Welcome to the last of eight general philosophy lectures.
Today, we'll be talking about God and morality, focussing, for example, on the problem of evil, but also various related issues.
Here we've got Monty Python's rendering of God. David Hume, who we've seen a lot of John Mackey.
John Mackey, who was to for unions for many years. And Richard Swinburne, who was Nulla professor of the philosophy of religion at Oriel College.
So a big Oxford Connexions. And that's my rendering of or that he's standing for anti-God, who is somebody who will come up just at the very end?
Now, it's important to bear in mind when thinking about general philosophy,
particularly in an historical context that back in the 17th and 18th centuries,
when a lot of these topics started or were discussed in a recognisably modern form, virtually everyone believed in God.
Hume probably being the most conspicuous exception.
But it's very striking that that belief informs a lot of philosophical views that are still very current.
And just as an illustration, there was a big survey of over 900 professional philosophers back in 2009.
Because we're now nearly a decade on from that and probably views will have changed more.
But at that time, fourteen point six percent of the respondents said they were theists.
Seventy two point eight percent atheist. So significantly more atheists.
But you'll see that there's a lot of correlation between these views. It's not surprising that theists are far more likely to be physically.
It's about mind than atheists. If you're a theist, you believe that there is an immaterial spirit, an infinite,
immaterial spirit in which case believing that we are a little immaterial.
Spirit's made in God's image and so forth.
It's not at all surprising that you would hold that view, whereas you can see that most atheists would deny it on free.
Will you see compatible? ISM is the majority view amongst atheists amongst theorists.
Libertarianism is significantly more popular.
We'll see why in this lecture. Personal identity atheists are more likely than theorists to think in terms of psychological continuity theists
significantly more likely than atheists to think that there's some further fact beyond the manifest phenomena.
For example, a sole.
And on ethics, you will see that consequential ism utilitarianism, for example, is significantly more popular amongst atheists, not a majority view,
but nevertheless significantly more popular amongst them, whereas the ontological views of ethics are significantly more popular amongst theorists.
One important thing that I want to draw to your attention, though with moral realism,
it's not at all surprising to find that things in general are moral realists.
They believe that there are, you know, moral facts. But notice also that we have a clear majority of atheists being moral realists.
So it's simply not true that in general, atheism pushes people firmly in the direction of A. realism.
OK, so the question of God is a big question in every sense, and it still is.
And one thing that I warn you against is a sort of parochialism.
One very important virtue of studying philosophy historically,
is that we can look back to periods when people's assumptions and beliefs were very different from now.
So, you know, the fact that maybe most philosophers now are atheists shouldn't blind us to the fact that over history,
huge numbers of very clever people have been atheists and the arguments deserve examination on their own merits.
Now, obviously, different religions have different views of gods, and here we are,
confining ourselves to one particular notion of God God with a capital G.
And that is being that is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient.
Perfectly good and creator of the universe. And I'm going to use Omni Perfect as an abbreviation for all powerful, all knowing perfectly good.
Now, why might you postulate a perfect gold Hume?
Perhaps not surprisingly, has a very cynical answer. He thinks it's largely due to flattery.
A tribe has its own particular God. And then in order to ingratiate itself with that God,
the people end up just giving according more and more power and excellence and wonderfulness to it.
And so you end up with a rather exalted view of your particular God.
More philosophically, perhaps. Richard Swinburne argues at length that an infinite,
perfect God has certain theoretical merits that postulating an infinite God as opposed to a finite God or a whole retinue of finite gods.
It gives you a hypothesis which is simpler and in science,
we generally prefer simple hypotheses that explain the phenomena over more complex hypotheses.
So the claim is that the belief in God has a certain theoretical merit.
If we find that it gives a good account of the phenomena, that is good reason for preferring it.
So according to Swinburn, who's probably the most influential recent philosopher of religion on that side,
arguing for God in this way, the existence of God can be thought of as something like a scientific hypothesis.
The world as we experience it is just the sort we would expect to perfect God to create Occam's razor that is preferred.
Generally, simple hypotheses don't postulate more than you need to and scientific practise suggest.
We should prefer the simplest and most comprehensive explanatory hypothesis.
