1 of 1- No True Scottist
- Member
Offline - Registered: 10/19/2015
- Posts: 16
The Problem of Evil ( a general scholastic solution)
I thought I would run this sketch of a solution to the Problem of Evil by you all and see what you think. I am not sure if this is more appropriate for the Religion or Philosophy section. If I am posting in the wrong section I apologize.
The classic formulation of the problem seems to go like this.
1. Suppose that( as the Catholics say) God is infinitely powerful, infinitely good, and has infinite knowledge.
2. Evil exists.
3. This can mean only one of three things
3.1. God knows of the evil, wishes to banish it, but lacks the power to do so.
3.2. God knows of the evil, has the power to do so but does not wish to banish it
3.3. God has the power to banish the evil, he would wish to banish it, but does not know of it
4. 3.1. implies that god is not infinitely powerful, 3.2. implies that God is not infinitely good,
3.3 implies that God does not have infinite knowledge.
5. Therefore by reductio ad absurdum 1 is false.
Now the most striking part of this argument for me is that we are given our presuppositions about God right from the beginning. This is good news because because I believe by adding in more aspects of God and a Scholastic ontology in general ( via Thomism in this case, though Ockham,Scotus, and Geach certainly influenced this solution just as much as he did) we can ( in a somewhat controversial manner) defeat not only the general problem of evil, but any particular example. We start our defense with a few extra assumptions added.
1. That God is the only being who is and can be infinitely good, infinitely powerful and have infinite knowledge.
2. That part of God's definition is that he is uncreated.
3. That for a creature to be good is either for it to be ordered towards God as its final end, or by participating in God's goodness. ( Perhaps somewhat can tell me if these notions amount to the same thing or not, the teleological notion is Aristotelean while the participatory notion is Platonic. It seems to me that we can find traces of both in Aquinas' work)
4. Evil is merely a lack of good.
Now with these presumptions given to us we now move on to the argument.
1. When one questions why evil exists in creation, given that evil is merely the lack of good, they are only asking why creation is not better.
2. God has infinite power, thus it is always possible that God could have created a different creation with one more good being in it than the creation he created, making this creation better than the last. Hence the possible creations are like the set of positive integers, they go on as a potential infinity, always finite, but never with a greatest member.
3. If we take one creation A with X amount of goodness, and another creation B with X+Y amount of goodness both would be equally distinct from the amount of goodness that God is capable of producing. So just as 2 is less than 3, both 2 and 3 are equally distant from the infinite as finite numbers.
4. To create a creation that is infinitely good would be for God to create himself, but God by definition is uncreated.
5. It is impossible for an infinitely good creation to be created.
6. An infinitely good creation is logically impossible and all possible finite creations are equally distant from what God has the power to instantiate.
7. It is arbitrary to demand that God create a creation with X amount of goodness but not X-Y or X+Y amount of goodness in order to justify his goodness. No principled argument can be made to justify a demand for one finite degree of goodness in creation over another.
8. Given 1-6, Any creation is permissible for God and does not challenge his infinite goodness. Any attempt to specify a criteria that God would be bound to when creating must necessarily fail.
9. Any goodness that comes from a creature in creation is only so insofar as it takes part in God's goodness.
10. The creation of a creature does not add any goodness that was not there before God.
11. There is an equal amount of goodness whether God creates or does not create. Creation does not add or subtract anything from God's infinite goodness.
12. From 8-9. God has perfect freedom to choose to create or not without it compromising his perfect goodness.
13. From 7 and 11. God is free in regards to whether he creates or not, and which creation he chooses to create, and this does not compromise his infinite goodness, power, or knowledge in any way.
FIN
Now I did not really talk about God's knowledge insofar as it did not need to be mentioned. If I ever wrote a paper on it I would give a more rigorous formulation and explain why God's omnipotence and omnipotence aren't touched. One may say that God not being able to create himself is a sign of a lack of omnipotence. I would argue that it is no more so than God not being able to create a circular square is. Created and infinitely good being are contradictory insofar as Aquinas' argument for divine simplicity and oneness is correct ( that all of God's properties are incommunicable). The question of infinite knowledge seems irrelevant to me at this point, but maybe it ties in some way in a possible defeater I have yet to think of.
- No True Scottist
- Member
Offline
- Registered: 10/19/2015
- Posts: 16
Re: The Problem of Evil ( a general scholastic solution)
Thanks for the reply.
You are definitely correct that I should have spelled out what a privation was instead of just leaving it as " a lack".
That is how we got bastardizations of the cosmological argument, I should know better.
Would the case of the imperfect cat in world x and the perfect cat in world y not still match up with 2 and 3 in relation to the infinite set of positive integers? Presumably if all else is equal then y will still be equivalent to x plus what ever goodness is added on by making the perfect cat as opposed to making the imperfect one.
I think I need to justify why we should be looking at the total goodness of creation when we look at the problem- it seems intuitive to me since God has one act of creation- everything that is comes together in one act and ought to be judged together in regards to the total goodness present in creation.
