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Welcome to the last of eight general philosophy lectures.

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Today, we'll be talking about God and morality, focussing, for example, on the problem of evil, but also various related issues.

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Here we've got Monty Python's rendering of God. David Hume, who we've seen a lot of John Mackey.

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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.

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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?

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Now, it's important to bear in mind when thinking about general philosophy,

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particularly in an historical context that back in the 17th and 18th centuries,

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when a lot of these topics started or were discussed in a recognisably modern form, virtually everyone believed in God.

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Hume probably being the most conspicuous exception.

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But it's very striking that that belief informs a lot of philosophical views that are still very current.

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And just as an illustration, there was a big survey of over 900 professional philosophers back in 2009.

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Because we're now nearly a decade on from that and probably views will have changed more.

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But at that time, fourteen point six percent of the respondents said they were theists.

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Seventy two point eight percent atheist. So significantly more atheists.

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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.

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It's about mind than atheists. If you're a theist, you believe that there is an immaterial spirit, an infinite,

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immaterial spirit in which case believing that we are a little immaterial.

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Spirit's made in God's image and so forth.

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It's not at all surprising that you would hold that view, whereas you can see that most atheists would deny it on free.

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Will you see compatible? ISM is the majority view amongst atheists amongst theorists.

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Libertarianism is significantly more popular.

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We'll see why in this lecture. Personal identity atheists are more likely than theorists to think in terms of psychological continuity theists

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significantly more likely than atheists to think that there's some further fact beyond the manifest phenomena.

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For example, a sole.

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And on ethics, you will see that consequential ism utilitarianism, for example, is significantly more popular amongst atheists, not a majority view,

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but nevertheless significantly more popular amongst them, whereas the ontological views of ethics are significantly more popular amongst theorists.

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One important thing that I want to draw to your attention, though with moral realism,

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it's not at all surprising to find that things in general are moral realists.

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They believe that there are, you know, moral facts. But notice also that we have a clear majority of atheists being moral realists.

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So it's simply not true that in general, atheism pushes people firmly in the direction of A. realism.

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OK, so the question of God is a big question in every sense, and it still is.

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And one thing that I warn you against is a sort of parochialism.

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One very important virtue of studying philosophy historically,

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is that we can look back to periods when people's assumptions and beliefs were very different from now.

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So, you know, the fact that maybe most philosophers now are atheists shouldn't blind us to the fact that over history,

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huge numbers of very clever people have been atheists and the arguments deserve examination on their own merits.

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Now, obviously, different religions have different views of gods, and here we are,

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confining ourselves to one particular notion of God God with a capital G.

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And that is being that is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient.

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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.

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Now, why might you postulate a perfect gold Hume?

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Perhaps not surprisingly, has a very cynical answer. He thinks it's largely due to flattery.

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A tribe has its own particular God. And then in order to ingratiate itself with that God,

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the people end up just giving according more and more power and excellence and wonderfulness to it.

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And so you end up with a rather exalted view of your particular God.

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More philosophically, perhaps. Richard Swinburne argues at length that an infinite,

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perfect God has certain theoretical merits that postulating an infinite God as opposed to a finite God or a whole retinue of finite gods.

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It gives you a hypothesis which is simpler and in science,

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we generally prefer simple hypotheses that explain the phenomena over more complex hypotheses.

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So the claim is that the belief in God has a certain theoretical merit.

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If we find that it gives a good account of the phenomena, that is good reason for preferring it.

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So according to Swinburn, who's probably the most influential recent philosopher of religion on that side,

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arguing for God in this way, the existence of God can be thought of as something like a scientific hypothesis.

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The world as we experience it is just the sort we would expect to perfect God to create Occam's razor that is preferred.

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Generally, simple hypotheses don't postulate more than you need to and scientific practise suggest.

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We should prefer the simplest and most comprehensive explanatory hypothesis.

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So one God without any limits is preferable to, for example, the hypothesis of lots of demigods.

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OK, so far, so good,

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but I want to point out that there are some problems with taking the hypothesis of God as being well-established by scientific criteria

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because there are some sorts of things that we look for in scientific explanations that the God hypothesis doesn't seem to provide.