So one God without any limits is preferable to, for example, the hypothesis of lots of demigods.
OK, so far, so good,
but I want to point out that there are some problems with taking the hypothesis of God as being well-established by scientific criteria
because there are some sorts of things that we look for in scientific explanations that the God hypothesis doesn't seem to provide.
It's very imprecise in the predictions it makes. OK.
Obviously, the world, as we experience it, has a lot of apparent imperfections.
So in order to reconcile the existence of God with the world as we see it, the problem of evil which will be coming to later,
we clearly have to accept that inferring an absolutely perfect world from a perfect creator just isn't on.
You have to leave lots of wiggle room in various ways, and that wiggle room means that the predictions that you can make are very imprecise.
It's quite non-specific, it doesn't explain in detail why one thing happens rather than another.
Whereas in scientific hypotheses, typically we do look for just that.
We look for a hypothesis that will predict a specific thing and we can test whether that thing is true,
whether it actually happens and thus either corroborate or refuse our hypothesis.
God's ways of acting seem to be completely different from anything we are familiar with,
our own actions in the world are mediated by brains and nerves and so on.
We are not familiar with any well-established action at a distance by mines on bodies, so that counts against the God hypothesis.
It's it's postulating something that seems to be radically different from anything that is well-established.
Of course, there are all sorts of problems about how mind and body interact, even in our own case.
And I've said before, but I think that there's a lot that is mysterious about that.
But at any rate, as far as we can tell you, don't get the kind of if you like telekinesis, which would be needed to explain God's actions.
And it seems to be therefore radically out of line with our background experience.
So there are some pluses and there are some minuses. Now, interestingly, in recent years,
an argument has come about which I personally think is by far the most interesting development in natural theology since Hume wrote,
except perhaps I suppose, Darwin. I mean, Hume criticised the design argument very effectively in his dialogues concerning natural religion.
Obviously, Darwin's discovery of evolution corroborated Hume's doubts.
The fine tuning argument gives a prospect of an argument for theism,
which can potentially have more power, I think, than any other argument that's being produced.
The jury's out, but let me explain why I think this is so interesting.
So the fine tuning argument claims that the constants of nature are very finely adjusted,
and if they were just slightly different, the world would be completely unlike what we experience.
So an example would be gravity as opposed to the Big Bang,
you've got a certain constant gravitational constant which dictates what acceleration there is on bodies due to each other's mass.
And you've got strong evidence for a Big Bang about 13 and a half billion years ago or whatever.
Which apparently involves a huge explosion whereby matter flew off in different directions.
Now, clearly, you get an interplay between the momentum of the matter going apart from the initial singularity.
And on the other hand, you get gravitational force between those particles.
Now, if the Big Bang is too large relative to the gravitational force, everything just flies apart.
You don't get an interesting universe if, on the other hand, gravity is too strong relative to the initial Big Bang.
You get a big crash soon afterwards, and that's it. In order to get a universe where you get complex galaxies forming and then stars and so forth,
you need quite a delicate balance between these two things.
And the claim is in this and quite a number of other cases that the constants of nature of very finely
balanced in such a way that if any one of these multitude of constants have been very slightly different,
nothing like the world we see with complex organisation, beauty, thinking animals etc could have come about.
Now, I think the contemporary verdict on the fine tuning argument, as I say, the jury is out.
We do not yet have an established solid physics.
Relativity and quantum mechanics are currently in conflict.
Dark matter, dark energy, all things that have only been postulated relatively recently.
They apparently constitute something like 95 percent of the mass of the universe.
So it's not like we've had a physical theory with regard to the universe as a whole,
which has endured, you know, for 100 years without any serious questions.
There are lots of questions. There's a problem about making probabilistic judgements about the universe because we've only got the one case.
So naturally, one might raise scepticism about arguing from a single case to such a momentous
conclusion is that there is a designer who set up all these constants just so.
And there are alternative theories. How else might we explain the apparent fine tuning of these constants?
Well, one way that many people find appealing is the thought that there are zillions of different universes we just inhabit
one and all these different universes may have completely different set ups of constants and laws of nature.
