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Lesson 101.2.1: The Problem of Evil, Part I
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If God is perfectly good, then this world demands an explanation—or a surrender of belief.
Topics discussed:- The relationship between intellectualism and belief in the supernatural
- A Pyrrhonian-style move: examining both sides of the “religion vs. reason” debate
- Early Christianity as a countercultural and sometimes anti-intellectual movement
- Introduction to Baron d’Holbach—an early, explicit defender of atheism
- The notion of the God of the Gaps
- The Problem of Evil argument against God’s existence
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Transcript
Introduction to Unit Two: Philosophy of Religion
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome friends to unit two. Unit two is a bit of a whirlwind. We begin with philosophy of religion.
00:00:12
Speaker
Then we move into the problem of free will. And then we close things off with a bit of moral philosophy. Everyone's favorite.
Baron d'Aubac and the Encyclopédie
00:00:24
Speaker
But we begin, as I already mentioned, with religion. Today, we're going to cover the views of a guy named, let me see if I can say it in French one time, Baron d'Aubac.
00:00:36
Speaker
I probably won't be able to do that every single time. Dolbach is one of the very first, very explicit atheists, as you recall.
00:00:48
Speaker
He was not only a philosopher, he was also an encyclopedist, which basically means that he wrote ah dozens, I think actually think ah hundreds of scientific entries for the Encyclopédie that was being worked on by various, mostly French scholars during the 1700s.
00:01:12
Speaker
And of course, Dobak was also a writer.
Dolbach's Atheism and Determinism
00:01:15
Speaker
He has a a very famous book called a System of Nature. That's the one we will be focusing on. And really, I'm just picking and choosing parts from it so that we can look at his philosophy of religion.
00:01:28
Speaker
But he is very famous for defending quite a few heterodox views. heterodox views not only atheism, but also materialism, which is the denial of the existence of non-physical souls or spirits, and determinism, which has to do with free will.
00:01:49
Speaker
So we will cover those views eventually, not Dolbach's versions of them, but we will begin with Dolbach's atheism and basically stick to that, that aspect of his philosophy.
00:02:03
Speaker
One thing I should mention though, is that Dobak was, you know, I guess today we're covering him as a philosopher, but it really was the case that he was seen in general as a public intellectual and mostly as a scientific authority.
00:02:22
Speaker
He, as i already mentioned, wrote many, many entries for the Encyclopedia, but also he hosted what are referred to usually as Parisian salons.
00:02:34
Speaker
What is a Parisian
Dolbach as a Public Intellectual
00:02:36
Speaker
salon? Well, Dolbach was very, very rich. And what he would do is have gatherings of intellectuals and they would all hang out and talk about whatever they're talking about, right?
00:02:50
Speaker
Which means that he knew a whole lot of important and interesting people, some of whom we all have already discussed. So whenever that is relevant, I will bring that up.
00:03:00
Speaker
However, again, we are barely scratching the surface of Dolbach's views. Really, we're only covering his atheism Nejuana. You know, I typically am saying this now of many of the people that we cover, but...
00:03:16
Speaker
were covering, you know, just a ah slice of what they you know thought about. with those details out of the way, wanna get one big ah elephant in the room out of the way as well.
00:03:32
Speaker
And gonna call this ah a gigantic sidebar, a 20 minute sidebar. But what I wanna do is begin by talking about intellectuals and belief in the supernatural.
Critique of Supernatural Beliefs
00:03:46
Speaker
Because Dobak has many, many arguments. you know, against religious beliefs. But he also takes a lot of cheap shots at intellectuals who are believers.
00:04:01
Speaker
He basically argues that if you are a believer, you are somehow, you know, cognitively unsophisticated. you know, you're dumb, right? he He didn't use the word dumb, but that's what he was saying, at you know, getting at. You're not really using your rational capacities to their full extent.
00:04:21
Speaker
So what I would like to do is take a couple of minutes to explore a couple of sides of this issue. And I'm going to begin actually with Dolbach's view saying, yeah, okay, intellectuals ah and believing in the supernatural kind of seem to be...
00:04:39
Speaker
mutually exclusive at times. But then I'll give you some reasons for why this is not a good view. Maybe I'm being ah a good Pyronian, right? We cover both sides of the argument so that in the end, there is no definitive view that you can subscribe to.
Early Christianity vs Intellectualism
00:04:55
Speaker
So let's begin by talking about to Christianity, early Christianity, and how it was a bit anti-intellectual in other words how christian supernatural beliefs sort of ran against the grain of the intellectual climate in which it arose so in antiquity let's just say around the second century CE things were pretty impressive intellectually speaking ah there was a very famous physician named Galen who would do live demonstrations of vivisections now that
00:05:38
Speaker
process itself is quite gruesome, but that's not the point that I'm trying to make here. It seems that people wanted to know about the state of research of their day, right? They just wanted to know what's going on with animal biology.
00:05:53
Speaker
So that is actually, you know, ah it's a good marker, it seems, if you're having public lectures and people are going, a lot of people are going. That's that's a good thing, right? ah Same thing with another view that actually disappeared for a while and then had to come back.