Would we be able to say that God making a perfect cat would be as equally good as making X amount of imperfect cats ? If so then can I subsume all individual cases into the universal case and continue to just judge creation based on the total amount of goodness in it rather than worrying about particular cases ?
It is certainly a needed lemma in the argument either way.
- •
Thread Starter- DanielCC
- Administrator
Offline
- Registered: 6/26/2015
- Posts: 765
Re: The Problem of Evil ( a general scholastic solution)
Interestingly something like this solution was broached on a previous thread about the Modal Problem of Evil here.
One thing I will say quickly is that we are arguably granting too much to the critic from the word off with Premise Two of the problem. We should in fact specify gratuitous evils exist, that is evils with no apparent this worldly justification. My immediate suggestion for deflating if not destroying that premise is to argue that on the Scholastic model an act could only be gratuitous if and only if it fails to bring about the flourishing of any entity - on this account the sickness and death of a cat or a child from, say, anthrax, is still conducive to the flourishing of myriad organisms i.e. the anthrax bacilli, the multitude of microscopic entities involved in the process of decay, plant life, fungal life et cetera.
Atheists might with some justification reply that this is odd since it makes evil into a primarily externalist matter - that is no moral difference between the case of a man suffering the pain and vicissitudes of a deadly disease and one who suffers the same disease without any of the qualia involved. This is true though conversely their criticism has the effect of making evil rather close to aversion. Myabe we can say that at least it goes a great distance in explaining Natural as opposed to Moral Evil.
(Apologies for the brief posts of late fellows)
Last edited by DanielCC (11/10/2015 12:41 pm)
- No True Scottist
- Member
Offline
- Registered: 10/19/2015
- Posts: 16
Re: The Problem of Evil ( a general scholastic solution)
Alexander wrote:
I think I need to justify why we should be looking at the total goodness of creation when we look at the problem- it seems intuitive to me since God has one act of creation- everything that is comes together in one act and ought to be judged together in regards to the total goodness present in creation.
Would we be able to say that God making a perfect cat would be as equally good as making X amount of imperfect cats ? If so then can I subsume all individual cases into the universal case and continue to just judge creation based on the total amount of goodness in it rather than worrying about particular cases ?
While I see your point, I think it really is particular cases of evil that the atheist tends to react to when giving the argument. At least, I've never met anyone who thought the most difficult version of the problem of evil rested on the "sum total goodness" being too low.
I am essentially pointing out that there are two senses in which God may be criticised as a creator: we may mean he hasn't created as much good as he could have done, or we may mean that the things he has created are not as good as they could have been. It seems clear that the first criticism is vulnerable to your rejoinder - God could never have created as much good as he "could have done". But the second criticism is not.
If there are a finite number of humans, and they commit no moral evil, it seems that this would be good. And we couldn't seriously blame God for not making them even better. If we wonder why God does not make every human being a saint, it is not much of an answer to say "even if they were, they could always be better saints, so why would God bother to make us all saints to begin with?". After a certain level of perfection, I suspect you reach a point at which the problem of evil could not be raised, regardless of whether the world is "as good as it could be", objectively speaking. This makes me think the problem is raised against seriously defective beings, not more generally absent beings.
A response could go like this.
The question of why God did not make a perfect particular human is still just asking why God did not choose one finite amount of goodness( the amount of goodness an imperfect human has) to another( the amount of goodness an imperfect human has + the goodness that would perfect it). Likewise even if God made this human perfect, he could have made a much better being in it's place, like an Angel- or alternatively made this being into an angel ( this depends on our views on identity) by increasing its goodness to an even greater rate, or creating a different being that is better in its place. Given that each finite amount of goodness in a being is still equally distinct from how good God has the power to make that being( or its substitute), and because no being can be as good as God has the power to make it unless it was God itself ( which we already showed would be an incoherent notion) it follows that all individual creations are equally defective in relation to God's omnipotence, and thus each creature is equally permissible in light of God's power by being a creature.
I don't see how any finite degree of goodness could be reached without the problem of evil being raised. In a world without murderers people would take it as inexcusable that there were people who merely said mean things. In a world where no one said mean things people would phrase the problem of evil in relation to why people have doubts sometimes or are scared sometimes. In a world where we are all morally perfect the atheist would complain about the existence of suffering and natural evil in general, etc
DanielCC : I think that an atheist would respond with a complaint that God made creatures that flourish from other creatures suffering and being destroyed in the first place.
- •
Thread Starter- DanielCC
- Administrator
Offline
- Registered: 6/26/2015
- Posts: 765
Re: The Problem of Evil ( a general scholastic solution)
[ I think that an atheist would respond with a complaint that God made creatures that flourish from other creatures suffering and being destroyed in the first place.
This is true, however it rather gives the game away - what the atheist is forced to claim that giving rise to contingent corporeal existence in itself is evil. They can argue this but it's much stronger thesis and will have to be reflected elsewhere in their ethical theory (for instance they should be committed to the view that to reproduce is immoral).