Now, if that were true, if you really did have zillions of universes, all with slightly different settings of the fundamental laws and constants,
then it wouldn't be surprising if one of them or a few of them happened to have the perfect settings for bringing about a complex universe like this.
And observers would only evolve in a universe that was set up accordingly.
So it would be no surprise that we find the universe we're in is like that.
So that is it's a bit like an evolutionary theory in a way.
It's a selection effect whereby only those universes that are appropriately set up lead to the development of intelligent life.
So, not surprisingly, intelligent living things find themselves in a universe where all the constants seem to be finely adjusted.
But to give my own view on the argument, whined forward a thousand years, suppose in a thousand years time,
all those anomalies in current physics have been eliminated, got a consistent, coherent physical theory.
It's got a number of fundamental constants.
And suppose in a thousand years, nobody has explained the particular values of those constants that just brute facts.
It's not like there's some deeper theory that explains why they all the way they are,
and suppose that it's possible to do computer simulation of lots and lots of different universe is the way the universe might have been.
Have these constants been slightly different?
And indeed, it turns out that there's only a very small range of values that lead to anything like a a complex and rich universe that we see.
So it's been convincingly established,
even tiny deviations from the observed actual values of the fundamental constants would imply a lifeless universe.
Well, it seems to me then that the we'd have two options.
One of the hypotheses would be that the universe has been set up in such a way as to create that complexity or some aspect of it.
In other words, a designer. It would seem to me in that context that that is not an unreasonable hypothesis to make.
The alternative is to postulate some selection effect amongst multiple universes.
And unlike many of my unbelieving colleagues, I actually think one here is not unreasonable.
OK? A lot of people will argue a lot of atheists will argue that too is intrinsically better than one because two is postulating more of the same,
more universes. We've already got one universe. It's simpler to postulate more of them.
But I think the theist who comes along and says, actually,
I think it's simpler to postulate one universe with a designer than zillions of universes, all with their different constants.
I think that's potentially quite a reasonable view. If you want to read more on this, by the way, I published a paper in 2015.
You can find it on David Hume dot org in the scholarship section in which I and the psychologist actually were
discussing the philosophy and psychology of religious belief and trying to come to a sort of rational midway.
How what space was there for rational religious belief in the context of criticisms like humans?
And in that we suggested that the fine tuning argument might have a part to play within the next two years, we had 12 published replies,
so it really generated a lot of interest, including criticisms from atheists who felt that we'd been far too soft on the fine tuning argument.
And I wrote a response in 2017 in which I go into some detail about that.
So if you if you find this stuff interesting, do you take a look?
OK, so I think I think the jury's out on the fine tuning arguments it might turn out to be strong at the moment,
I don't think it's very strong, but it certainly has potential.
But let's suppose we go that way. What is the universe fine tuned for?
Well, a complex universe. It doesn't look like it's particularly fine tuned for intelligent life,
but you might take the view that intelligent life is an appropriate target for a designer because of its intrinsic importance.
You might think that consciousness or morality are such important things that we could make sense of a designer aiming for those.
And as a means to that, creating a universe which is conducive for the evolution of intelligent life.
Again, it seems to me that's not an unreasonable view.
If you are a tall, inclined towards such thoughts as that, consciousness and morality are special.
These are important features of the universe. They are things that give the universe value.
Then it's not unreasonable to suppose that if there were some divine being, these would be the kinds of things that it might aim for,
rather than some aesthetic quality in a beautiful spiral galaxies or black holes or whatever.
But what sort of God would a fine tuning argument lead to?
Well, suppose I give an analogy here,
imagine you discover a bridge which is constructed in such a finely tuned way that the slightest change in structure would fail to support the load.
OK. It's really ingenious. How did they manage to produce a bridge with these materials that supports that load?
That's a real sign of ingenuity. Yes, yes, but does it suggest a designer who created everything from nothing in order to produce a bridge?
No, it doesn't. If you were creating it from nothing, you'd produce stronger materials, right?
It's what it suggests is an architect who's doing fantastically well with
materials that are not actually particularly conducive to the supporting things.
So I don't actually think the fine tuning argument supports an omnipotent God,
but on behalf of the theist, if I were a theist, I don't think this would be particularly worry me.
