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8/13/2015 9:29 am  #1


A Little Help with Evil

Hey everyone,
My theory of knowledge is class is about to discuss religion and one of the videos we are going to watch is Stephen Fry's vidoe where he argues about evil. I want to be able to refute his claims during the class, and I want to see if my reason why the problem of evil fails under classical theism:
"Under classical theism God is not a moral agent. This is because under classical theism He is is pure actuality or in other words He has no potentials that need to be realized. If God were a moral agent that would imply that God only has the potential to be good, and this can only be realized with good actions, like how you and I cannot be coherently judged as good until we perform a good action, which shows we have a potential to be good that needs to be realized. But under classical theism this makes no sense as God has no potentials to be realized, and since being a moral agent involves the potentials that need to be realized, then God in this sense cannot be seen as a moral agent, and trying to use the problem of evil in this way against him is incoherent. Another reason for this is that under classical theism God does not participate in goodness like you and I do, but He is Goodness itself. In other words He is the highest standard of goodness and moral standards. If this is the case than God can not be a moral agent as being a moral agent would imply that God can be judged and is subordinate to a moral standard that is higher than Himself. But if God is goodness itself and thus the highest moral standard of goodness than this means that there is no higher standard to judge Him by as He is that highest standard. This also means that He is not subordinate to any moral standard including His own as He is that standard, which consequently means there is no moral standard or law for Him to follow, and this makes him by default not a moral agent. Trying to argue against God using the problem of evil that Stephen Fry uses is nonsensical and intellectually bankrupt on a classical theist perspective due to the fact that it presupposes God is a moral agent or has some moral law to follow, but under classical theism God is not a moral agent due to the fact that He is the highest standard of the moral law/standard, and His actions do not follow any moral law nor can they judged by a moral law due to this."
Is this the accurate classical theistic perspective of evil?

 

8/13/2015 6:49 pm  #2


Re: A Little Help with Evil

Is this the video of Fry giving an interview in Ireland? If so, his argument was puerile. It was just a facile regurgitation of pat atheistic slogans. Is this a philosophy class? Fry is no philosopher, or even deep thinker (a stupid person's idea of a smart person, as Peter Hitchens likes to repeat). I once saw him debating the good of Catholicism, alongside Christopher Hitchens, and he said, basically, Catholicism is nonsense and malign because of empiricism, without supporting or explaining this in any depth.

It doesn't go to the heart of the matter, but you could point out that in the interview in question Fry gets very angry at a God he supposedly doesn't believe. You could also point out that he saying nothing new. These are very old debates in which the theistic side, even to a neutral observer, must be said to have given as good as it has got.  ​

As for a more substantive response, a good all-purpose response is the note that for the sake of argument the atheist invoking the so called poe is accepting the existence of objective good (after all, the argument wouldn't make sense if good and evil are just subjective terms), and the classical theist gives reasons for equating goodness with God. Therefore, the atheist is trying to appeal from absolute goodness to a higher good, or implying absolute goodness is not good enough, which is absurd. The atheist can then try and show that God is not in fact the good, or that there is some incoherence in the entire understanding of God and goodness in classical theism, but he have to actually do this properly and in detail (and I think, obviously, he'd fail), and Fry doesn't even properly state an argument for the problem of evil itself. 

 

8/14/2015 7:13 am  #3


Re: A Little Help with Evil

AKG wrote:

"Under classical theism God is not a moral agent. This is because under classical theism He is is pure actuality or in other words He has no potentials that need to be realized. If God were a moral agent that would imply that God only has the potential to be good, and this can only be realized with good actions, like how you and I cannot be coherently judged as good until we perform a good action, which shows we have a potential to be good that needs to be realized. But under classical theism this makes no sense as God has no potentials to be realized, and since being a moral agent involves the potentials that need to be realized, then God in this sense cannot be seen as a moral agent, and trying to use the problem of evil in this way against him is incoherent.

This is true. If pressed you'll have to specific this as ‘no passive potencies to be realised’ since God’s being pure actuality does not preclude Him from having powers i.e. active potencies – God could still realise a good (say the existence of unicorns) which hasn’t been realised yet in this world.

AKG wrote:

Another reason for this is that under classical theism God does not participate in goodness like you and I do, but He is Goodness itself. In other words He is the highest standard of goodness and moral standards. If this is the case than God can not be a moral agent as being a moral agent would imply that God can be judged and is subordinate to a moral standard that is higher than Himself. But if God is goodness itself and thus the highest moral standard of goodness than this means that there is no higher standard to judge Him by as He is that highest standard. This also means that He is not subordinate to any moral standard including His own as He is that standard, which consequently means there is no moral standard or law for Him to follow, and this makes him by default not a moral agent.

Again absolutely true. One should be careful here though as what the atheist is really getting at is if God is good by nature – God = the Good – then why is not God constrained by His nature to realise all goods? Here the Poe is recast in the form:
 
1. God is of His Nature Goodness and possess maximal power
 
2. It is better to realise all goods rather than just some
 
3. Therefore of His nature God must realise all goods.
 
4. There are goods in this world which have not been realised
 
Conclusion: As 3 and 4 are incompatible there can be no being as described in prop. 1
 
It’s pretty obvious the atheist’s reasoning relies on the implicit assumption that God is determined by His nature to create the best of all possible worlds. This is a harder philosophical nut to crack but I doubt anyone of Fry’s ilk will bring it up (or if they do it’ll be lifted straight from somewhere else ).
 

