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Lesson 2.2: The Problem of Evil, Pt. II
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When the world looks cruel, every defense of God becomes a theory of human nature.
Topics Discussed
- The problem of evil argument and the two main ways to resist it: reject premise 1 or reject premise 2.
- Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” theodicy, including its psychological promise of consolation and its ethical demand for active striving.
- Voltaire’s mockery of Leibniz after the Lisbon earthquake, especially the charge that “the best of all possible worlds” sounds absurd in the face of real suffering.
- Other responses to the problem of evil: deism, the devil, free will, evil as a counterpart to good, the soul-making defense, and skepticism about whether we can prove that unnecessary suffering exists.
- The connection between theology and moral psychology in Hobbes, Leibniz, and Spinoza: whether people need religion, political authority, or freedom from superstition in order to live well.
Recommended
Transcript
The Problem of Evil and God's Existence
00:00:01
Speaker
Just to refresh your memory, we are currently looking at a theological puzzle that has to do with the compatibility of what seems like unnecessary suffering and the existence of an all good, all powerful and all knowing being.
00:00:24
Speaker
Now you can take this puzzle and take the atheistic perspective, essentially generating an argument against God's existence in this manner. So, if God exists and God is understood to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, there should be no unnecessary suffering.
00:00:51
Speaker
But there does seem to exist on unnecessary suffering. Therefore, it stands to reason that God does not exist. Now we have already explored how to interpret this argument correctly.
00:01:06
Speaker
So what I would like to do is move directly into some possible solutions to this puzzle or maybe another way to put it is possible responses to this argument.
Philosophical Divisions: Empiricists vs. Rationalists
00:01:20
Speaker
I'm going to begin with someone that I probably should have covered before. His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and he is, you know, considered the last universal genius.
00:01:35
Speaker
He was very competent in multiple fields of science and mathematics and he was also ah a diplomat and a philosopher.
00:01:47
Speaker
He had a bit of a tussle with Isaac Newton because they both independently co-invented the calculus. And so, you know, when it came time to assign credit, you know, there was a little bit of a, a little bit of tension there.
00:02:06
Speaker
ah But beyond that, he invented modern binary notation. That's kind of a big deal. And the reason why he's famous philosophically is, you know, the reason why i also mentioned that I should have covered him earlier.
00:02:22
Speaker
He is a defender of philosophical rationalism. Now, you might remember this slide from many moons ago. And on the left, we have the empiricists who believe that all knowledge is rooted in sensory information, things we learn from our senses, our eyes and ears and all that.
00:02:45
Speaker
And on the right, we have the rationalists who believe that all knowledge is rooted in reason, is essentially, in things that we know through reason. And then you build up from there.
00:02:59
Speaker
Now you are all very familiar with Rene Descartes right there in the center right. But the other rationalists are Spinoza up there top right and bottom right is Leibniz.
00:03:14
Speaker
Just to remind you on the left we have John Locke in the center left and top left is George, George Barkley and bottom left is David Hume.
00:03:27
Speaker
Now, when I was going to school, and majoring in philosophy, this was the way that ah this group of thinkers was taught. There's two camps. One thinks that knowledge is rooted in reason, the other one in sensory knowledge.
00:03:46
Speaker
And that's sort of just how things were taught. Now though, lots of ah philosophers and historians of philosophy are letting go of this way of thinking about things in large part because, well, to be honest, the dividing them up into two camps kind of doesn't make any sense.
00:04:09
Speaker
It was done in large part by a man named Immanuel Kant in the 1700s and, you know, they kind of just stuck in and But really, the empiricists, you can't really call them a camp because they mostly spent their time arguing against each other. And the same goes for the rationalists. Actually, Leibniz, who we're going to chat about today, he basically built his views as a response to Spinoza, who's there in the top right, who's allegedly in his same camp.
00:04:42
Speaker
And so that's kind of weird. They just basically fight amongst themselves. And that doesn't make it seem like two coherent camps. The second big issue with this way of thinking about things is that some people that are allegedly in opposing camps look a lot alike. They look very similar.
00:05:04
Speaker
For example, there's some points of agreement between Spinoza, top right, And David Hume, bottom left. And so that's kind of weird, right? So this bifurcation, this division into empiricists and rationalists is no longer super popular.
00:05:28
Speaker
I do want you to know about it. It's probably important that you know that a lot of people just kind of think there's two camps and um and that's how they think about things, but that we're moving away from that. That is another important thing to know. One last thing about this group of people In my very humble estimation, not only is there not two camps, it almost seems like there's six camps. I mean, the more you look at each of their individual philosophies, these these are just six different categories of of thought.
00:06:07
Speaker
I can kind of see where the appeal was to divide them up into two, but um Yeah, i don't I don't really think it helps in understanding their views. As a matter of fact, it might hinder in understanding their views because you expect them to have more in common than they do.
00:06:29
Speaker
But okay, that's enough.
Leibniz's Theodicy and Its Implications
00:06:31
Speaker
Let's talk about the man of the hour. Well, the man of the 10 minutes. Leibniz. So, Leibniz is very worried about the problem of evil and many related arguments. For Leibniz, failing to definitively solve the problem of evil would lead to a degraded theology, something like deism, which in turn has, you know, real-world consequences, negative consequences.
00:07:05
Speaker
He thinks that There will be despair, psychological despair, wickedness. People will turn evil or in the very least become morally lazy. And there will be another rise of warring sects.
00:07:22
Speaker
Let me fill you in on some of the details here. Leibniz actually thought that in order to be happy, you had to believe that God it both existed and loves you, right? and people and he thought that if people didn't think God loves them, they wouldn't be able to achieve happiness, which is interesting. Leibniz also believed that if you don't believe that there's an afterlife, you won't be motivated to work together.
00:07:52
Speaker
toward the common good, right? To be, you know, morally courageous and, you know, proactive in improving the world. So that's another thing that he really believed in. And he also was severely disturbed by the fact that Christianity had been divided in the previous century into you know Catholicism and Protestantism.
00:08:18
Speaker
He wanted to reunite essentially all Christian sects. Actually, he wanted to go further. um He even, you know, when he was talking about Chinese philosophy, he was saying, well, you know what, there's some similarities here. We can probably piece it all together.
00:08:35
Speaker
so Leibniz is kind of a universal ah conciliationist, right? He wants everyone to be together once more ideologically so that we can all together work for the common good.