00:06:11
Speaker
Atomistic philosophy or atomist philosophy. Atomism is a view that things are made out of smaller things that are indivisible and we call them atoms. And of course, this is a view that, um well, it's at least a predecessor to a view that we mostly accept today. Atomism is that mostly was basically fairly prominent during this time period. There was at least one school of philosophy that really did kind of push their views.
00:06:45
Speaker
And of course, um it eventually went away. I'm talking about Epicureanism. And then it had to be rediscovered along with Adamism. We've in fact already talked about this view because it was Francis Bacon who was one of the people who were sort of, you know, actively trying to resurrect this this view.
00:07:05
Speaker
By the way, also in the second century CE, the head of state, the emperor of Rome, was a philosopher. Marcus Aurelius, actually quite a few emperors had a philosophical interests.
00:07:22
Speaker
And so maybe you can compare them to your head of state today, whenever it is that you are listening to this. Are they philosophers? I don't know. At least in my lifetime, I don't think that I've had a head of state for either of the countries that I'm a citizen of be a philosopher.
00:07:41
Speaker
So I guess the point that I'm trying to make here is that it was a time that was, you know, All else being equal, kind of impressive, right? Public lectures, very famous ah philosophies that eventually gave rise to modern science, heads of state that were intellectuals. Pretty cool, right?
00:08:02
Speaker
Well, into this milieu, early Christianity was arising and early Christians basically rejected many, if not most of the intellectual movements of their time. They were, of course, a millenarian group, which means that they expected the end of days to arrive very soon.
00:08:26
Speaker
and so Well, you know, when the end is coming, there's no time sometimes to ah change your behavior. You just have to repent and and get ready for the second coming. And so for that reason, not terribly sympathetic to intellectual movements where the Christians They also did things that to Roman ears must have been just ludicrous, but they shirked military service, which basically seemed, you know, unpatriotic, unpatriotic and kind of dumb because you get paid.
00:09:01
Speaker
And instead they preached meekness. What? Humility? What? Poverty is a good thing? So, you know, they were basically seen as contrarians by many Romans.
00:09:16
Speaker
And as this sort of anti-intellectualism was being, you know, more evident to some, these thinkers started becoming, well, first suspicious and then pretty critical of Christianity.
00:09:34
Speaker
here pictured we have uh we can pronounce his name celsus kelsus i've also seen the spelling so that there's an i in there it's calcius whatever i'll call him kelsus with the hard kelsus was a big critic of early christianity he did not think they were terribly well read and he actually thought they believed in things that they shouldn't believe given the evidence. Let me say that again.
Critique of Christian Beliefs by Celsus and Porphyry
00:10:05
Speaker
He thought that they would point at a certain story or a certain bit of evidence and go from that to Christianity. But he was saying this could easily lead you to another tradition or religion why are you going only to christianity it seems like you don't know much so i actually have here a quote from one scholar her name is katherine nixie who basically is summarizing keelsis's work for us and his basic arguments so here is that quote from nixie lack of education keelsis argued made listeners vulnerable to dogma
00:10:46
Speaker
If Christians had read a little more, believed a little less, they might be less likely to think themselves unique. The lightest knowledge of Latin literature, for example, would have brought the interested reader into contact with Ovid's metamorphoses.
00:11:04
Speaker
This epic but tongue-in-cheek poem opened with a version of the creation myth that was so similar to the biblical one that it could hardly fail to make an interested reader question the supposed unique truth of Genesis.
00:11:19
Speaker
so there it is the creation myth was pointed at by some christians as you know basically saying yeah well this is this is true and it points to the truth of our religion but people like kiosos were saying okay well other religions have that very same story Why wouldn't you think that those religions are true? i mean, it seems like you're kind of um jumping to conclusions without enough evidence, right? You're a little too confident in your views such that it almost seems irrational.
00:11:57
Speaker
Well, that is Celsus. Believe it or not, there was someone who was even harsher. His name was Porphyry and his attack on Christianity was, you know, basically just vitriolic. It was pretty ferocious.
00:12:14
Speaker
And um after, um you know, Christianity rose, so if you don't know the story, in the 300s, Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire. And not long after that, Christians began, actually even before that, but Christians began to attack pagan temples, pagan philosophers, ah pagan anything basically. And Porphyry was one of these victims, at least his intellectual works were.
00:12:48
Speaker
All of his works have been... eradicated the only way we know about porphyry's writings which were against christians is when a christian wrote about them so we we kind of know about them second hand and third hand right so that is all we have basically what am i trying to uh to paint here what kind of picture am i trying to paint I'm trying to tell you that early Christianity, at least some strains of early Christianity, hope you understand that Christianity had many different versions of it in the beginning as it does now, right? There's many ways to be a Christian.
00:13:31
Speaker
You can be a Catholic, a Protestant, a Calvinist, whatever, right? Well, the same thing was true ah in the ancient world. Many, many varieties of Christianity, and at least some of them were fairly, well, the polite term is probably anti-intellectual, but we can be a little harsher maybe even because some of what they did, ah like I said, destroying temples and even in some cases killing some pagans, it's
00:14:05
Speaker
you know, um terrorist doesn't seem like too strong of a word there. There are some stories of basically pagan priests being made to watch ah while their pagan temples are being destroyed. now that is, I mean, that's that's terrorism basically.