You know, a God who's capable of setting up the fundamental constants of a universe.
That's pretty good. Let's not worry about the fact that it doesn't point to complete omnipotence because of course,
an omnipotent God, if it's such a God, wanted to create intelligent life, they could do it just like that.
They don't have to go through thirteen point eight billion years to produce it, right?
But a fine tuning God maybe would have reason to do it that way.
So personally, I think giving up infinity is not a big problem.
I'm far more worrying is the lack of evidence for the goodness of any divine being.
Because the problem here is there's an evil God, let's call them anti-God.
Right? Imagine a being with all the characteristics of God, except that it's evil rather than good.
That would also have a motive for creating a universe capable of evolving intelligent, sensitive life,
because only if you have intelligent, sensitive life can you have suffering and profound suffering.
So the universe could have been designed for profound suffering rather than for profound good.
So let's come around to the question of morality and God.
What reason might we have for thinking that God is good rather than evil and we coming round here to the problem of evil, obviously?
Well, it's not surprising that historically views of morality have tended to think in terms of moral commands as coming from a commander.
If you think we think of morality as involving requirements, requirements on us to do or refrain from doing certain things,
and it's natural to think that a command or requirement requires a commander or something that's doing the requiring.
So the idea of a morally authoritative creator is quite a natural one.
And the divine command theory of morality certainly used to be the the orthodoxy that what good and evil are prescribed by God?
And we've got a quote from Dostoyevsky there without God in the future life.
Everything is permitted. Now, there's a suggestion about a future life is that hints at future reward and punishment.
OK, if I can do something wicked and get away with it, you know,
why wouldn't I do that if I can rob somebody or maybe maybe kill them and steal all their stuff and get away with it?
Why wouldn't I do it? And the thought is, well, because you'll be punished in a future life if you do.
And if there's no God, no future life, then all right, I might as well go ahead and do it.
But let's think more about as it were, the moral metaphysics.
Get rid of the prudential aspect of it.
The question of whether I'm going to be punished in an afterlife and ask, What is it that actually makes an action good or bad?
Is it actually God's commanding it that makes something obligatory, assuming, you know there is a god for the moment?
Well, this is commonly known as the youth afro dilemma because it was raised in Plato's dialogue
you throw and we get the question is what is Pius loved by the gods because it is pious?
Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? So what's the appropriate order of explanation?
Is. Does God command what he commands because he knows it to be good, in which case what is good has to be kind of prior to his commanding it?
Or is it, on the other hand, that his commanding it actually makes it good?
Now, if you go for the former case, then God is not actually providing the basis of morality, right?
What what is right and wrong is in a sense, independent of God.
God is simply commanding what he knows infallibly to be good.
If you go on for the second line,
then actually the problems are much more serious because effectively you're saying no matter what God commanded, it would be good.
And if God commanded the torturing a baby's fine, that would be the good thing to do.
Now this is not just theoretical. This isn't just theoretical, because there are, I'm afraid, passages in the Bible.
Well, particularly in the Pentateuch. So we're talking Deuteronomy here, which is a book that is held sacred by Jews, by Christians, by Muslims.
And it actually prescribes. Putting males to the sword,
taking women and children as bounty and even genocide of six whole nations because they happen to be living in the wrong place.
So if you take the Divine Command account seriously, then there is there is a risk that you take these ancient holy books,
which were often written, obviously written at a time when life generally was far more barbaric, when moral views were far less refined.
And you take these as actually prescribing what's good and bad, but does not seem to be a good way to go.
Just to be clear, I'm quite sure that most theists would would absolutely reject this.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that most things would go along with this.
The evidence is that the Deuteronomy was written centuries after it purports
to be in order to justify a cult of religious purity centred on Jerusalem.
And that was probably more to do with tax collecting and unifying the country
than it was to do with any any genuine commands of God as a political document.
The Ten Commandments are often obviously held in far more respect.
But I do want to point out that they don't provide a very good basis for morality in general because they're so rooted in the religion.
The first four commands are all to do with honouring God.
So. We have very good reason for wanting to seek a basis in morality that is independent of religion, even if we are religious.
