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Tallis in Wonderland

Excusing God

Raymond Tallis highlights the problem of evil.

This is the third time in this column I have written about – or more specifically, criticised – Philip Goff’s ideas. In Issue 135, I demonstrated (at least to my own satisfaction) that panpsychism, as set out in Professor Goff’s 2019 book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, did not make sense. Then in Issue 162, I argued against the claim advanced in his Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023) that the intrinsic improbability of a planet able to support life was evidence for a cosmic purpose. Now I am at it again. You may think that this amounts to literary stalking, or even persecution. That may be the case. But it is also a tribute to the intrinsic interest of Goff’s ideas, the lucidity with which they are expressed, and their power to widen the horizon of the thinking even of those who, like me, ultimately reject them.

This time my focus is on something more specific claimed by Goff, in a recent article in this magazine, ‘A God of Limited Power’ (Philosophy Now 165). Here he addresses the difficulty often invoked by infidels such as myself “of reconciling a loving all powerful God with the terrible suffering we see in the world.” The argument is that if God truly is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent – ideas central to Judeo-Christian belief – then he would not wish, nor indeed allow, that there should be suffering in the universe. So why is there so much suffering?

Indeed, the scale, intensity, ubiquity, and irremediability of that suffering is easy to under-imagine unless one is in the grip of it. But the constant possibility of suffering is built into our organic nature. Our vulnerability extends from external catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods, and fires, reaching down to our individual bodies with their many ways of going off course, and, as a result, imposing pain as the price of continuing existence. Moreover, the evolutionary mechanism the non-survival of the less-than-fit that has led to exotic megafauna such as humans, is a tale of predation, starvation, and often protracted, painful death. Darwin’s admission that he could not persuade himself “that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars” (in a letter to Asa Gray, 22nd May 1860) can be extrapolated to a lot of what happens in the natural world. And then, of course, there is man-made evil (AKA ‘moral evil’). This is the suffering we inflict on each other as we pursue our individual interests or those of the communities to which we belong: the endless human story of oppression, criminality, and war. The usual theistic defence is that our special status as the apple of God’s eye requires that we should have free will, which implies the power of choosing between doing good and doing evil, and some choose evil.

However, to me this response seems frivolous when I think of the pain inflicted on innocents by those who choose evil. The recent testimony of Professor Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who led an emergency medical team in central Gaza at Al-Aqsa Hospital, speaks for itself:

“One child I’ll never forget had burns so bad you could see her facial bones. We knew there was no chance of her surviving but there was no morphine to give her. So not only was she inevitably going to die, but she would die in agony. And there was nowhere for her to go, so she died on the floor of the emergency room.”

An omnipotent God would, it seems, have some explaining to do to.

Problems with Limited Solutions

For Goff and some theologians, the explanation is to be found in the idea that the deity, though benevolent, has limited power. So, as much as God would wish to eradicate suffering, it lies beyond his capacity to do so.

This defence is not persuasive. It seems unlikely that a being capable of creating a universe out of nothing, and setting in motion those processes by which life in all its astonishing variety emerged from lifeless stuff, and by which conscious life woke up out of insentient life, should be unable to meet the seemingly lesser challenge of making life pain-free, or of adjusting the order of things such that its crowning glory – human beings – should be universally kind, thoughtful, and truthful, committed to making life better for their fellows. Is it really easier to make a universe out of a void than making a pain-free life, or consistently good people?

The problem of suffering sits on a deeper problem: the mystery of sentience. Why would a benign God create a universe that ultimately generated entities susceptible to endless, sometimes unbearable, distress, inflicted on them by nature or by their fellows? Goff’s God may not be omnipotent, but he surely must have been able to anticipate these consequences of his act of creation. And if this future were not foreseeable, one might still expect the Creator to have some insight into the limits of his knowledge, and be prudent enough to mobilise the precautionary principle, and so hold back on the creation of conscious creatures, given that, with embodied consciousness, there comes at least the possibility of suffering. Or did he have no insight even into the limitations of his knowledge? Has he been surprised and disappointed by how things have turned out?