00:14:29
Speaker
um And they've told the ah the pagan priest that if he moved, they would kill him that's some kind of ah you know psychotic right so uh maybe i can give you another um more modern analogy to help you understand at least maybe how to think about some of these early christian movements but here is isis isis conquered a bunch of territory.
Destruction of Historical Artifacts Comparison
00:14:55
Speaker
And ah when they would, they would destroy whatever they saw as, um you know, not ah being in concordance with their, you know, interpretation of Islam.
00:15:09
Speaker
And so I don't know which statues these are. i do know they're gone now. They no longer exist because they were pulverized by these members of ISIS. That is exactly what some Christians did in the ancient world. We actually have the remnants of some statues that are broken into you know over 300 pieces, which means they were there for a long time, smashing it.
00:15:38
Speaker
taking their time. Here is another modern example, um courtesy of the Taliban. Now on the left is um a Buddha statue. i think it's ah this, the it was eventually blown up and I think that was in 2001. And so the picture on the left is pre-2001. I don't know when it is And then The Taliban, this is, of course, a fundamentalist group. And, well the Buddha would be a foreign religious figure. so they blew it up. And so there it is.
00:16:16
Speaker
On the right, it is gone. That statue was from around 500 So it was about... 1500 years old, gone now, right? So these are archeological relics ah that are destroyed, right? Because of of a religious conviction.
00:16:37
Speaker
That sorta helps you think about some of these early Christian movements. They were a little, it seems, anti-intellectual, right? I mean, this seems pretty, shall I say, narrow-minded?
00:16:52
Speaker
I'll give you one more set of factoids here. Mostly I want to mention some of these scholars who are um making these arguments, but various scholars, Christine Hayes, Catherine Nixie, Robin Wright, Michael Freyda, they've been arguing that early Christianity, and even even early judas Judaism, but they were simply not that theologically impressive.
00:17:19
Speaker
Quite to the contrary, they were unimpressive. And they actually gained a rational force. They just changed over time as they came into contact with Greek philosophy, right? Greek methods of argumentation.
00:17:37
Speaker
In many cases, especially the Christians, the you know there's basic um pagan philosophies like uh the views of plato that were simply adopted or appropriated by the christians so that's when they became more theologically impressive now these are several scholars saying this and one can basically see okay maybe there's a story that can be told here where certain supernatural beliefs like the ones that the Christians held millenarian beliefs about the end of the world and all that just didn't really jive with what we today consider, you know, intellectual rigor or, ah you know, philosophical sophistication. In fact, some other actions were were quite ghastly as we are. I think I mean, maybe you were horrified when ISIS or the Taliban destroy some ancient relic, that's kind of the way you know you should feel when you hear about Christians doing the same thing, right? So there is the best argument that I can make for how you know sometimes supernatural beliefs ah run contrary to ah intellectualism.
00:19:00
Speaker
But on the flip side, now I'm going to spend less time on this simply because i bet you already are okay with this view. So I'm trying to make them about equal for you.
00:19:15
Speaker
On the flip side though, um there's plenty of examples of intellectuals being motivated by their supernatural
Religious Motivation in Intellectual Pursuits
00:19:26
Speaker
beliefs.
00:19:26
Speaker
In other words, contrary to what Baron d'Obbach says, Some people were actually driven to inquire and discover and invent and et cetera, et cetera, because they believed in God.
00:19:45
Speaker
So the best example I can give you is some of these same people from both the Renaissance and the Age of Reason. Here is a quote from the historian of mathematics, Morris Klein.
00:20:01
Speaker
The mathematicians and scientists of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, let me add that in there, were brought up in a religious world which stressed the universe as the handiwork of God.
00:20:14
Speaker
Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Pascal, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. were in fact Orthodox Christians. Let me ah correct Morris Klein real quick. I wouldn't say they are Orthodox Christians, but they are some kind of Christian writer, some kind of believer.
00:20:38
Speaker
Newton, for example, didn't quite believe in the Holy Trinity. And Pascal's version of hell wasn't quite the official version of hell. And we can go on and on with this, right? Galileo didn't have the same interpretation of the Bible as the Pope, whatever.
00:20:55
Speaker
They were believers and it mattered to them, right? Their beliefs on the supernatural really seemed to drive their work.
00:21:05
Speaker
Let continue here with the quote. Indeed, the work of the 16th, 17th, and even some 18th century mathematicians was a religious quest motivated by religious beliefs and justified in their minds because their work served this larger purpose the search for the mathematical laws of nature was an act of devotion they would see the laws of nature um as the basically the thoughts of god and so they were trying to
00:21:44
Speaker
you know, capture those thoughts in a mathematical way. And that would mean for them that they were doing something sacred, right? They were, that was their way of worshiping.
00:21:57
Speaker
Let me finish the quote here now. It was a study of the ways and nature of God, which would reveal the glory and grandeur of his work, of his handiwork.