00:08:48
Speaker
so you know, the stakes are pretty high for Leibniz. And he definitely wants to, you know, improve the world. And he thinks that that happens by having the right beliefs.
00:09:00
Speaker
And so he's going to really work to restore God's honor. He wants to deal with these theological threats that are arising during his lifetime.
00:09:13
Speaker
And simultaneously, Console people. Console the people that are suffering because life is hard. And if you think life is hard now, you should have seen it before modern medicine and you know during great civil wars and and all that. it is you know It is difficult. Some parts of life are mighty difficult. So Leibniz was trying to you know find some way to give those people solace and ultimately, hopefully, unite a divided society.
00:09:44
Speaker
So Leibniz was clearly very ambitious, but also he was a genius, right? So he he felt he could do it. not Not short on ego was this man. Leibniz tends to concern himself not only with the problem of evil in general, but we're going to break it up ah and talk about two adjacent problems, I guess I'll call them.
00:10:09
Speaker
This first one we'll talk about is the author of Sin Problems. Think about it this way, if God creates, sustains, and foreknows all things,
00:10:21
Speaker
That means that human beings are mere puppets and it turns out God is the one actually responsible for their crimes. Just think about what a God is. We've talked about this before.
00:10:34
Speaker
If God really knows everything that's going to happen, well then it seems like history is kind of set in stone. It's already decided. And so that means that we don't really have free will. It's just the illusion of choices.
00:10:51
Speaker
Well, then clearly there's sin. We do commit sins, but we don't have free will. So who, you know, is responsible ultimately? Well, that would be God, the one that got the ball rolling, right? The one that decided how everything is.
00:11:05
Speaker
So there you go. God is actually the creator of sin. How can you... a love that kind of God. B, believe in that kind of God.
00:11:18
Speaker
Doesn't that lead to all those things that Leibniz is worried about? He thought that people would you know say, well I don't have to do good, right? God is evil himself. Why do i have to even worry about it? why i can't even help really acting on my own free will. I don't have free will, so whatever I do is just natural and that's fine. So you can see how if you believe in what we referred to earlier as divine the problem of divine foreknowledge, this idea that if God is all-knowing, we don't have free will, then you kind of give up in a lot of ways, morally speaking.
00:11:56
Speaker
So that's one issue that Leibniz wanted to deal with. And another issue that he wanted to deal with, I don't have a good name for it. We're going to call it the should have done better problem. Why not?
00:12:10
Speaker
ah If God is all powerful and benevolent, the world could have been designed without flaws. And of course, there are pretty obvious flaws in the world. And so God could have and should have done better than this.
00:12:32
Speaker
It is, i think, pretty evident that some aspects of the world are sort of incomprehensible if you really believe that you know God is all-powerful and all-loving.
00:12:49
Speaker
mean, he could have done better. You know, you hear about a volcanoes that, you know, almost wipe out human existence on Earth or, you know, earthquakes that kill tens of thousands of people. And you think to yourself, like,
00:13:06
Speaker
Did it have to be that way? I mean, doesn't it seem like, you know, God could have made tectonic plates a little less ah tectonic? I don't know. I don't know how to say that. But it seems like it could have been a little more hospitable. Sure, Earth is habitable.
00:13:24
Speaker
But, you know, Mother Nature is is mean. I mean, there there wasn't another less um violent, less occasionally destructive way to make the earth.
00:13:38
Speaker
It seems like there could have been. So God should have made that kind of world instead. So these are some of the problems that Leibniz wanted to deal with. Of course also the problem of evil, also a problem that we haven't really talked about called the mind-body problem.
00:13:57
Speaker
We'll talk about it eventually so don't worry we can mention Leibniz again then. But he worked on it for decades. All right so he met with this guy Spinoza another person who is allegedly in this camp of rationalists, right? And they probably had a disagreement. we We don't know. But historians of philosophy had kind of pieced together the story and they assume that they probably had a bit of a tense argument.
00:14:28
Speaker
And then Leibniz, for you know basically decades, tried to build a system that responds to not only Spinoza's arguments, which were not really pro-Christianity,
00:14:42
Speaker
um but also the problem of evil and the author of sin and the problem of a divine foreknowledge and etc. etc. right He's going to try to deal with all these problems.
00:14:56
Speaker
And so, what does he decide? Well, Leibniz concluded that this is what happened. God evaluated all the possible realities.
00:15:08
Speaker
and chose the absolutely best one. In other words, if you want to think about it like a bunch of simulations, we talked about simulations earlier in this course. Imagine that there is an infinite set of simulations and you know they differ from each other in just like little tiny ways.
00:15:27
Speaker
Well, God looked through all of them and he chose the absolutely best one. And that is what this universe is based on. and so The one universe that actually got made is the best of all possible universes.
00:15:45
Speaker
It may not seem like it to us, but it is perfectly harmonious. It is absolutely the best. whenever we you know see what we think is unnecessary suffering, those are really just kind of um local evils, right? Local problems.
00:16:05
Speaker
But these are unavoidable byproducts of the optimal design as a whole. This universe is the best of all possible universes.
00:16:16
Speaker
And if we ever think we're looking at unnecessary suffering, what that really is, is that you're focusing on just one little bit, one little negative bit, but if you were to able to see the whole bigger picture, you would realize that actually it's all for the best.
00:16:35
Speaker
The analogy that Leibniz gives is like dissonant notes heard in isolation that ultimately resolve into a greater universal harmony.
00:16:49
Speaker
What in the world does that mean? It's actually a pretty good analogy. If I jump on the piano here and play some notes that, um you know, don't really sound good together. here Try this. Yeah.
00:17:07
Speaker
That's not fun, right? So you're hearing that and um basically you're saying, oh, that's... and That's evil, that's unnecessary suffering. Really what you have to do is hear the more complete chord, right?
00:17:26
Speaker
See that is more harmonious, that is nice. Those notes, the original ones I played, there they're in there. but they all sound much better when you kind of ah you know hear the whole thing.
00:17:40
Speaker
And you know that's just one level up. Imagine God's level where he can see everything. It's a whole perfect you know musical harmony that's happening there. So that is Leibniz's way of saying, of avoiding all the problems that we mentioned before.