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It's very imprecise in the predictions it makes. OK.

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Obviously, the world, as we experience it, has a lot of apparent imperfections.

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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,

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we clearly have to accept that inferring an absolutely perfect world from a perfect creator just isn't on.

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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.

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It's quite non-specific, it doesn't explain in detail why one thing happens rather than another.

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Whereas in scientific hypotheses, typically we do look for just that.

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We look for a hypothesis that will predict a specific thing and we can test whether that thing is true,

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whether it actually happens and thus either corroborate or refuse our hypothesis.

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God's ways of acting seem to be completely different from anything we are familiar with,

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our own actions in the world are mediated by brains and nerves and so on.

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We are not familiar with any well-established action at a distance by mines on bodies, so that counts against the God hypothesis.

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It's it's postulating something that seems to be radically different from anything that is well-established.

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Of course, there are all sorts of problems about how mind and body interact, even in our own case.

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And I've said before, but I think that there's a lot that is mysterious about that.

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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.

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And it seems to be therefore radically out of line with our background experience.

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So there are some pluses and there are some minuses. Now, interestingly, in recent years,

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an argument has come about which I personally think is by far the most interesting development in natural theology since Hume wrote,

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except perhaps I suppose, Darwin. I mean, Hume criticised the design argument very effectively in his dialogues concerning natural religion.

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Obviously, Darwin's discovery of evolution corroborated Hume's doubts.

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The fine tuning argument gives a prospect of an argument for theism,

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which can potentially have more power, I think, than any other argument that's being produced.

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The jury's out, but let me explain why I think this is so interesting.

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So the fine tuning argument claims that the constants of nature are very finely adjusted,

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and if they were just slightly different, the world would be completely unlike what we experience.

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So an example would be gravity as opposed to the Big Bang,

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you've got a certain constant gravitational constant which dictates what acceleration there is on bodies due to each other's mass.

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And you've got strong evidence for a Big Bang about 13 and a half billion years ago or whatever.

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Which apparently involves a huge explosion whereby matter flew off in different directions.

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Now, clearly, you get an interplay between the momentum of the matter going apart from the initial singularity.

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And on the other hand, you get gravitational force between those particles.

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Now, if the Big Bang is too large relative to the gravitational force, everything just flies apart.

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You don't get an interesting universe if, on the other hand, gravity is too strong relative to the initial Big Bang.

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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,

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you need quite a delicate balance between these two things.

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And the claim is in this and quite a number of other cases that the constants of nature of very finely

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balanced in such a way that if any one of these multitude of constants have been very slightly different,

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nothing like the world we see with complex organisation, beauty, thinking animals etc could have come about.

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Now, I think the contemporary verdict on the fine tuning argument, as I say, the jury is out.

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We do not yet have an established solid physics.

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Relativity and quantum mechanics are currently in conflict.

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Dark matter, dark energy, all things that have only been postulated relatively recently.

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They apparently constitute something like 95 percent of the mass of the universe.

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So it's not like we've had a physical theory with regard to the universe as a whole,

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which has endured, you know, for 100 years without any serious questions.

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There are lots of questions. There's a problem about making probabilistic judgements about the universe because we've only got the one case.

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So naturally, one might raise scepticism about arguing from a single case to such a momentous

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conclusion is that there is a designer who set up all these constants just so.

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And there are alternative theories. How else might we explain the apparent fine tuning of these constants?

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Well, one way that many people find appealing is the thought that there are zillions of different universes we just inhabit

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one and all these different universes may have completely different set ups of constants and laws of nature.

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Now, if that were true, if you really did have zillions of universes, all with slightly different settings of the fundamental laws and constants,

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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.

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And observers would only evolve in a universe that was set up accordingly.

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So it would be no surprise that we find the universe we're in is like that.

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So that is it's a bit like an evolutionary theory in a way.

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It's a selection effect whereby only those universes that are appropriately set up lead to the development of intelligent life.