00:22:09
Speaker
So by studying the way the universe works, they were admiring the you know how good of a craftsperson God was, right? So that is the whole idea.
Mysticism in Greek Philosophy
00:22:21
Speaker
That is an excellent rebuttal of basically everything I just said over the last 10, 12 minutes, whatever it was. It seems like some people are very much driven by their supernatural beliefs to engage in very intellectual work. Look at the people that I mentioned.
00:22:42
Speaker
copernicus right the copernican revolution kepler pascal we talked about pascal's uh invention of probability theory as well as decision theory that's kind of a big deal right galileo is maybe the most responsible for um getting people to accept the heliocentric model of the solar system.
00:23:06
Speaker
We've covered Descartes, Newton. I mean, these are big deals, right? So the basic idea here is that Dobak, you know, Dobak is wrong.
00:23:17
Speaker
There are some ways in which supernatural beliefs are very much compatible with intellectual striving. Let me finish off here, not with Christian supernatural beliefs, but with the supernatural beliefs of ancient Greeks.
00:23:36
Speaker
Just as in the Age of Enlightenment, supernatural beliefs motivated intellectual work, the same could be said of the Greek Golden Age. Various pivotal figures in the history of Western thought, including Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Parmenides, possessed deeply held mystical beliefs, beliefs that drove their philosophical work.
00:24:03
Speaker
It actually goes further than this. Some of these early um philosophers were shamans. They would communicate, they said, with the divine, right? And so these are very much um supernatural beliefs and they very much shaped the philosophies that they developed.
00:24:27
Speaker
And these philosophers influence some of the biggest names in the history of Western philosophy. I'll just name one, Plato, right? So if you think that Plato is an intellectual, well, then you have to accept that having some quite supernatural beliefs is compatible with intellectualism.
00:25:13
Speaker
Now that we have that sidebar out of the way, let's get on to one of the main points of today's lesson. i call this section atheists on the defense because here, Dolbach is going to sort of try to block ah arguments for God's existence or arguments for believing in God or or even making believing in God intelligible.
00:25:42
Speaker
Now, some of these are quite offensive, if you you you know get the meaning of that word, in the sense that you know the best defense is a good offense.
00:25:53
Speaker
But in general, um Dolbach, let me bring him back here, is sort of, you know I sort of organize these arguments as him, you know, giving some difficulties ah to believers, right? Raising some concerns about believing in God. And so I kind of call that defense. Later on, we will look at his more offensive arguments in the sense that they will be arguments against God's existence. But let me begin
00:26:26
Speaker
with this.
Non-Physical Entities and Their Coherence
00:26:27
Speaker
Let's start with um the the notion of non-physical things. Dobak argued that the notion of a non-physical thing is incoherent.
00:26:40
Speaker
Even if non-physical things are real, we wouldn't know about them. Because how is it that you know about things? Well, typically, you know about them through your senses.
00:26:53
Speaker
So light bounces off of a physical object. And because it's physical, that's why the light bounces off of it. And it goes into your eye and, you know, your visual cortex interprets it. And that's how you know about stuff, you know, out there in the world.
00:27:11
Speaker
Well, if they are not physical, that means that light can't bounce off of them and it can't make noises because noises are just puffs of air, right? So how will it generate that if it isn't a physical thing?
00:27:28
Speaker
Basically, if there is such a thing as a non-physical thing, you would not know about it. You would have no way of knowing about it. And even if they did exist, they wouldn't be able to interact with anything physical.
00:27:45
Speaker
So that's why, for example, ghosts go through walls, right? And it doesn't really make sense that you can see a ghost because it's not physical. So light can't bounce off of it. And so if there is a non-physical thing, don't worry about it. You can't know that it's there. it can't do anything to you.
00:28:08
Speaker
It kind of seems like a ah non-entity, nothing that you know nothing to worry about here, right? And so if all this is true, if God is non-physical, then this creates quite a few problems.
00:28:22
Speaker
One, we cannot know about God's existence. And two, God cannot intervene in the world. He's not physical, so he can't like make miracles happen.
00:28:35
Speaker
ah So all of this is very problematic for standard ah religious beliefs, right? How is it that you know about God? Why is it that you think that God can intervene in the world? It seems like non-physical things can't do that. And God is presumably a non-physical thing.
00:28:53
Speaker
If you want to go the other direction, God is physical. Okay, where is he, right? So that also creates some problems. But there is one of Dolbach's points centering around the idea of a non-physical thing.
Ontological Arguments for God's Existence
00:29:08
Speaker
Dobak also tried to block ontological arguments. Now we have already covered some ontological arguments, namely that of Descartes.
00:29:19
Speaker
There are others. Pictured here, I have Saint Anselm who was around in the eleventh century CE. And he also gave an ontological argument.
00:29:31
Speaker
But Dobak basically argued that all ontological arguments rely on specific definitions of God.
00:29:42
Speaker
And in a nutshell, you can't define a thing into existence. For example, Descartes argued that he had an idea of a perfect being and well,
00:29:57
Speaker
Where did he get this idea from? it must have been a perfect being that put the idea there. And so that means that this perfect being must exist and that perfect being is God.