00:18:00
Speaker
I'll explain that a little bit more now. So of course, The problem of evil is, you know, this idea that there's unnecessary suffering, but he deals with that by basically saying, no, it's only from your limited perspective that it seems like unnecessary suffering. So there you go. There's all kinds of ethical payoffs to this way of looking at things, at least Leibniz thought so.
00:18:26
Speaker
We'll talk about two of them right now. is a psychological benefit, but there's also sort of like a call to action, ethically speaking. So let's talk about the psychological benefits first.
00:18:41
Speaker
So you are here in this moment ah considering, you know, the existence of God and all that. And you might think about, you know, the past as a way to understand the problem of evil. You think to yourself, you know, I've had some genuinely horrific experiences, some real difficulties. I can't think of any benefit from it. It seems like unnecessary suffering.
00:19:10
Speaker
Leibniz says, well, you know, once you accept and trust that we live in the best of all possible worlds, you realize that those hardships, you know, they were difficult.
00:19:23
Speaker
But in some other possible worlds, it could have been way worse. And so given that you actually are in the best possible condition, you can have gratitude. You can say, well, you know, it could have been a lot worse.
00:19:40
Speaker
ah So I'm thankful for that. Moreover, you can trust that this is all necessary, right? It all has to happen because this is the best of a possible world. So it all is conducive to the greatest good.
00:19:55
Speaker
And so that sort of, according to Leibniz, at least, makes you feel like you know all the psychological turmoil that you might be feeling if you don't believe god exists or doesn't love you or something like that well that goes away and you can have a sense of like a bit of peace i guess but there's also this call to action that i talked about If you really do believe that you know this is all for the best and you know that God loves you and He made the best of all possible worlds for you, then you need to fiercely strive to do good.
00:20:36
Speaker
Because everything, literally everything that happens, your good deeds, your efforts, your prayers, whatever, everything, they are part of God's plan, right? They are necessary constituents, effective components of God's plan.
00:20:51
Speaker
And so you have to do them, right? So they're in this combination of ideas, you can see that Leibniz is dealing with ah the psychological disturbances that might arise from a belief like deism, where you don't believe that necessarily it's the case that God loves you.
00:21:14
Speaker
Maybe God made the world, but you know he's he doesn't really care about you. He doesn't listen to your prayers. Well, he's dealing with that problem, the psychological aspect of it. And he's also dealing with the problem of moral wickedness, right? You do have to do good deeds. It's part of God's plan.
00:21:32
Speaker
Okay, well, that is Leibniz. And I hope you can see how he tries to respond to the problem of evil. ah In particular, he tries to show that it is not the case that there's unnecessary suffering.
00:21:50
Speaker
It's only from, you know, narrow-minded perspective, very human perspective, but still a perspective that doesn't take everything into account, that it seems like there is unnecessary suffering.
00:22:04
Speaker
Well, now we come to the actual man of the half hour.
Voltaire's Critique of Leibniz
00:22:12
Speaker
His name is Francois-Marie Arouette.
00:22:17
Speaker
And this is a person that I really wanted to talk about today. ah This is, of course, fitting with our time period. We are he in 1778. and he died in seventeen seventy eight just before the French Revolution and the American Revolution was going on, right? So we'll have more to say about that.
00:22:41
Speaker
But this person, decisively, many philosophers think and many historians think, argued against the views of Leibniz and similar views.
00:22:54
Speaker
And he's very famous. I actually think you already know of this person, except that you don't know him. as Francois-Marie Arouet, you know him as Voltaire.
00:23:07
Speaker
Of course, Voltaire is his pen name, but that is how he is most well known. a playwright, a writer, um you know, he wrote on philosophy, on history, and he did satires.
00:23:22
Speaker
And he, you know, we'll talk more about him in ah in ah his his trajectory in a bit. But he's very you know known for his criticisms of Christianity and of slavery, which is ah very important.
00:23:36
Speaker
He also advocated freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, and the separation of church and state. Very popular ideals today. And of course, he was influential to some of the founding fathers. they they He knew some of them.
00:23:54
Speaker
That's all very interesting. um What I want to say about him right now is that you know his politics, they're all built on his rejection of Leibniz's style of um a philosophy. right So Leibniz thought that you needed to believe in God to do good and he wanted ah you know government to be Christian And, you know, so so that that's kind of the way he thought about things.
00:24:23
Speaker
Voltaire here is really pushing more of what today we might call or sort of like a secular liberalism. And freedom of speech is is a very important part of that. Freedom of religion, of course, as well. But freedom of speech, Voltaire has a famous line where he says something like, I i disagree with your opinion, but I will fight to the death for your right to have it.
00:24:49
Speaker
So he is very much okay with differing points of views. And he did spend a bunch of time in jail for advocating some of his views, right? So he, um you know, he put his money where his ah mouth was, I suppose.
00:25:04
Speaker
Real skin in the game. Okay, let's talk about Voltaire's trajectory for a bit. He was initially pretty optimistic deist.
00:25:17
Speaker
what is optimistic about Voltaire's early deism, well, he thought that God, like all deists, he didn't think that God was involved with human creation, right? we were're We're here basically alone.
00:25:32
Speaker
But at least God was a rational creator. He did make the world in a fairly hospitable way for humans. And that's nice, right? But All that changed after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. If you don't know about it, tens of thousands of people died. And the earth looked like it was, you know, if you grab like um if you grab like a cracker or something and and crack it in half
00:26:07
Speaker
And you see how it you know it fragments. That's sort of what you know parts of ah of Lisbon look like. it's It's pretty horrific. You can see modern versions of this, right big earthquakes that have happened. In the Caribbean, there was a big earthquake a couple of years ago. In Mexico City, there was an earthquake in 85, I want to say. So you can go look at pictures of that. It is honestly horrific.
00:26:32
Speaker
And so after that, Voltaire changed his tune a lot. Sure, there is a God, but doesn't really care about you and doesn't necessarily you know um create a world that is optimized for you.
00:26:49
Speaker
And more to the point, part of his pessimism is that Voltaire believed that anyone who wanted to push these ideas, kind of like Leibniz, they're dangerous. They're hurting people, right? They're they're filling them with superstition and you know it's not helpful. It's bad.
00:27:10
Speaker
So in a very famous work named Candide, which you might have read in high school, I read it in high school, ah Voltaire skewers the views of Leibniz.
00:27:24
Speaker
He goes to town. He basically has a character. that is based off of Leibniz and he makes them look like a complete idiot.