OK? If you believe in a good God and you want that to actually be a substantial claim, there is a good god.
You don't want to be saying just with God commands what God commands.
You want to be saying that that God actually has a nature such that he commands what are genuinely good things independently of his will.
So you still have the work to do of moral metaphysics,
you still have to work out a theory of good and evil that is that is independent of God's existence.
Now, there's no reason for being pessimistic here.
OK? It's just not true that if God doesn't exist, everything is permitted and morality goes out the window.
I've already pointed out that most atheist philosophers are actually moral realists.
So, you know, don't worry that without theism, morality falls down.
It doesn't. We've got quite a lot of things on which we can base an objective is to account of morality.
Including an evolutionary account.
I've pointed out before that it's quite easy to explain the development of morality in human society with an evolutionary perspective.
Another interesting fact here that the specific thing that backs this up is the correlation of brain size and social group.
It turns out that if you rank animals according to the typical size of the social group and the size of their brain, there is a strong correlation.
There's good reason to think that the reason our brains have evolved to be so powerful is largely because we are such a cooperative species.
So it's not surprising that we end up with moral codes,
it's not surprising that we end up systematise them and then society gets bigger, we just systematise them more and so forth.
You can perfectly well make sense of morality.
And however you do that, it is possible, therefore, to form a theistic theory which is not going to be sort of trivial.
God commands what he commands. You can believe in a God who is a good god.
Meaning that his intentions broadly align with what we consider to be good things
that is favouring flourishing people getting along together rather than suffering,
on the other hand. Now, the problem is, of course, that if we look around the world, we do find an awful lot of suffering.
So we've got our hypothesis, where is the evidence to support it?
We've seen the fine tuning argument can potentially give some evidence for designer.
But as I mentioned, there's no obvious reason why that design has to be good rather than evil.
So if we focus on the moral question, this is still very much alive.
Now on your reading list, a couple of sections of Hume's dialogues,
10 and 11 feature and Hume pushes the problem of evil very eloquently and very strongly.
He first introduced it like this Epicurus is old. Questions are yet unanswered.
Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able but not willing then, is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing?
Whence then is evil? Now they're humans presenting it as it, or it looks like he's presenting it as a logical problem.
If we believe in an omnipotent good God, a God good, a good God, who would presumably want to eliminate evil as far as he can,
then if he's omnipotent, you wouldn't expect there to be any evil. But there is.
Therefore God doesn't exist.
That seems to be the implicit argument, and that's an example of the what's called the logical problem of evil or the consistency problem.
But notice there are two other variants of the problem of evil.
One of them suggests that the existence of God, though perhaps logically possible, is not plausible given the existence of evil.
Hume actually focuses more on the inferential problem, namely given the there is evil in the world.
Maybe there could be a God, but you've got no grounds for inferring a good god.
So notice that those are subtly different.
We've also got different variants of the problem of evil, depending on the quantity of evil that it appeals to.
So some people might say actually if you've got any evil at all in the world that refutes God's existence or counts against God's existence,
or at least makes it impossible to infer that there's a God. But you might more modestly say, well, no.
I can see how there could be some evil in the world. Consistently with God, but not the amount there is.
So the quantitative problem of evil or the quantitative variants of the problem of evil.
Focus on the amount of evil and maybe the variety of evils that there are in the world, rather than just the fact that there may be a smidgen.
Another important distinction within the problem of evil is distinguishes between natural and moral evil,
sometimes called the the problem of pain that is the problem of suffering as opposed to the problem of sin that is moral evil.
So a reason why this is very important is because it's associated with the freewill defence.
So as we'll see later, a major way of answering the problem of evil is to appeal to the free will of humans and potentially other agents,
saying that God isn't responsible for what we do freely.
And therefore, if we freely do something wrong, God can't be blamed.
You know, it's good that God gave us freedom. It's a shame we abused it.
Now, that sort of answer can work well, perhaps with the problem of sin morally evil, which arises from the existence of evil behaviour.
But the problem of pain suffering includes obviously the suffering of animals before humans ever
appeared on the scene and suffering that arises from diseases or floods or droughts or famines,
which at least in older times, could not be blamed on the free actions of people.