00:30:10
Speaker
Well, Dolbach says, just because you can imagine a perfect being, that doesn't mean that it actually exists, right? In a reality.
00:30:22
Speaker
It gets a little bit worse though. How do you even know you are imagining a perfect being? There is a difference between imagining a perfect being and thinking you are imagining a perfect being.
00:30:39
Speaker
if I were to tell you something like, you know, visualize 10,000 apples, Well, I'm not sure that you'll visualize exactly 10,000 apples. You might just visualize a bunch of apples, but you might believe you are visualizing 10,000 apples, in which case you'd be wrong, right? mean, and then I would say, add one, right? So now you're visualizing 10,001 apples. And it's not clear that the mind is that sharp that we can actually,
00:31:10
Speaker
have that precise of a thought in our minds. So maybe for that same reason, we can't have that precise of a thought of a perfect being in our minds. We just think we do. so That's another problem there.
00:31:25
Speaker
What else? Dobak also argued that the traits that we assign to God, the perfections, things like infinite goodness and infinite knowledge and infinite power, these are really just human qualities and they've been inflated to an imaginary scale.
00:31:46
Speaker
Key word here being imaginary.
Paradox of Omnipotence
00:31:49
Speaker
Those terms, those characteristics actually lose all meaning when you apply it to a being that is supposedly beyond human understanding.
00:32:02
Speaker
So let's be a little obnoxious here let's just pick one of these traits. Let's do ah you know let's do being all powerful. So the trait of being or the quality of being all powerful is known as omnipotence.
00:32:20
Speaker
And this concept is, well, quite paradoxical because it seems like it's just not possible to be all powerful. i mean, it's just, it's too easy to create sort of counter examples. Let me begin with a dumb one.
00:32:37
Speaker
um i mean, these are all dumb, to be honest, but can God make a boulder so big that afterward he can't move it? Well, if God can't make it, then he's not all powerful.
00:32:53
Speaker
And if he can make it, he's still not all powerful focus because then he can't move it. Did you catch that? He's not all powerful either way. Either he can't make this boulder or he can't move the boulder.
00:33:08
Speaker
So that tells you one of two things. Either this notion of omnipotence is incoherent, or when we say that God is omnipotent, we literally have no idea what we're talking about.
00:33:23
Speaker
it is just you know a word that doesn't mean much because we we can't comprehend God. Let me give you another example of this kind of paradoxical reasoning.
00:33:36
Speaker
Can God create beings like humans that afterwards he can't control? Well, if he can make beings that he can't control, then he's not all powerful because he cannot control them.
00:33:55
Speaker
And if he can't make beings that afterward he can't control, then he's still not all powerful because he can't make them. Either way, he can't do something.
00:34:09
Speaker
And that's the omnipotence paradox. Let me just move into some truly ridiculous ridiculous examples here. But can God make a pizza so big that afterward he can't finish it?
00:34:20
Speaker
Can God make a burrito so spicy that afterward he can't handle it? whatever right either way god is not all powerful kind of funny well that's what happens when we stretch these human qualities to an imaginary scale there's actually quite a few versions of of these paradoxes, you can do it with basically any of God's traits. You can also combine traits and show that they sort of don't make sense together. For example, maybe being all powerful is incompatible with being all loving because being all loving basically means you can't do evil
00:35:10
Speaker
which means there's something you can't do, which means you can't be both all loving and all powerful because being all powerful means you can do anything, including evil.
00:35:23
Speaker
So yeah, this is a tangled web and this is courtesy of Dolbach. He's saying, I'm not even sure you all know what you are saying when you say these, you know, these perfections, right? All powerful, all knowing. doesn't make any sense.
00:35:39
Speaker
There's also this problem that I'm just kind of adding here that um basically it seems like God's traits, the ones that Christians assign to God, are incompatible with some things that we really like.
00:35:56
Speaker
For example, I think humans really like the idea, or at least um Westerners, really like the idea of free will. We like the you know notion that we make our choices are not determined.
00:36:10
Speaker
Okay, but if God is all-knowing, then to God, basically everything, all of history is like laid out to him like a book.
00:36:20
Speaker
And what do characters do? Well, they just do whatever their character is supposed to do, right? So there's a sense in which God already knows everything you're gonna do.
00:36:32
Speaker
Well, that suddenly doesn't really seem like true, real, genuine choices. It seems like your you know your whole fate is already laid out in God's mind.
00:36:47
Speaker
And i don't know, there's sort of a tension there with the notion of free will, true free will. It almost seems like if God knows everything that's going to happen, then you don't really have free will.
00:37:02
Speaker
This is a problem and the intra internet is aware of it. You can find ridiculous memes with typos on the interwebs should you go out and look for them. Okay, one more problem here given from Dolbach before I transition to another idea.
00:37:25
Speaker
Conventional Christianity claims God is infinite, right, everywhere. Yet, they also say that God is a person, a distinct individual with a will, with like, you know, volition, things that he desires.
00:37:41
Speaker
This is very evident in the Old Testament. As I think you all know, in the Old Testament, God gets really upset with his chosen people because they're not doing what he wants them to do.