00:27:35
Speaker
You know, Voltaire didn't want to write philosophy in a way that wasn't accessible to people and so he made this, you know, short story instead and he really does make the case that, you know, it seems like anyone who believes that this is the best of all possible worlds is kind of an idiot, right? He's a fool.
00:27:55
Speaker
And so that is Voltaire's argument. Let me express it perhaps a little bit more formally. It is extremely implausible to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds.
00:28:11
Speaker
Maybe another way to frame this is to say that Leibniz, by building his system about the best of all possible worlds, he basically gives you a choice. He says, well, either you believe in my system or you believe that God created the world, but you know, he doesn't really care about us. He didn't make the world perfect for us.
00:28:31
Speaker
And he basically abandoned us. And those are your two choices, let's just say. Well, Voltaire's argument is like, if those are the two choices, you know which one seems more likely? The one where God abandoned us, right? Deism.
00:28:46
Speaker
And so that's basically the case that Voltaire is making. One of the cases that Voltaire is making in his book, Candide. Now, Voltaire time and time again went after um other ah you know religious thinkers of his day.
00:29:05
Speaker
And you know at least one historian ah says that, his name is, by the way, is Will Durant, says that Voltaire so decisively dealt with ah the theological responses to his view. Now, it's kind of boring to read them now because all of us agree with Voltaire.
00:29:26
Speaker
And so that's kind of telling, right? um He would write in a very accessible manner too. And that's that's kind of cool. Philosophy is almost never accessible, but Voltaire tried to make sure that it was.
00:29:41
Speaker
And so that is one argument against Leibniz. that his view is just extremely implausible. You have to be kind of gullible to believe it or maybe you have to already believe that God exists to find it likely.
00:29:59
Speaker
Let's move on to another argument against Leibniz. Now, this is a little bit more subtle, but you might argue that Leibniz's metaphysical system doesn't actually achieve the aims that Leibniz wanted to achieve.
00:30:16
Speaker
So Leibniz created this whole, you know, um complex system, which I didn't explain to you, by the way, called the monodologies, because i didn't explain it to you because it
Critiques and Counterarguments to Leibniz's Philosophy
00:30:29
Speaker
is so darn complicated. It would take like two lessons at least.
00:30:34
Speaker
And his whole idea for Leibniz was that through this system, he could both preserve science and the traditional conception of God. right Remember, he was a scientist and a method mathematician.
00:30:47
Speaker
He liked those things, so he wanted to keep them. But he also wanted to keep... The idea of God as you know like a person who is transcendent, what that means is that God is outside of creation. God made the world, but is not a part of the world, which is not what other people were believing at the time. And God has desires and a will, and he wants you to behave a certain way, right? And so Leibniz wanted to keep both of those, science, math, and on the other hand, also traditional religion.
00:31:22
Speaker
Well, Leibniz builds this big old complicated system and it's not clear that it worked. So I can give you just one example here. Leibniz paints God as making a choice between possible worlds, right? So he looked at all the simulations and he said, ah, that's the best one right there. We'll make the world like that.
00:31:46
Speaker
But due to his benevolence, God seems to have been bound to choose the best of all possible worlds. so me put that in a different way.
00:31:58
Speaker
If God is all good, he isn't capable of doing anything other than choose the best of all possible worlds.
00:32:09
Speaker
What this means is that God's choice Was that a choice at all? If all you can do is the best thing, well, then that's all you can do.
00:32:23
Speaker
How can it be a genuine choice if you literally could not have done otherwise? That's what it means to be a robot, right? And robots don't have free will.
00:32:35
Speaker
So that is kind of a big deal. The whole point of Leibniz's metaphysical system is to show that God is a person that has a will, right? A free will and, you know, makes choices.
00:32:51
Speaker
But Liveness the system doesn't really show that God makes choices. God's behavior is an outcome determined by the nature of God, namely that trait that God possesses of being all loving.
00:33:08
Speaker
And so there you go. um We can get way deeper into this, but we would have to actually learn about Leibniz's metaphysics, right? His monodology.
00:33:19
Speaker
And that's a whole that's a whole thing. you can You can dive into it. Go ahead. Rather than reading Leibniz, though, which is extremely difficult to read, i would read this book here, The Cordier and the Heretic. Pretty good. I've to say, um I think it's... ah I think it's fair, put it that way.
00:33:39
Speaker
Okay, I have one more argument here against Leibniz and his possible solution to the problem of evil, but it's kind of a sidebar.
00:33:50
Speaker
So yeah, let me just give you this. um Various philosophers have found Leibniz's metaphysics to be either incomprehensible or arbitrarily designed just so as to avoid skeptical attacks like the problem of evil.
00:34:10
Speaker
In other words, during Leibniz's day, there's all these... theological puzzles that are arising, these critiques that seem to undermine traditional religion.
00:34:23
Speaker
And Leibniz's system very conveniently deals with all of them. In fact, it's so convenient that it looks like he literally built his system just to respond to these particular theological puzzles.
00:34:43
Speaker
It's almost like he made up something that, um you know, ah in a very complicated way, deals with the problems that most nagged him, which is kind of ah weird. Something about it seems...
00:34:58
Speaker
disingenuous It kind of seems contrived, arbitrary. um It reminds me of a Rube Goldberg machine. If you don't know what these things Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist from the 20th century. And he would build designs for like really complicated machines that do really simple things.
00:35:20
Speaker
And that's kind of what Leibniz's system is. It's really complicated, like too complicated. And it's just to address these these theological puzzles.
00:35:32
Speaker
And when it gets that complicated, you wonder to yourself like, well, at this point, isn't it just easier to be a deist like Voltaire? It just seems like, you know, if you have to make the system this complicated, what's probably not true, right? that's the ah That's the rule that we learned a couple of lessons ago, right?
00:35:52
Speaker
Occam's razor. So yeah, that's that's a thing. And so let me finally get to my last point against Leibniz. Some historians of philosophy actually argue that Leibniz didn't believe any of what he wrote.
00:36:11
Speaker
That's kind of bananas, right? Leibniz, according to some people, just wrote what he wrote to sort of defend the way he thought government should be.
00:36:26
Speaker
right He wanted a theocracy. he Remember i said that he wanted the government to be Christian? And because that's what he wanted, he built a system that would convince people to still accept traditional Christian theology.