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So, not surprisingly, intelligent living things find themselves in a universe where all the constants seem to be finely adjusted.

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But to give my own view on the argument, whined forward a thousand years, suppose in a thousand years time,

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all those anomalies in current physics have been eliminated, got a consistent, coherent physical theory.

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It's got a number of fundamental constants.

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And suppose in a thousand years, nobody has explained the particular values of those constants that just brute facts.

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It's not like there's some deeper theory that explains why they all the way they are,

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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.

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Have these constants been slightly different?

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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.

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So it's been convincingly established,

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even tiny deviations from the observed actual values of the fundamental constants would imply a lifeless universe.

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Well, it seems to me then that the we'd have two options.

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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.

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In other words, a designer. It would seem to me in that context that that is not an unreasonable hypothesis to make.

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The alternative is to postulate some selection effect amongst multiple universes.

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And unlike many of my unbelieving colleagues, I actually think one here is not unreasonable.

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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,

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more universes. We've already got one universe. It's simpler to postulate more of them.

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But I think the theist who comes along and says, actually,

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I think it's simpler to postulate one universe with a designer than zillions of universes, all with their different constants.

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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.

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You can find it on David Hume dot org in the scholarship section in which I and the psychologist actually were

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discussing the philosophy and psychology of religious belief and trying to come to a sort of rational midway.

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How what space was there for rational religious belief in the context of criticisms like humans?

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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,

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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.

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And I wrote a response in 2017 in which I go into some detail about that.

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So if you if you find this stuff interesting, do you take a look?

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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,

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I don't think it's very strong, but it certainly has potential.

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But let's suppose we go that way. What is the universe fine tuned for?

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Well, a complex universe. It doesn't look like it's particularly fine tuned for intelligent life,

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but you might take the view that intelligent life is an appropriate target for a designer because of its intrinsic importance.

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You might think that consciousness or morality are such important things that we could make sense of a designer aiming for those.

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And as a means to that, creating a universe which is conducive for the evolution of intelligent life.

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Again, it seems to me that's not an unreasonable view.

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If you are a tall, inclined towards such thoughts as that, consciousness and morality are special.

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These are important features of the universe. They are things that give the universe value.

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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,

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rather than some aesthetic quality in a beautiful spiral galaxies or black holes or whatever.

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But what sort of God would a fine tuning argument lead to?

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Well, suppose I give an analogy here,

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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.

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OK. It's really ingenious. How did they manage to produce a bridge with these materials that supports that load?

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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?

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No, it doesn't. If you were creating it from nothing, you'd produce stronger materials, right?

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It's what it suggests is an architect who's doing fantastically well with

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materials that are not actually particularly conducive to the supporting things.

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So I don't actually think the fine tuning argument supports an omnipotent God,

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but on behalf of the theist, if I were a theist, I don't think this would be particularly worry me.

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You know, a God who's capable of setting up the fundamental constants of a universe.

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That's pretty good. Let's not worry about the fact that it doesn't point to complete omnipotence because of course,

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an omnipotent God, if it's such a God, wanted to create intelligent life, they could do it just like that.

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They don't have to go through thirteen point eight billion years to produce it, right?

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But a fine tuning God maybe would have reason to do it that way.

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So personally, I think giving up infinity is not a big problem.

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I'm far more worrying is the lack of evidence for the goodness of any divine being.

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Because the problem here is there's an evil God, let's call them anti-God.

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Right? Imagine a being with all the characteristics of God, except that it's evil rather than good.

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That would also have a motive for creating a universe capable of evolving intelligent, sensitive life,

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because only if you have intelligent, sensitive life can you have suffering and profound suffering.

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So the universe could have been designed for profound suffering rather than for profound good.

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So let's come around to the question of morality and God.

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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?

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Well, it's not surprising that historically views of morality have tended to think in terms of moral commands as coming from a commander.

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If you think we think of morality as involving requirements, requirements on us to do or refrain from doing certain things,

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and it's natural to think that a command or requirement requires a commander or something that's doing the requiring.

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So the idea of a morally authoritative creator is quite a natural one.