 

8/14/2015 10:31 am  #4


Re: A Little Help with Evil

@Daniel,
I won't worry too much about someone bringing up the best of possible worlds as I'm the only one in my class who most likely has bothered to research the philosophy behind God. But just in case how could a classical theist respond to the best of possible world claim? 

     Thread Starter
 

8/14/2015 10:47 am  #5


Re: A Little Help with Evil

AKG wrote:

But just in case how could a classical theist respond to the best of possible world claim? 

The simplest is to argue that there just is no "best possible world." As Aquinas himself argued, you can start with any conceivable world and think of another one just like it except with a smidgen more goodness in it. You'll find a related (and somewhat broader) argument here.

 

8/15/2015 3:20 pm  #6


Re: A Little Help with Evil

Speaking of the POE, J.L Mackie formulates his "logical POE" but he also denies that there is such thing as objective morality or values.  How does he reconcile this? Does he address this seeming contradiction somewhere?

 

8/15/2015 6:46 pm  #7


Re: A Little Help with Evil

Mysterious Brony wrote:

Speaking of the POE, J.L Mackie formulates his "logical POE" but he also denies that there is such thing as objective morality or values.  How does he reconcile this? Does he address this seeming contradiction somewhere?

This always fascinated me as well - J.H. Sobel too apparently denied the existence of objective moral values yet gave a version of the Logical Problem of Evil. I suppose the paradox goes back to Hume who managed very successfully to attack the notion of objective morality with his Is/Ought Distinction yet appealed the existence of ‘Evil’ on a number of occasions as an objection against Divine Omnipotence.  

 This articleby J.W. Wartick is worth referencing at this point.

Last edited by DanielCC (8/15/2015 6:46 pm)

 

8/15/2015 7:48 pm  #8


Re: A Little Help with Evil

DanielCC wrote:

 
It’s pretty obvious the atheist’s reasoning relies on the implicit assumption that God is determined by His nature to create the best of all possible worlds. 
 

But doesn't the atheist have to show that there is some problem with the classical theist conception of God or the good or both? Once the classical theist has given a proper argument for identifying God with absolute goodness, the burden surely goes back to the atheist to show why God is not supposedly good enough.

And there seems something unsatisfying about just pointing to particular incidents of suffering as a sufficient response. Surely the atheist really has to show in a more comprehensive way a problem with the classical theist conceptions so that the general level of suffering in our world, or perhaps any at all, seems inconsistent with them, or in some other way they are dubious or incoherent. Or, in other words, it seems to me the presumption should be that, if the classical theist can give cogent arguments for the nature of God and the good, particular acts of suffering - such as the ubiquitous harm to herbivores or babies always brought up in these discussions - require no explaination by the theist. Only if the atheist can give a broader argument about the level of suffering or the concepts of the classical theist does there seem much a recourse to me. In the somewhat tedious language of contemporary philosophy of religion perhaps this will be called sceptical theism, but it seems a somewhat distinct kind to those normally brought up today, in which, though it is admitted one doesn't know the exact reason why a particular act of suffering in the world, there is a good presumption it shouldn't worry the theist.

 

8/16/2015 4:40 am  #9


Re: A Little Help with Evil

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

 
But doesn't the atheist have to show that there is some problem with the classical theist conception of God or the good or both? Once the classical theist has given a proper argument for identifying God with absolute goodness, the burden surely goes back to the atheist to show why God is not supposedly good enough.

Well the problem ceases to be about suffering per say (a good thing too given the utter saccharinity it inspires in many atheists – see Quentin Smith’s famous ‘Bambi deer’ remark in his debate with WLC or Darwin’s frankly pathetic whinging about parasitic wasps) and becomes a question of why don’t all beings perfectly instantiate their essences. In other words it asks why there are any instances of privation when it’s possible for there not to have been.
 
The time honoured response to this has been to point out that as there are contingent beings in the first place and thus beings doomed to corruption at some point the world is ordered such that the inevitable corruption of beings contributes to the flourishing of others.  This neutralises a great deal of the problem as far as I’m concerned and reminds us to avoid anthropomorphism – however it’s a small step from admitting this to the claim that God orders the world so that corruption is at its’s bare minimum/its use is maximised which saddles one with the problematic best of all possible world claim.
 
I’ll start a thread for possible world claims I think – they lead to interesting antimonies.

(For what it's worth I have a suspicion that the Scholastic account of the transcendentals coupled with the admission that God need not create the best possible world leads to the interesting conclusion that there is no world too evil for God to create - any being/goodness is gratuitous)    

 

 

8/16/2015 9:27 am  #10


Re: A Little Help with Evil

DanielCC wrote:

(For what it's worth I have a suspicion that the Scholastic account of the transcendentals coupled with the admission that God need not create the best possible world leads to the interesting conclusion that there is no world too evil for God to create - any being/goodness is gratuitous)

The page to which I linked explicitly concludes (on more or less that basis) that there's no possible world so bad that God couldn't choose to create it.

Last edited by Scott (8/16/2015 9:27 am)

 

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