomings. And they do appear to contribute massively to the quantity of suffering there is in the world.
BUZZ: Could they be? Can you think of an account which would blame all disease on the misuse of human free-will?
[Human immorality upsets the harmony in nature.
Macbeth:]
Natural disasters seem to be another source of suffering which are difficult to put down to human immorality. Floods, eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves, storms: we are beginning to put some of these down to global warming, for which we claim responsibility, but to put all natural dislocations down human beings requires quite a feat of the imagination.
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We are just seeing a bit of the picture.
Suppose it has to be conceded that there is imperfection in the world. Is there any way even so of preserving the Christian idea of a perfect creator?
Well, might we not be seeing just a small part of a bigger picture?
We know the earth is just a tiny tiny bit of an enormously larger Universe.
And we can imagine, can't we, that the life we live here might be a tiny part of a larger life which carries on in a different context once this bit of it is over.
Might it not be that if this is so and you stand back a bit and look at the whole picture you will see experience in this life in a context which will show that there isn't anything wrong with this world after all?
There are two possibilities here.
The first is that when seen in context what we take to be bad will turn out not to be bad at all. In this case, the bad we think we see is not really bad at all - the appearance of badness comes to be seen as an illusion.
The second is that when seen in context the bad things here will seem justified.
Seen in their proper context
1. apparently bad things will be revealed as good
The first:
What we see when we take in the bigger picture is that there isn't really anything bad in this world at all. If we think there is, it's a mistake, a mistake we make because of our inadequate perspective.
On this view, the press-ups don't really hurt at all. It's not that we come to see the good they make possible - it's that they are good anyway, only we didn’t see it before.
Well.
This is pretty outrageous. I don't want to turn gloomy, on a topic that actually invites a great deal of gloom, but we have just for a moment to switch from press-ups to some of the more sombre things that go on in our world. People suffer in all sorts of ways, and die in all sorts of ways, and what is often worse see their partners and children and parents and friends suffer and die. There is starvation, and disease and servitude. There is rape and genocide.
Can we say that these may turn out to be good things after all? That when we see the bigger picture we will realize our mistake?
2. Bad things will seem justified
The second possibility is to my mind more thinkable.
It is suggested that we will come to see this life as a kind of training for what is to come. We should think less of a Heysham High and more of Sandringham perhaps. Not so much of the local primary as that place Demi Moore went to into order to become a Seal - GI Jane.
You need to go through it in order to equip yourself as a successful combat person.
Could we see this life as like that? Full of press-ups and put-downs, being wet and knocked into ponds with your hands tied and interrogated and hit on etc etc. Not nice while it is going on, but making possible something quite wonderful - the life of the Navy SEAL.
When you see the bigger picture - a few months doing press-ups, and then years and more wonderful years as a combat ready naval officer, you may think the press-ups all worth while. They are still press-ups, you don't change your mind about them having been painful, but you come to think they were worth it.
On this first option then the idea is that you may come look back on the trials and tribulations of your mortal life as invaluable in enabling you to enjoy the life to come.
BUZZ: Is this a solution? Does this line of thought make it possible to understand how a good God, who is also omnipotent and omniscient, could have made this gruelling world?
A possible riposte is this: Surely a truly omnipotent God could have made it at least a little easier? He is after all in a uniquely powerful position. He isn't a sergeant-major given raw recruits to make of what he will. He makes the recruits in the first place. Why shouldn't he have made them so they didn't need a training regime, or didn't need such a harsh one at any rate? An omnipotent, omniscient Creator God makes all the rules. It may be true that human beings, being what they are, need knocking into shape if they are to enjoy eternal life. But an omniscient, omnipotent Creator God would surely be in a position to give them the right shape to begin with…
2. The Universe is better with some bad things in it than it could be if there were no bad things.
The logical position: the problem of evil as a disproof of the existence of God.
What follows if we cannot solve 'the problem of evil'?
The problem is not abut God, but about a concept.
This is why I can speak so freely about it. We are not talking about what God is like, or what he can or cannot do, but about the logical character of the concept of God put forward by one religion, and not perhaps by everyone who subscribes to that religion. It is a concept articulated by specialist intellectuals, the central component of an intricate clockwork of concepts and arguments and claims that comprises orthodox Christian theology.
The central concept of God is that of a perfect Being who created all that there is.
He has attributed to him a number of characteristics.
He is said to be perfectly good.
He is said to be absolutely powerful.
He is said to know everything there is to be known.
There are other characteristics, but it is these that are relevant to the present argument.
It is said that a Being with these characteristics created the Universe, and our world as part of that.
The critic says simply that if you accept that this world is imperfect, the theology is guilty of conceptual confusion.
The confusion is this: it is a contradiction to say that a being who is
created an imperfect world.
Attempts to rebut this charge have mostly focussed on the last bit. They have been arguments designed to establish that this is not the imperfect world it may appear.
But the first argument we considered is an exception:
The world was created perfectly, but the creation of creatures with free will corrupted it.
The others are:
The world is not really imperfect because:
(a) we need shaping up or
(b) when we understand the big picture we will see there isn't really any suffering in the world or
(c) to make a perfect world, in the sense of the best best possible world, you need to some good things which require some lesser bad things as preconditions.