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And the divine command theory of morality certainly used to be the the orthodoxy that what good and evil are prescribed by God?

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And we've got a quote from Dostoyevsky there without God in the future life.

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Everything is permitted. Now, there's a suggestion about a future life is that hints at future reward and punishment.

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OK, if I can do something wicked and get away with it, you know,

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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?

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Why wouldn't I do it? And the thought is, well, because you'll be punished in a future life if you do.

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And if there's no God, no future life, then all right, I might as well go ahead and do it.

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But let's think more about as it were, the moral metaphysics.

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Get rid of the prudential aspect of it.

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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?

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Is it actually God's commanding it that makes something obligatory, assuming, you know there is a god for the moment?

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Well, this is commonly known as the youth afro dilemma because it was raised in Plato's dialogue

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you throw and we get the question is what is Pius loved by the gods because it is pious?

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Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? So what's the appropriate order of explanation?

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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?

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Or is it, on the other hand, that his commanding it actually makes it good?

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Now, if you go for the former case, then God is not actually providing the basis of morality, right?

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What what is right and wrong is in a sense, independent of God.

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God is simply commanding what he knows infallibly to be good.

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If you go on for the second line,

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then actually the problems are much more serious because effectively you're saying no matter what God commanded, it would be good.

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And if God commanded the torturing a baby's fine, that would be the good thing to do.

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Now this is not just theoretical. This isn't just theoretical, because there are, I'm afraid, passages in the Bible.

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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.

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And it actually prescribes. Putting males to the sword,

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taking women and children as bounty and even genocide of six whole nations because they happen to be living in the wrong place.

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So if you take the Divine Command account seriously, then there is there is a risk that you take these ancient holy books,

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which were often written, obviously written at a time when life generally was far more barbaric, when moral views were far less refined.

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And you take these as actually prescribing what's good and bad, but does not seem to be a good way to go.

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Just to be clear, I'm quite sure that most theists would would absolutely reject this.

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I'm not suggesting for a moment that most things would go along with this.

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The evidence is that the Deuteronomy was written centuries after it purports

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to be in order to justify a cult of religious purity centred on Jerusalem.

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And that was probably more to do with tax collecting and unifying the country

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than it was to do with any any genuine commands of God as a political document.

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The Ten Commandments are often obviously held in far more respect.

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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.

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The first four commands are all to do with honouring God.

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So. We have very good reason for wanting to seek a basis in morality that is independent of religion, even if we are religious.

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OK? If you believe in a good God and you want that to actually be a substantial claim, there is a good god.

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You don't want to be saying just with God commands what God commands.

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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.

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So you still have the work to do of moral metaphysics,

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you still have to work out a theory of good and evil that is that is independent of God's existence.

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Now, there's no reason for being pessimistic here.

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OK? It's just not true that if God doesn't exist, everything is permitted and morality goes out the window.

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I've already pointed out that most atheist philosophers are actually moral realists.

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So, you know, don't worry that without theism, morality falls down.

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It doesn't. We've got quite a lot of things on which we can base an objective is to account of morality.

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Including an evolutionary account.

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I've pointed out before that it's quite easy to explain the development of morality in human society with an evolutionary perspective.

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Another interesting fact here that the specific thing that backs this up is the correlation of brain size and social group.

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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.

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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.

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So it's not surprising that we end up with moral codes,

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it's not surprising that we end up systematise them and then society gets bigger, we just systematise them more and so forth.

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You can perfectly well make sense of morality.

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And however you do that, it is possible, therefore, to form a theistic theory which is not going to be sort of trivial.

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God commands what he commands. You can believe in a God who is a good god.

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Meaning that his intentions broadly align with what we consider to be good things

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that is favouring flourishing people getting along together rather than suffering,

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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.

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So we've got our hypothesis, where is the evidence to support it?

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We've seen the fine tuning argument can potentially give some evidence for designer.

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But as I mentioned, there's no obvious reason why that design has to be good rather than evil.

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So if we focus on the moral question, this is still very much alive.