00:36:39
Speaker
right so that is that's kind of twisted right and a lot of evidence says that leibnitz was kind of a... Well, there's a lot going on with that guy. He's kind of a people pleaser, but he's always after himself. He's always after his own best interest. And you can see this in his political career. So maybe there's some truth to this.
00:37:01
Speaker
The fact that it's even possible that Leibniz didn't believe his system really kind of, you know, takes the wind from underneath the sails of the view. It's like, oh...
00:37:14
Speaker
Like, why would I believe this if the guy that made it maybe didn't believe it? So the verdict on Leibniz's philosophy is something like this.
00:37:28
Speaker
lots of people, Bertrand Russell was one of them, they found Leibniz's metaphysics to be some combination of arbitrary, incoherent, and implausible.
00:37:40
Speaker
Right? So arbitrary because it was just designed to deal with the problems that Leibniz most worried about. And it seems very obvious that it was like that.
00:37:51
Speaker
Incoherent because it might not make any sense. And implausible because it just seems like there's simpler explanations that, you know, don't stretch credulity as much.
00:38:06
Speaker
Also, there real world horrors like, you know, super volcanoes and earthquakes and whatever that make this view just seem absurd to some philosophers. Voltaire is the prime example here.
00:38:22
Speaker
You kind of have to be a fool, says Voltaire, to believe in Leibniz's system. I got one more for you. Many today don't necessarily agree with Leibniz's view that people need to believe that God loves them in order to be happy.
00:38:42
Speaker
I mean, it seems like there's some non-believers that are perfectly happy, right? And so that doesn't seem to land as well as it used to Here's another one.
00:38:56
Speaker
Leibniz thought that you need to believe there's an afterlife to work toward the common good. But a lot of people do um things for their community and don't believe in an afterlife. Now maybe they do it for the love of their community.
00:39:17
Speaker
Maybe they do it because they want, I don't know, libraries named after them or whatever out of self-interest. Maybe they do it because they think it's the right thing to do, right? They just believe that you're supposed to give back, whatever.
00:39:30
Speaker
it doesn't seem like you need to believe in heaven, that you're going to go there, to do do good deeds for the community. So a lot of what motivated Leibniz doesn't land for us anymore.
00:39:45
Speaker
Now you might be thinking to yourself, I thought we were going to cover possible solutions to the problem of evil. Here we are. all right i just wanted to give you that one because It is one of them that crops up in discussions and there's a lot of arguments against that. So I wanted you to be familiar with that. But okay, I know what you want. You want some more possible solutions.
00:40:09
Speaker
So let's do that now.
Responses to the Problem of Evil: Deism and Alternative Views
00:40:30
Speaker
Let me now give you sort of a sampling of the sorts of solutions to the problem of evil argument, the responses to the problem of evil argument that I most hear in my classroom when we have an open discussion about this.
00:40:48
Speaker
They are in no particular order. Although I guess I am going to lump them together into two camps. So the first camp has to do, these camps both have to do with ah the argument itself.
00:41:03
Speaker
You can either reject premise one or premise two, right? So the argument itself is valid in the sense that if you believe one and two, you do have to accept three.
00:41:15
Speaker
So if you want to challenge the argument, you um so you know basically say that it's not sound, it's not actually true premises, you want to challenge one or both of the premises, right? So this first camp challenges premise one.
00:41:32
Speaker
Basically, if God exists, you know then you might still expect unnecessary suffering. So let me give you these. And again, this is these are kind of like, I don't want to say knee jerk reactions or responses, but, you know, intuitively, when I present students with this argument, here's what they come up with first. Right. Among some of the first things, some of them go with deism. Now, they don't call it deism.
00:42:01
Speaker
They might say, well, you know what? God still exists. He just wants the world to kind of operate on its own, right? With that, you know, if you kind of start probing a little further, eventually looks like deism, right? There's a rational creator, sure, and he made the world and maybe hospitable, maybe an inhospitable way, whatever, but there is a God, just doesn't intervene in the world, right? He's hands off. He's a laissez-faire kind of God.
00:42:29
Speaker
And so these students eventually say, well, okay, there's no miracles because that that would be intervening in the world. There's no guiding of history, right? Some people think that history happens because God wanted it to happen that way. Well, you know, that wouldn't make sense for the deist.
00:42:48
Speaker
There's no divine revelation either, right? So this is one view Let me show you why it it undermines the problem of evil argument. Basically, it changes the definition of God.
00:43:05
Speaker
Under this way of thinking, it's at least not necessarily the case that God is all good and or all loving, right? Maybe he's all knowing, maybe he's all powerful.
00:43:18
Speaker
but he's not all good or all loving. And so what that ends up, you know, the situation that that creates is that God created the world, but it might still be a world where there is unnecessary suffering.
00:43:33
Speaker
ah God is a creator, but not necessarily ah an optimizer, right? He didn't make it perfectly. And so that, I suppose, does ah make the problem of evil argument go away. You change the definition of God, premise one no longer works.
00:43:51
Speaker
But for every possible solution that I will cover in this lesson, i will give you the atheistic response. That's going to be represented here by this symbol. Apparently the symbol of atheism. I didn't know that that existed.
00:44:06
Speaker
But yeah, What would the atheist respond to in this case? They might say something like, actually, there's a lot of things they might say, but they might say something like this.
00:44:21
Speaker
You have conceded so much to the atheist, to our side. the This is the atheist speaking, by the way. So this God does not ah not appear to be benevolent, right? And that is a key trait of the Christian God. So you they're basically saying, maybe you have avoided this problem of evil argument, but you basically redefined God so that it isn't the Christian God.
00:44:49
Speaker
The Christian God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful. So if you take away one of those traits, right, the all-loving, all-good one, well, then that's not the same God anymore. And so the atheist basically says, okay, well, you know, you still believe in a God, but it's not that God you started with.
00:45:10
Speaker
Wow, that is a very good response. that you Obviously, it is a different kind of belief system, right? deism. So, you know, that it's not clear that a Christian who is arguing against ah the problem of evil argument wants to go this far.
00:45:29
Speaker
By the way, The atheist might add that this God is not really worth worshipping. This God created the world and didn't even make it perfect and then just dipped, right? Just left humans to their own devices, whatever. Whatever happens, happens.
00:45:50
Speaker
Okay, that is the response to that ah possible solution. Okay, here is another possible solution that students tend to bring up.