00:37:56
Speaker
And so obviously it seems like a person, right, an individual, right? and uh and they have will and they god has a will right do i'm the only god right don't have other gods that seems like a will okay well dobak argued that these are mutually exclusive an infinite being could not have a will or desires or any of that stuff that persons do because this infinite being would already contain everything and need nothing. That is what it means, presumably, to be infinite.
00:38:32
Speaker
So we're sort of in a similar scenario here. Either we have to admit that is it is incoherent to say that god God is both infinite and a person, or that we don't quite know what we're talking about when we say that.
00:38:46
Speaker
So these are, you know i hope you can see quite ah forceful um objections from Dolbak. And this sort of reasoning has given rise to what we today call the God of the gaps.
00:39:05
Speaker
So at no point did Dolbach say this phrase that I know of. But today we refer to this sort of problem as the god of the gaps.
00:39:17
Speaker
And it is very much influenced by Dolbach, among others. There are some other people in there. But let me kind of explain this idea to you to close off this section. Using logic similar to Occam's razor, and I will define that for you in a bit,
00:39:35
Speaker
Dolbach argued that God is merely a name humans give to the unknown causes of natural phenomena. In other words, when we are not sure how something works, we say, well, you know, God did that.
00:39:53
Speaker
And that sort of points to a psychological need for explanations that usually leads to us invoking God whenever we don't understand something.
00:40:06
Speaker
Okay, well, that's the first point. The second point that Dolbach sort of inspired is that it turns out that positing the supernatural as an explanation actually explains nothing.
00:40:23
Speaker
I hope you noticed in the preceding discussion that sometimes I would say, you know, either this notion is incoherent or we don't really know what we're talking about.
00:40:34
Speaker
That's actually, you know, a very lasting legacy of Dolebox's arguments. It really turns out that if you try to explain something in terms of the supernatural, you are not explaining anything.
00:40:48
Speaker
If you went to a mechanic, this is kind of a a regular example that I use. but um If you went to a mechanic and they said, oh, there's ghosts in your engine, you would leave, right? That that is not an explanation of what is wrong with your car.
00:41:04
Speaker
and so supernatural explanations are not actually explanations it basically amounts to saying i don't know how this works it is a mystery so that is another important point that Dolbach made and it gives rise to this issue of the God of the gaps this idea of the God of the gaps One more point from Dobak. He contended that as science advances, the perceived need for supernatural explanations shrivels, eventually leaving God as a superfluous hypothesis, sort of an extra belief that we don't really need.
00:41:48
Speaker
Well, I want to give you just a couple of clarifications on this idea of the God of the gaps. And let me just, you know, bring in this quick definition of Occam's razor.
00:42:01
Speaker
Occam's razor was popularized by a guy named Occam. Wouldn't you know it? from a few centuries prior to this point. It goes by many names. Sometimes it it's also known as the principle of parsimony.
00:42:17
Speaker
And this principle states that given competing theories or explanations, if there is equal explanatory power, that is, if the theories explain the phenomenon in question equally well,
00:42:30
Speaker
one should select the one with fewest assumptions. So let's just say that I have some socks missing and I come up with two theories.
00:42:41
Speaker
Theory one, ah sometimes my socks get like stuck in my pants, like inside my pants. I don't know how it happens. Maybe when they're, you know, dancing and jiving or whatever in the washer machine, the socks will make it into the pants and they just kind of get stuck there.
00:42:59
Speaker
So that's theory one. My socks are stuck in some pants somewhere. I have to go look through my pants. Theory number two is that during the night, elves come and steal my socks so that they can make their magical cookies.
00:43:14
Speaker
I hope you can see that um one of these theories, namely the first one, has fewer assumptions. You have to believe in less stuff. Basically, you only have to believe in me, my socks, and my pants, and I guess the washing machine, right?
00:43:30
Speaker
But that second theory requires more beliefs. That would be the elves or the elves. Did I say elves or goblins? Whatever. you have to believe in more things, that would not be fewer assumptions, right? That would be more assumptions. So Occam's razor, this idea that go for the simpler explanation, it's very, very common. They use it in computer science and history and political science, philosophy, whatever, right? It is a good rule of thumb, even though it's not like, you know, there's no proof for it, but it tends to work in general.
00:44:08
Speaker
But let me add this little bit that you would only get from actually reading the work of William of Ockham. Built into this view is a sort of anti-raiser.
00:44:20
Speaker
Don't reduce to the point where you lose explanatory power. Some people say, well, i'm going to make the you know simplest theory possible. God caused it all. the But this is exactly going against what Ockham says you should do.
00:44:35
Speaker
don't go with so few assumptions that you're actually not explaining anything. And so let me now once again return to this idea from Dolbach that basically we're eventually gonna run out of reasons for believing in God.
God of the Gaps Theory
00:44:54
Speaker
If you explain things through supernatural beings, again, you're really not explaining anything. And so what people are doing currently is A, not really working, but B, they're doing it for fewer and fewer things. You know, basically rational theists believe in the the world the way we see it, right? And most of science.