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Now on your reading list, a couple of sections of Hume's dialogues,

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10 and 11 feature and Hume pushes the problem of evil very eloquently and very strongly.

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He first introduced it like this Epicurus is old. Questions are yet unanswered.

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Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.

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Is he able but not willing then, is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing?

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Whence then is evil? Now they're humans presenting it as it, or it looks like he's presenting it as a logical problem.

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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,

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then if he's omnipotent, you wouldn't expect there to be any evil. But there is.

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Therefore God doesn't exist.

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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.

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But notice there are two other variants of the problem of evil.

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One of them suggests that the existence of God, though perhaps logically possible, is not plausible given the existence of evil.

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Hume actually focuses more on the inferential problem, namely given the there is evil in the world.

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Maybe there could be a God, but you've got no grounds for inferring a good god.

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So notice that those are subtly different.

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We've also got different variants of the problem of evil, depending on the quantity of evil that it appeals to.

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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,

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or at least makes it impossible to infer that there's a God. But you might more modestly say, well, no.

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I can see how there could be some evil in the world. Consistently with God, but not the amount there is.

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So the quantitative problem of evil or the quantitative variants of the problem of evil.

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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.

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Another important distinction within the problem of evil is distinguishes between natural and moral evil,

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sometimes called the the problem of pain that is the problem of suffering as opposed to the problem of sin that is moral evil.

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So a reason why this is very important is because it's associated with the freewill defence.

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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,

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saying that God isn't responsible for what we do freely.

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And therefore, if we freely do something wrong, God can't be blamed.

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You know, it's good that God gave us freedom. It's a shame we abused it.

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Now, that sort of answer can work well, perhaps with the problem of sin morally evil, which arises from the existence of evil behaviour.

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But the problem of pain suffering includes obviously the suffering of animals before humans ever

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appeared on the scene and suffering that arises from diseases or floods or droughts or famines,

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which at least in older times, could not be blamed on the free actions of people.

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Maybe a bit different now with, you know, if with climate change that may be caused by humans and so forth.

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But at least historically quite different.

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So looking at these various variants of the problem of evil, what's the most difficult one for the theist to deal with?

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Well, I would say it's the evidential problem of rendering God's existence reasonably in favourable or even perhaps barely plausible,

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given the extent of moral and especially naturally evil evil that we see in the world.

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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.

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But the idea that it makes the existence of a perfect God highly implausible.

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And I've pointed out that that is quite closely related to the design argument.

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Remember when you read Hume, he is actually considering evil in the context of the design argument.

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So in a sense, he's given himself a relatively easy task as he says his opponent, a theist,

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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.

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You know, it's it's one thing to to show that the hypothesis of God is consistent with the world.

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It's quite another to show that the world requires the hypothesis of God, and that's what he was attacking.

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Notice that what I said earlier implies that the design argument now in the 21st century

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potentially has resources coming from physics that simply weren't there in humans day.

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So although Darwin's theory of evolution, which was about 100 years after Hume was writing the dialogues,

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although that obviously weakened the design argument in certain respects the biological one in recent years,

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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.

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I'm trying to give you an understanding of the general area and what the main points in it are.

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A sea odyssey is an attempt to explain away the evil in the world from a theistic perspective.

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OK, so here, first of all, are two very weak the Odyssey's.

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One is the idea evil is an illusion. There isn't really any evil in the world.

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First problem that completely undermines morality. If there isn't any evil in the world, then we have no obligation to eliminate evil.

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And if evil is an illusion, well, surely you can still distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant illusions.

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Why do we get such unpleasant ones? We have to have some evil in the world to appreciate the good.

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Well, let's suppose that were true, that wouldn't merit lots and lots of evil in the world, just a little bit.

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Right. I only need to have two fake ones to appreciate for the rest of my life the absence of toothache.

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In any way, if God is omnipotent, if God can create us how he wants to.

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Then he could create this in such a way that we appreciate good without having to experience evil first.

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Contingent fact of human nature. If we can't experience or enjoy our benefits without first experiencing the opposite.

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Here are two extreme solutions to the problem of evil. One is just to give up the idea that God is all perfect.