00:46:02
Speaker
It was the devil. It's the devil that causes unnecessary suffering. So even though God does exist, the devil also exists. And that second character, the devil, that is the source of the evil that we see in the world.
00:46:21
Speaker
Okay, that does undermine premise one, right? It shows that it's not necessarily the case that if God exists, the world would be free from unnecessary suffering.
00:46:33
Speaker
But of course, again, there is a problem here and the response once more comes from the atheistic camp. I guess I could say a couple of things about this. I mean, first of all, if you're following Occam's razor,
00:46:49
Speaker
I mean, you know, that's adding another supernatural deity or i mean, i guess it's not a deity, but another supernatural being, the devil. So you have to believe not only that God exists, but also the devil exists. And that's but whatever. Here's the more direct answer from the atheist.
00:47:07
Speaker
If the devil really is causing unnecessary suffering and God is all powerful and all knowing and all loving, Well, then God should just obliterate the devil, destroy him.
00:47:23
Speaker
Why is he around? If he is a source of evil, get rid of him. The fact that God isn't getting rid of the devil raises questions. Why not? Maybe he's not all loving or maybe he can't. Maybe he's not all powerful.
00:47:38
Speaker
Right. So the atheist here is using the existence of the devil now ah sort of as a way to undermine belief in God or, you know, the inconsistency in both believing in the devil and God.
00:47:54
Speaker
So maybe that possible solution also doesn't work. How about the free will response? I think this is a very popular response. Basically, you know, humans are the ones that cause unnecessary suffering in the world.
00:48:12
Speaker
It is their actions done out of free will that cause suffering and evil. Well, that is a view, sure.
00:48:24
Speaker
The atheistic response, though, is, i guess there's a couple of things they can say here. First of all, there is a bunch of non-ethical, anthropogenic suffering that this doesn't really deal with, right?
00:48:38
Speaker
So super volcanoes um for almost all of human history had nothing to do with humans, right? They just happen.
00:48:49
Speaker
ah The world is made that way. The same goes for earthquakes. Now, maybe you can say that humans are affecting the environment, but that's a very recent thing.
00:49:00
Speaker
Even if you stretch it back, you know, to the beginnings of civilization, humans have been around for way longer than that, right? So there's a whole other 2000, sorry, 200,000 years at least that humans have been suffering from nature that they had really no impact. They they didn't, you know, bring it upon themselves.
00:49:22
Speaker
So that's one very big deal. Also, you have to persuade the atheist, maybe, that you actually have free will. Because remember,
00:49:34
Speaker
There's this idea and that God's omniscience, the fact that God knows everything that's going happen, that seems to be incompatible with the idea of real human free will.
00:49:47
Speaker
And so you have to kind of fix that tension. That's one thing that Leibniz wanted to do. But as we saw, it was not as easy as he thought.
00:50:01
Speaker
Let me give you one other point here that the atheist might make. There's quite a few philosophers and scientists who don't believe humans have free will.
00:50:13
Speaker
There's a recent book called Determined ah by a Stanford psychologist, I think, or maybe he's a neurobiologist. I'm not sure anymore. But yeah, Robert Sapolsky argues as you know from psychology and neuroscience and biology that humans don't have anything resembling free will. So you can go check out that book if you want.
00:50:41
Speaker
In a nutshell, it is not clear that the free will response actually a sufficient to account for all seemingly unnecessary suffering.
00:50:51
Speaker
And it's not even clear that we have free will. You actually have to provide an argument that A, we have it, and B, it's compatible with God's omniscience.
00:51:03
Speaker
So there you go. Another response from the atheist. Let me give you one more here. from this camp ah that sort of um echoes some Eastern thought.
00:51:17
Speaker
But maybe evil is a necessary counterpart to good. Evil has to exist whenever good exists, right? There's like a yin-yang kind of thing going on So when God made good, evil happened too.
00:51:34
Speaker
It's just, you know, this is a part of it. Well, here's what the atheist would say. That assumes that God could not create good without evil, which implies that God has limits on what he can do, which is incompatible with his omnipotence. Let me put that in a more simple way for you.
00:51:58
Speaker
If you think that creating good necessarily implies creating evil, that means that you think God can't do everything.
00:52:11
Speaker
If God really is all-powerful, he would be able to create good without evil. So by saying, well, you know, he has to create evil when he creates good, you're basically saying God is not all-powerful. He's not omnipotent.
00:52:25
Speaker
So there are some responses to the problem of evil that come from denying premise one. Let's look now at a few where they deny premise two. They might say, you know what? It's actually not the case that there's unnecessary suffering. So this first one, going to be honest, I think it's a strong one. So I'm going to spend quite a bit of time on it, but it goes directly for number two here. Okay.
00:52:55
Speaker
Typically, it is referred to as the soul-making defense. Here it is, in a nutshell, the universe is better with some evil in it. In other words, this world has just enough bad in it to motivate some true goodness.
00:53:17
Speaker
Think of Mother Teresa, think of Gandhi, think of Martin Luther King Jr. These were people that exhibited a ton of moral courage and were incredibly morally proactive doing incredible things and helping a lot of people and doing it in um a morally admirable way, right? Through nonviolence or or devotion to the poor or whatever, right? So that is why the universe is the way it is
00:53:50
Speaker
Moreover, we actually need this abundant suffering in this world. The suffering that comes from moral evil and natural evil, it's just the perfect amount to give us opportunities, enough opportunities to act courageously and benevolently, right?
00:54:12
Speaker
And to develop empathy and sympathy and compassion So we need this amount of suffering. It is necessary for us to show true moral fiber.
00:54:26
Speaker
And here's a little bit of Leibniz in there. It's also not so abundant so as to discourage moral development.
00:54:37
Speaker
Had it been any suffering in the world, it would have been like a lost cause. We would have just been like, hey, you know what? It's too much. I can't deal with it. Forget it.
00:54:49
Speaker
Right? So it's just at the right sweet spot, the Goldilocks region of suffering, where where it motivates us to do some true good and to really you know um get out there and develop strong bonds with our fellow human beings. right Anything so more than this would have seemed to discourage moral development.
00:55:13
Speaker
I quite like this view because there's so much to think about here, right? um So i will um now give you the atheistic perspective, um but notice that I'm, you know, because I like this view, i'm you know, there's more of a nuance to it. So let's get into this.