Maybe a bit different now with, you know, if with climate change that may be caused by humans and so forth.
But at least historically quite different.
So looking at these various variants of the problem of evil, what's the most difficult one for the theist to deal with?
Well, I would say it's the evidential problem of rendering God's existence reasonably in favourable or even perhaps barely plausible,
given the extent of moral and especially naturally evil evil that we see in the world.
So. The hardest problem to the theist, natural evil and the extent of it and not the idea that that necessarily refutes the existence of God.
But the idea that it makes the existence of a perfect God highly implausible.
And I've pointed out that that is quite closely related to the design argument.
Remember when you read Hume, he is actually considering evil in the context of the design argument.
So in a sense, he's given himself a relatively easy task as he says his opponent, a theist,
has to tug the labouring order to actually prove the existence of God from a world which may seem hard even to reconcile with the existence of God.
You know, it's it's one thing to to show that the hypothesis of God is consistent with the world.
It's quite another to show that the world requires the hypothesis of God, and that's what he was attacking.
Notice that what I said earlier implies that the design argument now in the 21st century
potentially has resources coming from physics that simply weren't there in humans day.
So although Darwin's theory of evolution, which was about 100 years after Hume was writing the dialogues,
although that obviously weakened the design argument in certain respects the biological one in recent years,
discoveries in physics have arguably strengthened it. OK, so let's look at some of the oldest, I'm obviously able to do only a quick survey here.
I'm trying to give you an understanding of the general area and what the main points in it are.
A sea odyssey is an attempt to explain away the evil in the world from a theistic perspective.
OK, so here, first of all, are two very weak the Odyssey's.
One is the idea evil is an illusion. There isn't really any evil in the world.
First problem that completely undermines morality. If there isn't any evil in the world, then we have no obligation to eliminate evil.
And if evil is an illusion, well, surely you can still distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant illusions.
Why do we get such unpleasant ones? We have to have some evil in the world to appreciate the good.
Well, let's suppose that were true, that wouldn't merit lots and lots of evil in the world, just a little bit.
Right. I only need to have two fake ones to appreciate for the rest of my life the absence of toothache.
In any way, if God is omnipotent, if God can create us how he wants to.
Then he could create this in such a way that we appreciate good without having to experience evil first.
Contingent fact of human nature. If we can't experience or enjoy our benefits without first experiencing the opposite.
Here are two extreme solutions to the problem of evil. One is just to give up the idea that God is all perfect.
Maybe he's not all powerful. Maybe he's not all good. OK, that gives up the problem of evil, right?
We're not. I'm not going to consider those because that's not the problem that we are discussing here.
We are discussing whether whether God with a capital G can be reconciled with the existence of evil.
A more popular extreme solution is just to say God's goodness is a total mystery to us.
But notice that this, again, is really problematic, if you say God's goodness may be completely different from what we think of goodness as being.
You've undermined practical morality. OK.
Maybe torturing babies really is a good thing.
Maybe when we see all the suffering arising from disease and famine and all, maybe that's really good rather than evil.
So we shouldn't be trying to stop it. And another problem is that if you take that line, actually, if you believe in an afterlife,
there's no reason for supposing that to be any more pleasant. Right? If actually the way we see the world just is how God wants it to be.
And our conception of what is good and evil is just wrong, then that's going to apply to the afterlife as well.
Final point There's no reason to suppose that God will be truthful. We think of telling the truth is good and lying is bad.
But if actually God's morality is quite different from ours or incomprehensible to us,
then we've no reason for trusting any supposed holy books, even if we knew that they came from God.
So these sorts of extreme solutions are really not helpful.
Coming now to Hume's discussion of the design arguments in the context of the problem of evil.
He focuses on this twice, actually, enquiry 11, I don't think is on your reading list,
but it's it's well worth looking at your reading other parts of the enquiry.
You'll notice, by the way, that he presents both dialogue section.
Sorry Enquiry Section 11 and the dialogues are in the form of a dialogue.
Why he's being prudent. He doesn't want to show he's his own.
What I suspect is an atheist hand.
So he he puts the sceptical points in the mouth of a sceptical friend of whose principles he can by no means approve an enquiry.