00:45:16
Speaker
But wherever there's a gap in our understanding, they'll say, oh, that's where God is. Okay, that's where God is. But then, you know, we explain that thing and they're like, okay, well, now there's new things that we don't know.
00:45:28
Speaker
That's where God is. Okay, okay. But eventually, we're going to basically understand more and more and more, maybe even everything. And according to Dolbach, at that point, the God hypothesis will go away for good.
00:45:49
Speaker
And so that is this notion of the God of the gaps. Yes, for a time, people will keep finding reasons or places to sneak in, you know, the existence of God, belief in God, a need for the belief in God. But eventually, that belief will no longer have a reason for being.
Problem of Evil Argument
00:46:45
Speaker
Let's move now into an argument against God's existence. It is not the only argument against God's existence in the literature. In fact, there's books that basically detail the many different kinds of arguments against God's existence.
00:47:05
Speaker
But the one we're going to cover is probably the most famous.
00:47:11
Speaker
In fact, it goes back way back into the ancient world. It is at least first, something like it is first noticed by Epicurus.
00:47:23
Speaker
But we are covering, of course, the modern version of it. Epicurus, when he brought it up, had to do with um polytheism right many gods but so we're talking about the version of this argument that is tailored to the Christian God so let's really quickly cover three important traits that we have already actually covered but want to be very precise about their meaning Omniscience is the property of knowing everything there is to know.
00:47:57
Speaker
Sometimes we just all-knowing as a synonym for this word. Omnipotence, the property of being able to do anything, right? Being all-powerful.
00:48:09
Speaker
And omnibenevolence, the property of having only good intentions, being all loving or all good, being only capable of doing good things.
00:48:20
Speaker
As we discussed earlier, You can probably find fault with any one of these individually. You can find more faults if you pair two together and you can say that they are incompatible like omniscience sorry omnipotence and omnibenevolence, which I mentioned before.
00:48:40
Speaker
And all three, it becomes even more problematic because there is... a sense in which any being that has all three of these properties would get rid of this So the word we're going to be using is evil, but evil can mean a lot of things, right? Human evil.
00:49:05
Speaker
In the problem of evil argument that we will be covering, evil is supposed to be understood as unnecessary suffering.
00:49:17
Speaker
Unnecessary suffering. Suffering that there seems to be no rational gain from there's nothing you can possibly say well at least they learned something from their suffering right so maybe you can think of some natural disasters uh some volcanic eruptions that have you know almost uh eradicated the human population in in the past i know of one around 70 000 years ago that that almost killed off human beings maybe hurricanes tornadoes earthquakes some earthquakes kill thousands of people right and it is unclear what real benefit came from this it just seems like unnecessary suffering
00:50:06
Speaker
Or think about suffering out in the wild. Maybe the suffering of a little baby deer that, you know, loses, gets gets lost from its family. And there's a storm. I'm going to just make up stuff here. but There's a lightning storm and, you know, ah a branch gets struck and it falls on top of this baby deer and it's trapped underneath and it starves to death and it takes a couple of days. And it's just awful. What was the point of that, right?
00:50:37
Speaker
I'll give you one more. i don't know a ton about babies, but I know there's some conditions where there's essentially no chance of the baby surviving or very little chance. And during the time that the infant is alive, it is very painful.
00:50:56
Speaker
So there is really very little to be gained in this situation, it seems like. And I'm thinking of things like spina bifida. And, you know, there's other sort of spina bifida, so you know, it has to do with the spine not fusing. But there's other disorders that, you know, might qualify as form of unnecessary suffering.
00:51:19
Speaker
So let me just kind of reiterate the definition again. It's just suffering that seems to be completely pointless. There is no benefit from it. So if you're thinking about something where you can learn from it, then you're just thinking about the wrong thing. Keep thinking until you find a form of suffering that just doesn't seem um fruitful in any way.
00:51:44
Speaker
So given that you have that in mind, here is the problem of evil argument.
00:51:54
Speaker
If God exists, then there should be, would be no unnecessary suffering. course, God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving.
00:52:09
Speaker
So he would know about the suffering, want to alleviate it, and be able, capable of alleviating it. But there does seem to exist some unnecessary suffering, which leads us to the conclusion that must be the case that God does not exist.
00:52:30
Speaker
when I present this argument there are very often misinterpretations. I want to make sure that it's very clear what's going on here in this argument.
00:52:42
Speaker
And so one thing that um typically of course believers would ah would respond to this argument is that atheists are blaming suffering on God.
00:52:56
Speaker
I'm not really sure how this objection materializes in the mind of people. I will be very honest with you because this argument is from the atheistic perspective, right? So they're not, they don't believe in God.
00:53:12
Speaker
They're not blaming suffering on God that they don't believe in God. Why would they do that? doesn't make any sense. So what I kind of think is going on here, this is kind of a psychological explanation, is that the mind of these believers kind of tends to naturally tend towards something like begging the question.
00:53:32
Speaker
They're already assuming the claim that is in question. They already believe in God. And so rather than really questioning each individual premise, which is the way that we're supposed to critique arguments,
00:53:47
Speaker
They just sort of ah go right to the conclusion, right? So that is not how you are supposed to interpret this argument. We will actually spend all of next lesson critiquing and looking at possible responses to the problem of evil argument. But right off the bat, I don't want you to say, well, the atheist is just blaming suffering on God. That is the wrong way to think about this.