00:55:33
Speaker
The first problem that the atheist might, you know, bring up here is that the person that is giving the soul-making defense is literally saying that God created some of the evil in the world, right?
00:55:51
Speaker
The natural evil at least. So that is kind of weird. They're basically saying God is the author of evil.
00:56:02
Speaker
God did put deliberately some suffering into the world. And that seems to be incompatible with omnipotence and omnibenevolence or being all good or all loving.
00:56:17
Speaker
So why is that the case? Well, maybe if God is all powerful, wouldn't God be able to make humans that didn't have to see all this suffering to be good to each other, right? To really show moral courage.
00:56:32
Speaker
Or maybe look at it another way, right? If God really was all-loving, would he ever, you know, it almost seems like this is a testing ground, right? If God is all-loving, why would he put his creation in this testing ground with which he knows there's suffering and he deliberately put it in there?
00:56:53
Speaker
It seems incompatible with this idea that God is all loving, that he's a a loving creator, father, right? And so that is one argument against this ah possible solution.
00:57:06
Speaker
It just doesn't seem like the traits of God fit in with this particular um defense, right? God could have made it so that we are morally you know upright without suffering because he's all powerful.
00:57:24
Speaker
And he wouldn't put us somewhere where there is suffering because he's all loving. Okay, so that's the first point from the atheists. Here is why, maybe why I like this view so much, but this kind of implies, oddly, I might add, that by making the world better, in other words, by reducing the amount of suffering in the world, that means that we're acting against God's will?
00:57:57
Speaker
Question mark? right If the idea is that this is like the perfect amount of suffering so that we really get out there and do some good, well then you you can't reduce the amount of suffering because that would stop being enough to get other people to go out there and do some good.
00:58:16
Speaker
Notice how bananas that is, right? If the suffering in the world is so that we can get out there and do some good, By doing good, we are actually relieving suffering and making making it so that other people won't need to get out there and do some good.
00:58:37
Speaker
What? There's something kind of twisted about this, right? If that was God's plan, then doesn't seem to make sense, right? This doesn't seem to be the plan of an all-knowing God.
00:58:48
Speaker
ah So that's another point from the atheistic camp. This next one um has to do with sort of when you think about this problem, but let me put it like this.
00:59:03
Speaker
It seems like there could be a lot less evil in human history. So let me put it like this. Here we are today. ah considering this idea that the amount of suffering in the world is just the perfect amount so that we, you know, are motivated to be morally courageous and upright.
00:59:26
Speaker
Well, so Steven Pinker has his book where he makes the case that suffering and evil, moral evil, has declined over the last few centuries so that we basically live in one of the best eras to be alive, right?
00:59:42
Speaker
Even hunter-gatherer societies had a greater percentage of people dying by violent means than we do today. And so let's just say that we still think that the amount of suffering today is enough to do, um you know, to really develop moral character.
01:00:02
Speaker
Okay, then what about all the other times in the past when there was way more suffering. I mean, if it really is the case that suffering has declined over time, then the soul making defense kind of doesn't make any sense because the idea is that it's the perfect amount ah for people to do good.
01:00:28
Speaker
But the amount hasn't been static. It's been changing over time. In fact, there's less suffering now, even though there's more people. So there's something kind of wonky going on here, right?
01:00:41
Speaker
So from this perspective, the evils of like the early modern period, right? The period where where we started with, like the 1600s, with a lot of suffering, that seems excessive if the amount of evil that we have today in the USA is enough for soul making. So you have to wonder, like, if there's enough evil now,
01:01:03
Speaker
for soul making and for moral character development, why was there so much more suffering in the past? It seems to go against this idea that there's this quote unquote, perfect amount of human suffering.
01:01:17
Speaker
So, okay. That's another point, very subtle, right? But cool to think about. Let me give you one more it still doesn't really deal with some kinds of suffering.
01:01:33
Speaker
For example, it is unclear how the fact that nearly half of humans throughout history have died as infants, how that helped anyone become a better person.
01:01:45
Speaker
Maybe some people you know, developed mortal character because their infant died. But a lot of people were just crushed and broken.
01:01:59
Speaker
And, you know, they they became a little more hardened and they became a little less attached to their babies, right? Because you don't know if they're going to survive.
01:02:12
Speaker
And so, it doesn't deal with all the suffering ah in the world. In fact, you can easily think of more cases where you're like, well, I'm not really sure that that helped anyone develop moral character.
01:02:27
Speaker
So you can go ahead and think of some cases on your own. But for me, you know that's a ah factoid that sticks out in my mind. About half of the humans that have that have ever existed died as infants. It seems not fair. It seems like it doesn't help anyone. It doesn't seem like the product of an all good God. right So a lot to think about there.
01:02:52
Speaker
Okay, so that was the soul making defense. I do think there's a lot to unpack there and we could have done a whole lesson on it probably, but um we're doing a ah know greatest hits version here of the problem of evil.
01:03:06
Speaker
Let's go to a different ah approach. William Rowe, in his pretty good introduction to the philosophy of religion, ah basically says this, entertains this idea.
01:03:20
Speaker
Isn't it the case that we don't know for sure whether there is unnecessary suffering, right? How do you prove that? How do you know it's true or false for that matter?
01:03:33
Speaker
It could be the case that there is no unnecessary suffering, but we're just not smart enough to really see it, right? So maybe when we look at the argument, we should look at premise two insight and say, well, question mark, i don't really know.
01:03:48
Speaker
It seems like there's unnecessary suffering, but I can't prove it. Maybe there is no unnecessary suffering, right? So that is that argument. And let me close then by giving this final response from the atheistic camp.
01:04:04
Speaker
Maybe, right? It is true that to claim that you know for sure that something is unnecessary suffering is a little...
01:04:16
Speaker
dogmatic, right? You can say it seems to me like there's unnecessary suffering, but how do you how do you prove that definitively, right?
01:04:26
Speaker
i mean, i I made the case that infants dying, ah you know, that doesn't seem fair or like it's the product of um of an all-loving God. But what do I know? i'm I have a puny human brain.
01:04:39
Speaker
i I'm not even that smart. to I'm just a guy. How would I know for sure that that never had any benefit, right? So this is kind of a tough situation.
01:04:52
Speaker
However, the atheist still has a response. Maybe the atheist goes all Pyronian and says, well, you know what? We don't know if there is unnecessary suffering or not. We have to suspend judgment.
