16 Comments

I don’t know what growth is possible for young children that are killed by natural disasters or congenital diseases.

Expand full comment
author

Yeah, that seems to me to be the most decisive objection. Really not sure what to say about that one.

Expand full comment

Also I think a good objection against fine-tuning arguments for God.

Expand full comment

The idea would be not that every particular bad thing in the world is justified but that there's something very good about a world with universal non-axiarchic laws--and such a world produces natural disasters and such as a tragic side effect.

Expand full comment

Bentham's Bulldog endorsing the existence of unalloyed goods completely independent (and even countering) of any good consequences for sentient beings, eh.

Expand full comment

To me personally, it doesn't help much. It merely shifts the problem away from explicit evil, to tragedy. So the question then is the problem of tragedy, and not just inter-personal relations tragedy, but life and death tragedy. Provides good evidence for a purposeless reality, in which case God as explanation is unnecessary.

Expand full comment

Well, I don't claim this is evidence for God, so I agree God is unnecessary as an explanation of evil. My point is theists can explain evil, and it makes sense to believe in God for other reasons. If, as I argue, God would have reasons to place us in tons and tons of different worlds, probably some of those would have exceptionless laws--but that would mean we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in such a world.

I also disagree that this is a good objection to fine-tuning--seems to me that this is just double-counting one argument. It's still surprising on atheism that the world is fine-tuned even if it's separately surprising on theism that there's so much bad stuff.

Expand full comment

No I was meaning that God is unnecessary as an explanation of reality/universe, and that it is an inadequate one. Explaining why we live in a world with exceptionless physical laws and hence tragedies is much easier without God, basically that there is no reason other than that the conditions of life took hold on Earth.

The idea against fine-tuning would be that tragedies provide good evidence the world isn’t fine-tuned, regardless of whether you think God would/should permit evil/tragediesೆ

Expand full comment

Well if God is likely to permit tragedies then the existence of tragedies can't be evidence against God. The data point of fine-tuning is that the constants of the universe fall in an extremely narrow range that supports the existence of complex structures--potentially giving rise to conscious agents. No part of the existence of tragedies negates that.

If my theodicy is right then theism makes it highly likely we'd be in a world with exceptionless physical laws and hence tragedies, so it won't be evidence against theism. Now, it won't prove theism by itself certainly, but it means evil won't be evidence against it.

Now, as for whether God is necessary--I think he is the best explanation of lots of otherwise surprising facts https://benthams.substack.com/p/god-best-explains-the-world

Expand full comment

I fear we are going in circles. My response to God permitting tragedies was that this undercuts the typical initial motivation to invoke God as an explanation of reality and also that if one maintains God as an explanation it is an extraneous one as a much simpler explanation for such a world is that it is purposeless and is the result of some random process or event.

I was supposing a version of the fine-tuning argument that was narrower than yours. But going with it as you describe I just don’t find it decisive one way or the other that physical constants are a particular way. All of it is entirely consistent either way life on earth or the earth never evolving life.

I doubt we will make much movement here on this issue as I fundamentally don’t think all things have to have an explanation.

Expand full comment

Two things come to mind. One is a comment by Jeremy Bentham on his own theories of utility. Bentham said no system can address all problems but we can design society to address some and that is better than addressing none of society's issues.

The second that always comes to mind is a little book by H.G. Wells entitled The Modern Utopia. It is actually an essay rather than a version of a perfect world, and as such before anyone begins to espouse on any utopian vision the book needs to be perused.

Ultimately Wells ends up illustrating two fallacies of any utopian vision. The first is that in order to assume any ideal one has to first assume that the ideal itself could somehow eliminate change. Inmmortality, as such, if a being is still alive does not end the body's changing, in fact it would require a much slower cellular replacement but not end it because that would not be immortality but death.

The second problem is utopians must assume all people have all the same desires and all the same personalities. If this were true then of course we would all already live in a utopia, but as we complete for resources our interests are different. This being true, then utopias must require an extreme method to enforce conformity. But methods that attempt to enforce conformity are exactly the issue utopian visionaries wish to escape so we are right back to the first problem of such visions.

And while I would totally agree with Mr. Philosophy Bear on many of his goals, I am still left wondering that they are everyone's goals since we don't already have such a society. Thus any policies to implement such goals end up using the same methodologies of enforcement And this is the history of revolutionary results that's aims were to better society.

So to actually better society, I fear we are forced to abandon utopian ideologies altogether and constantly revise aspirations as injustices of either environment or human leadership occur. It is like the pre-computerized automobile engine. The problem may not have always been the obvious problem and if the initial "fix" was unsatisfactory then another fix was attempted until the issue causing the problem was resolved.

Expand full comment

Both of these fail Ivan Karamazov's test: if evil is the means of bringing about the final creation, God is not the Good, and thus not God.

St. Gregory of Nyssa's doctrine of epekstasis answers the Utopia question for me, but only eschatologically, not in this world.

Expand full comment
author

If evil is the means of bringing about final creation, then it may be that evil is not really evil, but merely apparently so.

Expand full comment

>However, the problem of Deep Utopia has a shorter history than you might think. It is hinted at every so often in the history of philosophy but rarely tackled explicitly.

The earliest explicit discussion Im aware of is Orwell 43

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/socialists/english/e_fun

Have you seen it before? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Expand full comment

Evil exists because psychopaths exist. And because they're ruthless, brutal, creatures they managed to get control of the world.

Expand full comment