I am reminded of an analogous problem that has arisen with the increasing power of humanity as a result of technological advance. The philosopher Thomas Metzinger fears that we may be able to create conscious computers. As readers of this column may recall, I believe this is a fantasy (see ‘The Fantasy of Conscious Machines’, Issue 152). But the improbability of conscious machines is, for Metzinger, beside the point. In ‘Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology’ (Journal of AI Consciousness, 2021), he argues that, so long as it is even remotely possible that artificial consciousness might emerge, there should be a ban in the medium-term on all research that directly aims at or knowingly risks this outcome. Central to his argument is the strong possibility that conscious machines might be obliged by humans to experience states they find unbearable. The moratorium may not need to be permanent; but, Metzinger argues, it should not be lifted until it has been tied “to an ever more fine-grained, rational, evidence-based, and hopefully ethically convincing set of constraints.”

To some it may seem arrogant, even blasphemous, to suggest that the Creator should have looked before he leaped, and hesitated before switching on a universe with properties that eventually gave rise to sentient creatures so vulnerable to dreadful suffering. Some apologists, however, have defended God’s choice on the grounds that the suffering is redeemed, possibly justified, or even to be regarded as a hidden good; for instance, on the grounds that it is character-building, or that it gives us the opportunity to devote ourselves to alleviating the suffering of our fellow humans. This type of explanation, however, hardly applies to the suffering experienced by most non-human organisms; and it also seems irrelevant to the point of obscenity if it’s invoked in relation to those humans like Professor Maynard’s little patient who spent the last hours (or days) of her short life in unrelieved agony on the floor of an emergency room. The evil that caused this hideous suffering is in no way redeemed by the opportunity it provides for the exercise of goodness.

The Imbalance of Good & Evil

Goff’s ‘God of limited power’ is at least benign. But then there is Steven Law’s ‘The Evil God Challenge’ (Religious Studies, 2010, 46:3). Law reminds us that there are, after all, good things in the world – beauty, wonder, love, nobility, pleasure, happiness – which may allay the suspicion that the universe has been created by an ‘all-evil’ omnipotent God. As Law points out, however, it does not support the notion of a god who is all-good. In general, any attempt to rest the answer to the question of the benevolence of God on a ‘felicific calculus’ performed to determine whether the sum total of goodness or happiness exceeds that of evil or suffering, must fail. Firstly, we cannot add up the quantity of happiness and the quantity of suffering over the history of the universe in order to see which is the greater. To put it mildly, we lack the data. And in any case, happiness and suffering cannot be quantified on a single scale, so the relevant sums cannot be performed.

The Bible tells us that God himself passed judgement on his creation. According to Genesis 1:31, he “saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” Marking his own homework, he concluded that it was perfect. The excuse that this would have remained the case had it not been for the Original Sin of the first humans does not work: given that man is God’s creation, it is not clear that the responsibility for things going awry can be distanced from God. It also seems unfair to extend the punishment visited on humanity to non-human sentient creatures.

It seems therefore that those who want to reconcile the fact of suffering – which seems fated to accompany the emergence of conscious physical beings – with the notion of an omnibenevolent God, may not be entirely reassured by the idea of a God of limited power. Why, moreover, should we believe that a God who is prevented by the laws of nature he has himself created from making that nature free of appalling suffering, or who sees the pain of the evolutionary process as an acceptable price to pay for the emergence of beings with free will, will be able to secure his favourites a decent after-life? While it may seem plausible that, as Goff says, “a loving God would want to preserve our conscious lives after death and would want to move us towards a better world”, it is equally plausible, on the basis of his performance in this world, that this will beyond his limited powers.

Goff’s claim that life after death and a cosmic purpose are ‘a reasonable hope’ does not therefore stand up. God’s performance in this world does not give me confidence as to the quality of the next one. After all, we cannot imagine that, in creating the world as we know it, he wasn’t trying hard enough or was deciding not to exercise the powers that would be necessary to create an afterlife – an afterlife, incidentally, not available to someone like me, whose gaps in understanding do not seem to be shaped to accommodate a god. A limited God who has the power to create a universe, but who is unable to protect its most innocent inhabitants from suffering that’s ended only by death, cannot be relied upon to deliver on the promise of an eternal life of unalloyed joy.

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is now out from Philosophy Now.