11 when you read that sort of thing, you know. Take that with a big pinch of salt.
Now, the point he makes an enquiry 11 is is basically this you can't argue from the world to a supposed perfect creator.
And then argue back from that perfect creator to draw new conclusions about the world that are radically different from those we see.
So if, for example, the world, as we see it, is full of distributive injustice.
We can't argue from that to a god of a certain character and then say,
given the character of that God, we can be sure that there will be perfect justice.
And therefore there must be an afterlife in which perfect justice is established.
Something's gone wrong there. OK? One of one of those two arguments has to be wrong.
The way the second could be wrong is we've got such a misunderstanding of God's goodness that actually distributive in justice is a good thing,
in which case the afterlife will be the same. All right. The porch view is appears in in the dialogues in section 10.
The idea here is that this world is just a porch to a far greater building, and the porch may look pretty awful,
but actually the afterlife, everything is going to be made fine and then we'll see the the wonderful design of the whole thing.
An example I like giving there is I go into a restaurant.
I have a first course, which is absolutely disgusting.
And then I say, Well, that was so bad. The main course is bound to be absolutely wonderful to compensate that.
That is not logical reasoning. No, the evidence I have so far is that the food produced here is lousy.
So the reason that the rational implication is that the next course will probably be lousy to.
In the dialogues clear, Murthy's who is actually the main advocate of the design argument,
so he's a believer, is given the job of refuting the porch view.
And he points out that it's just building one hypothesis upon another.
You are just supposing that there is this afterlife where everything will be made fine.
It may be true, but that's just a conjecture. You haven't got anything to support it.
Another approach to the problem of evil, which can seem initially very tempting, is associated with John Hick.
He says.
The world, as we experience it, is a pretty difficult world, we encounter a lot of challenges, a lot of suffering, a lot of pain and so forth.
But actually, these ordeals have a purpose.
They build our character and they they build us into the sorts of beings who will be appropriately mature morally to enter heaven.
So again, it somewhat relies on the idea of an afterlife.
But as Mackie points out, this, this kind of tha odyssey is hopeless against an omni, perfect creator.
Absolutely perfect. Hopeless because if God is omnipotent, he can create whatever causal laws he wants.
He's not like in the position of a parent who allows a child to suffer for its own good.
Now I may allow my child to stumble around and fall.
Rather than helping it everywhere because the child is learning,
it's getting better at walking or whatever, and it's learning that falling can be painful and so on.
That's a useful lesson. But if I'm an omnipotent God, I can just create a creature who doesn't need to go through all that suffering on the way.
So so far, this looks pretty bleak for the theism given, given the evil in the world,
but I want to point out that there is an approach that could potentially work.
First of all, let's look at the notion of omnipotence. God can do anything.
That's the first approximation. OK, so can God create a stone that is too heavy for him to lift?
Paradox, if he can, then there's something God can't do, namely lift that stone,
if you can't, then there's something he can't do, namely create such a stone.
Right? And this sort of thing is sometimes put against the ISM is showing that it's intrinsically contradictory.
Again, you can see potential conflicts between omnipotence and omniscience.
You might say, can God create a creature that is able to act without God's knowledge?
And whichever way you go, you seem to get a contradiction. Can God create gratuitous evils in the world?
If he can, then he's not perfectly good, if he can't, then he's not omnipotent.
Now I personally don't think these kinds of objections against the ISM have much force.
After all, it's up to the theist to define theism as they want to define it.
And I don't see why they shouldn't define it in such a way that it's free of contradiction. So they can say, when I say God is omnipotent, I mean,
God is able to do anything which is logically possible for a perfectly good and omniscient being to do.
That's free of contradiction. OK.
So against that background, it might be that there are certain things that it's logically impossible for God to do.
And therefore, he's not being able to do it is no limit on his omnipotence.
He might not be able to create a world, for example, in which there is sympathy, genuine sympathy without any suffering.
He might not be able to create a world in which there is courage without any danger.
He can't create a world in which there is scientific endeavour to discover cures for diseases unless there are diseases in the first place.