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Maybe he's not all powerful. Maybe he's not all good. OK, that gives up the problem of evil, right?

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We're not. I'm not going to consider those because that's not the problem that we are discussing here.

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We are discussing whether whether God with a capital G can be reconciled with the existence of evil.

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A more popular extreme solution is just to say God's goodness is a total mystery to us.

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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.

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You've undermined practical morality. OK.

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Maybe torturing babies really is a good thing.

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Maybe when we see all the suffering arising from disease and famine and all, maybe that's really good rather than evil.

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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,

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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.

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And our conception of what is good and evil is just wrong, then that's going to apply to the afterlife as well.

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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.

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But if actually God's morality is quite different from ours or incomprehensible to us,

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then we've no reason for trusting any supposed holy books, even if we knew that they came from God.

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So these sorts of extreme solutions are really not helpful.

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Coming now to Hume's discussion of the design arguments in the context of the problem of evil.

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He focuses on this twice, actually, enquiry 11, I don't think is on your reading list,

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but it's it's well worth looking at your reading other parts of the enquiry.

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You'll notice, by the way, that he presents both dialogue section.

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Sorry Enquiry Section 11 and the dialogues are in the form of a dialogue.

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Why he's being prudent. He doesn't want to show he's his own.

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What I suspect is an atheist hand.

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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.

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11 when you read that sort of thing, you know. Take that with a big pinch of salt.

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Now, the point he makes an enquiry 11 is is basically this you can't argue from the world to a supposed perfect creator.

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And then argue back from that perfect creator to draw new conclusions about the world that are radically different from those we see.

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So if, for example, the world, as we see it, is full of distributive injustice.

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We can't argue from that to a god of a certain character and then say,

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given the character of that God, we can be sure that there will be perfect justice.

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And therefore there must be an afterlife in which perfect justice is established.

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Something's gone wrong there. OK? One of one of those two arguments has to be wrong.

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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,

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in which case the afterlife will be the same. All right. The porch view is appears in in the dialogues in section 10.

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The idea here is that this world is just a porch to a far greater building, and the porch may look pretty awful,

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but actually the afterlife, everything is going to be made fine and then we'll see the the wonderful design of the whole thing.

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An example I like giving there is I go into a restaurant.

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I have a first course, which is absolutely disgusting.

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And then I say, Well, that was so bad. The main course is bound to be absolutely wonderful to compensate that.

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That is not logical reasoning. No, the evidence I have so far is that the food produced here is lousy.

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So the reason that the rational implication is that the next course will probably be lousy to.

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In the dialogues clear, Murthy's who is actually the main advocate of the design argument,

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so he's a believer, is given the job of refuting the porch view.

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And he points out that it's just building one hypothesis upon another.

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You are just supposing that there is this afterlife where everything will be made fine.

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It may be true, but that's just a conjecture. You haven't got anything to support it.

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Another approach to the problem of evil, which can seem initially very tempting, is associated with John Hick.

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He says.

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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.

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But actually, these ordeals have a purpose.

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They build our character and they they build us into the sorts of beings who will be appropriately mature morally to enter heaven.

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So again, it somewhat relies on the idea of an afterlife.

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But as Mackie points out, this, this kind of tha odyssey is hopeless against an omni, perfect creator.

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Absolutely perfect. Hopeless because if God is omnipotent, he can create whatever causal laws he wants.

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He's not like in the position of a parent who allows a child to suffer for its own good.

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Now I may allow my child to stumble around and fall.

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Rather than helping it everywhere because the child is learning,

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it's getting better at walking or whatever, and it's learning that falling can be painful and so on.

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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.

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So so far, this looks pretty bleak for the theism given, given the evil in the world,

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but I want to point out that there is an approach that could potentially work.

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First of all, let's look at the notion of omnipotence. God can do anything.

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That's the first approximation. OK, so can God create a stone that is too heavy for him to lift?

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Paradox, if he can, then there's something God can't do, namely lift that stone,

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if you can't, then there's something he can't do, namely create such a stone.