00:54:12
Speaker
Also, you're not supposed to you know shift the blame to humans. You're not supposed to say things like, well, humans, ah humans um you know, cause ah natural disasters with fracking and global climate change or whatever.
00:54:29
Speaker
If that's what you're thinking about, then stop thinking about that example. Think about another one where it seems to be non-anthropogenic, where it seems to be the case that the suffering in question um doesn't have anything to do with humans.
00:54:44
Speaker
So now that we've covered those misinterpretations, very common misinterpretations, here's the way you really want to think about the problem of evil argument.
00:54:55
Speaker
Basically, the structure of the argument suggests that the world as we know it, the world as it seems to many of us with built in suffering, right, where we're, you know, a lot of us suffer and then we die.
00:55:11
Speaker
and there's nothing that can be said to have been learned from it. um This world just seems incompatible with the existence of a being like God, with the traits that we have ascribed to God, like being all loving, all knowing, all powerful.
00:55:30
Speaker
I kind of like to say it counterfactually, or I guess this is sort of a counterfactual, but if God actually existed, then the world wouldn't be like this.
00:55:41
Speaker
That is sort of the message that the argument is putting forth. I want to mention that this is so, so in line with Dobak's greater challenge of, you know, science being basically diametrically opposed to faith.
00:56:02
Speaker
Because notice that the rejection of God opens the way for naturalistic explanations of why the world is the way it is. So once you stop thinking to yourself, well, you know, God is the explanation to things. And once you let go of that hypothesis, now you can see that there's a bunch of open questions.
00:56:23
Speaker
And what we have to do is figure out why things are happening. Why why are things the way they are? You know, and that paves the way for ideas like evolution or tectonic plates or viruses or whatever, right? Genetically inherited traits and diseases like whatever causes spina bifida.
00:56:45
Speaker
So the basic idea here is that, according to Dolbach at least, we should abandon the idea of God and really go out and look for naturalistic explanations.
00:56:56
Speaker
Now, it is the case that some people are actually fueled by belief in God to do science. But Dolbach says, well, you know, they're just confused. They don't really get it. Once everyone rejects God, we can all kind of mobilize together to um to really understand the world. And so rejecting the God hypothesis,
00:57:20
Speaker
opens up the way for naturalistic scientific explanations for suffering in the world. Explanations that might eventually also lead to a solution for the suffering.
00:57:32
Speaker
right So Dobak here is saying something that might ring true to something like Francis Bacon. What we ultimately want is to stop the suffering.
00:57:44
Speaker
And the way to do that is to actually understand the world, not to fill it with superstition, ah at least what Dobak would consider superstition and, you know, metaphysical beliefs.
00:57:58
Speaker
So there you have it, the problem of evil argument. And Dobak, again, was not, you know, the only person who mentioned this. a lot of people have ah lobbed this argument against believers.
00:58:13
Speaker
But I do think that, among others, Dobak was particularly dangerous. Remember, most Enlightenment thinkers still believed in some form of God, right? Descartes was basically a ah good Catholic.
00:58:29
Speaker
He even had his own rational proof for God's existence. Newton, yeah, maybe he didn't believe in the Trinity, but he saw the universe as divine design. And Voltaire, yeah, well, maybe the least religious out of these, but he was still a deist.
00:58:43
Speaker
He believed in some kind of God. And so that was the case for most people, most of the enlighteners, at least I should say. But Dolbach argued in another direction altogether.
00:58:55
Speaker
He said the universe doesn't need God at all. We don't need this idea. Everything that we know and understand is explicable through natural causes.
00:59:08
Speaker
Natural explanations are all we need. Our explanations, in fact, should be natural because that's how we will really understand things.
Natural Explanations vs Necessity of God
00:59:18
Speaker
And maybe adding a little bit of bacon in here, maybe that's how we actually alleviate suffering in our world.
00:59:27
Speaker
His challenge, which I'm going to call here the atheist's challenge, is pretty intellectually riveting because we like to investigate things, right? Humans like, they seem to, we seem to have a ah natural curiosity and we want to understand the universe and nature and morality and everything, right? Human behavior,
00:59:49
Speaker
But a lot of people sort of infuse, especially during this time period, God into the explanation. And what people like Dolbach are asking is, can we explain these things without God?
01:00:04
Speaker
And if so, then knowledge becomes a threat to traditional religion. In other words, in Dolbach's way of thinking, if natural explanations are sufficient,
01:00:19
Speaker
then the God hypothesis becomes philosophically unnecessary. We don't need belief in God. So that's sort of the closing idea, right? the The way I want to leave you with, the thought i want to leave you with.
01:00:36
Speaker
Suppose every natural phenomenon could be explained by science, is explained by science. Maybe we can project ourselves into the future a bit and we understood everything.
01:00:52
Speaker
Would the idea of God still be necessary?
01:00:58
Speaker
We'll take on that and responses to the problem of evil next time.