01:05:06
Speaker
What does that mean? That means that the existence of God is an open question. You don't know if there is unnecessary suffering or not. So if there is, then God doesn't exist. If there isn't, well then maybe God exists. But you don't know the answer to that question. That's basically what Rose said.
01:05:26
Speaker
And so what is the only rational response? Maybe agnosticism? Maybe say, I don't know that we can know whether or not God exists.
01:05:37
Speaker
And so there you go We have, what was that, five, six, seven um responses to the problem of evil and then responses to the responses, right? So it is unclear that we can solve this problem in this lesson alone.
01:05:54
Speaker
But don't worry, we will continue to look at this issue, maybe from a different angle. and see if we can get any work done. I want to close this lesson with a real quick story time.
The Interplay of Theology and Politics
01:06:14
Speaker
We have been covering these theological disputes of ah the 1700s, but I don't want you to think that this is just about religion.
01:06:27
Speaker
For many of these thinkers, maybe all of them, the The theological disputes in question had political consequences, they had scientific consequences, they mattered for human psychology, psychological states, right?
01:06:45
Speaker
And even ethics, what we um what would motivate us to be good, what we have to do, all these things were intertwined. Let me give you as one example here.
01:06:58
Speaker
Mr. Thomas Hobbes, he's actually from the 1600s, but he definitely thought that if you let people, ah you know, if you leave them up to their own devices, they will, you know, they are completely driven by self-interest.
01:07:13
Speaker
And before you know it, they will start fighting with each other. And so what we need is a strong central government that basically controls the masses, keeps us from our own worst instincts.
01:07:30
Speaker
And this government would have total control on everything having to do with morality and religion. And so that is the only way to make sure that we don't devolve into a war of all against all.
01:07:48
Speaker
So there you have it. Hobbes definitely sees um politics tied in with ethics and psychology, right? he had all these views intersect. He had a view about human psychology that we're all driven by self-interest.
01:08:03
Speaker
which means that he had a political solution and that political solution involves defining what morality is in a political way. right So these all intersect with each other.
01:08:15
Speaker
Leibniz, we already discussed a little bit, but remember that he thought that we have to believe that God loves us in order to be happy. So that's kind of an interesting idea.
01:08:28
Speaker
Let me now talk about Spinoza because Spinoza was one of the first people that argued for what we today call secular liberalism.
01:08:40
Speaker
He thought that you could be happy without religion. He thought that you could behave well without religion. He thought that government would ideally not have anything to do with traditional religion.
01:08:51
Speaker
And so these are very much opposed to what Leibniz thought. And the key for Spinoza um is freedom. right he He wanted to promote freedom and that would be what is, you know, that is his radical idea for, you know, radical and scare quotes. It was radical for the time, but now we all sort of, you know, believe that freedom is a good thing.
01:09:15
Speaker
And freedom of speech, freedom from religion, freedom of religion, these are all good things. But at the time, it was kind of jarring to many people. Spinoza emphasized that we need freedom from superstition because if we believe in superstition, we might do things out of fear and that's not freedom, right?
01:09:34
Speaker
He believed that, I wrote in here, that we should be free from immoderate passions. What that means is basically emotional disturbances, right strong emotional reactions.
01:09:47
Speaker
Those don't let us see clearly. We end up kind of ah thinking in a very emotional way and that's not free either. We want to be free from delusion. We don't want to believe false things. And we want to be free from wanting what is beyond our control.
01:10:07
Speaker
a little bit of stoicism in there, right? A lot of people make themselves unhappy by wanting what they rationally can't expect or achieve on their own.
01:10:19
Speaker
And so leipwise sorry Spinoza here is giving us a whole, a very modern, you know, um way of looking at the interaction between a religion, politics, psychology, etc. right So there is yet another view. right And all these thinkers were thinking about all these issues simultaneously. It's like everyone kind of was like, we need to figure this out. right What is the interplay between religion, politics, human psychology, science, etc.?
01:10:54
Speaker
Well, into this atmosphere, ah intellectual um you know culture, a bunch of pretty important historical figures entered, right?
01:11:08
Speaker
And we have talked about them before. There was a group of American elites who were very much into ancient writings and they were also very much into the writings of some of these radical enlighteners.
01:11:26
Speaker
In fact, some of the American elites that we're talking about here, like Benjamin Franklin, were friends with some people that we have covered in this class. In fact, I know that Benjamin Franklin at one point met David Hume and they had a apparently a nice conversation.
01:11:46
Speaker
So in any case, why do these American elites matter? Well, because eventually, after thinking about all these different ideas, they fomented a revolt against Great Britain. Now at this point, they had been colonies of Great Britain.
01:12:08
Speaker
But there was a lot of things that were going on, and a lot of thoughts that were being had. And by the way, there was a tax on rum and that they didn't like very much. And so they eventually, um you know, hostilities break out in 1775. And eventually they declare their independence and win their independence.
01:12:29
Speaker
And so, of course, that means that in the rest of this course, we will now be incorporating more American philosophers into the conversation now that America is a thing, right?
01:12:43
Speaker
But before we get to that, we have to talk about France. France is a hotbed of enlightenment thinking. In fact, we've covered a bunch of French people.
01:12:56
Speaker
And you know that because I have to bust out my bad French pronunciation and say these names multiple times so I can actually pronounce them correctly. So France is where a lot of these ideas are taking place and a lot of the thinkers, especially in Paris by the way, and a lot of these thinkers they're in France or they're they're in Paris, they get kicked out because their ideas are too radicals.
01:13:21
Speaker
But that's like, you know, ground zero for a lot of these, you know, wild ideas, political, religious, and otherwise. And so Eventually, they also had a political revolution, but this one was different from the American Revolution.
01:13:42
Speaker
In France, the revolution that would take place would lead to ideologically driven wars of expansion, right? A big empire was about to be one And we're also going to have the and initiation of purges of officials who were not committed to the revolution, sort of like a you know, oath of loyalty, right?
01:14:10
Speaker
Very violent time period indeed. And there would be the cult of the supreme ruler, this idea that we need to basically have a ruler who is almost godlike in status.
01:14:25
Speaker
And of course, this all leads to a ton of bloodshed. Now, you probably know who I'm talking about already.
01:14:37
Speaker
that's coming up next.