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Right? And this sort of thing is sometimes put against the ISM is showing that it's intrinsically contradictory.

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Again, you can see potential conflicts between omnipotence and omniscience.

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You might say, can God create a creature that is able to act without God's knowledge?

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And whichever way you go, you seem to get a contradiction. Can God create gratuitous evils in the world?

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If he can, then he's not perfectly good, if he can't, then he's not omnipotent.

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Now I personally don't think these kinds of objections against the ISM have much force.

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After all, it's up to the theist to define theism as they want to define it.

387
00:45:48,360 --> 00:45:54,990
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,

388
00:45:54,990 --> 00:46:01,380
God is able to do anything which is logically possible for a perfectly good and omniscient being to do.

389
00:46:01,380 --> 00:46:06,150
That's free of contradiction. OK.

390
00:46:06,150 --> 00:46:14,540
So against that background, it might be that there are certain things that it's logically impossible for God to do.

391
00:46:14,540 --> 00:46:18,620
And therefore, he's not being able to do it is no limit on his omnipotence.

392
00:46:18,620 --> 00:46:27,600
He might not be able to create a world, for example, in which there is sympathy, genuine sympathy without any suffering.

393
00:46:27,600 --> 00:46:35,620
He might not be able to create a world in which there is courage without any danger.

394
00:46:35,620 --> 00:46:44,580
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.

395
00:46:44,580 --> 00:46:53,130
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,

396
00:46:53,130 --> 00:46:59,130
and discovering things about the world is a very good thing and it empowers us.

397
00:46:59,130 --> 00:47:01,590
It extends our our free will,

398
00:47:01,590 --> 00:47:10,170
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.

399
00:47:10,170 --> 00:47:19,950
And it may be arguably that all of the evils in the world are, in Mackie's phrase, absorbed evils,

400
00:47:19,950 --> 00:47:28,790
meaning the evils that can be accounted for in terms of the good by-products that they bring.

401
00:47:28,790 --> 00:47:35,300
Now, actually, that claim, which is associated with life, it seems rather implausible.

402
00:47:35,300 --> 00:47:39,860
And again, notice the problem we've already seen twice before in this lecture.

403
00:47:39,860 --> 00:47:44,930
It subverts morality. If you actually claim that this world is the best of all possible worlds,

404
00:47:44,930 --> 00:47:52,430
that all the evils that we see in the world or apparent evils are merely means to greater goods.

405
00:47:52,430 --> 00:48:00,700
Then actually, morality seems to go out the window because whatever we do will be for the best.

406
00:48:00,700 --> 00:48:04,180
And again, you get the afterlife problem. This is the best things can be.

407
00:48:04,180 --> 00:48:09,160
Then don't expect things to be any better in the afterlife.

408
00:48:09,160 --> 00:48:16,690
But here we get the biggest single move in this debate, which is to do with the free will defence.

409
00:48:16,690 --> 00:48:23,390
And I want to explain why the free will defence is so crucial here.

410
00:48:23,390 --> 00:48:35,000
So in only perfect God would not initiate a causal process that was causally determined to produce an absorbed evil that seems very plausible,

411
00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:41,210
absorptive, or maybe they'll allow a bit of suffering to promote sympathy, a bit of danger to promote courage,

412
00:48:41,210 --> 00:48:46,370
but unobserved evil that is gratuitous evil that doesn't bring any benefits.

413
00:48:46,370 --> 00:48:52,600
God would not initiate a causal process that was determined to bring that about.

414
00:48:52,600 --> 00:49:00,910
So how might it have come about? Well, it might have come about by some contra causal process and an undetermined process.

415
00:49:00,910 --> 00:49:09,390
But why would God put a non deterministic process into the world that risks bringing about nasty things?

416
00:49:09,390 --> 00:49:14,850
Well, presumably only because that undetermined process is itself a good thing,

417
00:49:14,850 --> 00:49:21,080
but it's a good thing that the world contains that contra causal undetermined process.

418
00:49:21,080 --> 00:49:26,990
Can you think of any process that might be thought intrinsically good and contra causal?