And Swinburne suggests that unless the world is conducted by regular laws, there would be no scope for us to discover things about the world,
and discovering things about the world is a very good thing and it empowers us.
It extends our our free will,
our power of action by learning about things so you can see that there are good things that arise in the world from evil things.
And it may be arguably that all of the evils in the world are, in Mackie's phrase, absorbed evils,
meaning the evils that can be accounted for in terms of the good by-products that they bring.
Now, actually, that claim, which is associated with life, it seems rather implausible.
And again, notice the problem we've already seen twice before in this lecture.
It subverts morality. If you actually claim that this world is the best of all possible worlds,
that all the evils that we see in the world or apparent evils are merely means to greater goods.
Then actually, morality seems to go out the window because whatever we do will be for the best.
And again, you get the afterlife problem. This is the best things can be.
Then don't expect things to be any better in the afterlife.
But here we get the biggest single move in this debate, which is to do with the free will defence.
And I want to explain why the free will defence is so crucial here.
So in only perfect God would not initiate a causal process that was causally determined to produce an absorbed evil that seems very plausible,
absorptive, or maybe they'll allow a bit of suffering to promote sympathy, a bit of danger to promote courage,
but unobserved evil that is gratuitous evil that doesn't bring any benefits.
God would not initiate a causal process that was determined to bring that about.
So how might it have come about? Well, it might have come about by some contra causal process and an undetermined process.
But why would God put a non deterministic process into the world that risks bringing about nasty things?
Well, presumably only because that undetermined process is itself a good thing,
but it's a good thing that the world contains that contra causal undetermined process.
Can you think of any process that might be thought intrinsically good and contra causal?
Well, there's only one candidate, right? Free will. So you can see why the free will defence is logically playing a crucial role here,
the free will defence potentially allows God off the hook with respect to an absorbed evils.
I'm only going to have time here to just highlight some problems with the free will defence.
Notice that it requires incompatible ism. The argument I'd just given only works if free will is undetermined contra causal.
Right. So a compatible IST God is not going to be able to use it.
A compatible IST God would see that free will is compatible with determinism and therefore
would create free beings who are causally determined to do good rather than evil.
So this explains, right at the beginning of the lecture, I pointed out that theists generally or incompatible list is incompatible.
ISM is strongly correlated with theism amongst philosophers.
This isn't a coincidence. The free world events can only explain moral evil, not natural evil.
So why is it that animals suffered so much before humans came on the scene and quite independently of human action?
Well, you can explain that using the free will defence, but if you're going to do that,
you're going to have to postulate free fallen angels or spirits.
You know, God created these beings, some of whom went astray, like Satan.
And they are responsible for the suffering of animals and so forth.
Problem that seems to be just building one hypothesis upon another.
Another problem, if you think back to Swinburn case that theism has merit because it's a peculiarly simple theory.
If actually you're having to augment it with supplementary theories about angelic beings and so forth, it's far less simple.
So it's losing the theoretical benefits and notice also that if freedom carries logically a risk of sin.
In other words, you have to say if God creates a free being, he can only do so with the necessary risk that it will go astray.
If you think that is a condition on freedom, then you've got to apply that to angels as well and may be God.
So again, you've got this problem. How can you infer any different, anything different from the afterlife?
How can you explain why God supposedly can be both free and perfectly good?
And yet we cannot. And there's also a more general problem, so we come back to anti-God, just like with the fine tuning argument.
It's not easy to to show why that points in favour of a perfectly good God rather than the perfectly evil God.
We have the problem here that with all these, the Odyssey's,
all these attempts to explain how a perfectly good god can be compatible with the existence of evil in the world.
Invert the hypothesis.
Yet take the hypothesis of a perfectly evil God, and you might think that's completely implausible because there's so much good in the world.
The trouble is the same arguments that are used to explain away the evil in the world from a theistic
type of perspective can be used to explain away the good in the world from an an anti god hypothesis.
And given that fact, perhaps the most reasonable conclusion would be that if there is an omnipotent omniscient
being actually that being maybe doesn't give a damn about morality or about us,
which would be sad, but I hope you found this interesting and provocative.
Thank you very much for coming to this series of lectures, and I hope you've enjoyed them.