419
00:49:26,990 --> 00:49:34,910
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,

420
00:49:34,910 --> 00:49:45,240
the free will defence potentially allows God off the hook with respect to an absorbed evils.

421
00:49:45,240 --> 00:49:50,560
I'm only going to have time here to just highlight some problems with the free will defence.

422
00:49:50,560 --> 00:49:59,680
Notice that it requires incompatible ism. The argument I'd just given only works if free will is undetermined contra causal.

423
00:49:59,680 --> 00:50:04,000
Right. So a compatible IST God is not going to be able to use it.

424
00:50:04,000 --> 00:50:10,060
A compatible IST God would see that free will is compatible with determinism and therefore

425
00:50:10,060 --> 00:50:17,230
would create free beings who are causally determined to do good rather than evil.

426
00:50:17,230 --> 00:50:24,370
So this explains, right at the beginning of the lecture, I pointed out that theists generally or incompatible list is incompatible.

427
00:50:24,370 --> 00:50:28,210
ISM is strongly correlated with theism amongst philosophers.

428
00:50:28,210 --> 00:50:35,540
This isn't a coincidence. The free world events can only explain moral evil, not natural evil.

429
00:50:35,540 --> 00:50:43,970
So why is it that animals suffered so much before humans came on the scene and quite independently of human action?

430
00:50:43,970 --> 00:50:48,980
Well, you can explain that using the free will defence, but if you're going to do that,

431
00:50:48,980 --> 00:50:52,700
you're going to have to postulate free fallen angels or spirits.

432
00:50:52,700 --> 00:50:58,910
You know, God created these beings, some of whom went astray, like Satan.

433
00:50:58,910 --> 00:51:04,300
And they are responsible for the suffering of animals and so forth.

434
00:51:04,300 --> 00:51:09,280
Problem that seems to be just building one hypothesis upon another.

435
00:51:09,280 --> 00:51:17,890
Another problem, if you think back to Swinburn case that theism has merit because it's a peculiarly simple theory.

436
00:51:17,890 --> 00:51:25,810
If actually you're having to augment it with supplementary theories about angelic beings and so forth, it's far less simple.

437
00:51:25,810 --> 00:51:34,480
So it's losing the theoretical benefits and notice also that if freedom carries logically a risk of sin.

438
00:51:34,480 --> 00:51:45,280
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.

439
00:51:45,280 --> 00:51:51,550
If you think that is a condition on freedom, then you've got to apply that to angels as well and may be God.

440
00:51:51,550 --> 00:51:56,410
So again, you've got this problem. How can you infer any different, anything different from the afterlife?

441
00:51:56,410 --> 00:52:01,030
How can you explain why God supposedly can be both free and perfectly good?

442
00:52:01,030 --> 00:52:13,040
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.

443
00:52:13,040 --> 00:52:21,980
It's not easy to to show why that points in favour of a perfectly good God rather than the perfectly evil God.

444
00:52:21,980 --> 00:52:24,680
We have the problem here that with all these, the Odyssey's,

445
00:52:24,680 --> 00:52:31,970
all these attempts to explain how a perfectly good god can be compatible with the existence of evil in the world.

446
00:52:31,970 --> 00:52:35,210
Invert the hypothesis.

447
00:52:35,210 --> 00:52:43,100
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.

448
00:52:43,100 --> 00:52:48,680
The trouble is the same arguments that are used to explain away the evil in the world from a theistic

449
00:52:48,680 --> 00:52:57,480
type of perspective can be used to explain away the good in the world from an an anti god hypothesis.

450
00:52:57,480 --> 00:53:06,690
And given that fact, perhaps the most reasonable conclusion would be that if there is an omnipotent omniscient

451
00:53:06,690 --> 00:53:14,160
being actually that being maybe doesn't give a damn about morality or about us,

452
00:53:14,160 --> 00:53:19,470
which would be sad, but I hope you found this interesting and provocative.

453
00:53:19,470 --> 00:53:29,898
Thank you very much for coming to this series of lectures, and I hope you've enjoyed them.