I’m an atheist optimist who also believes the world is pretty obviously evil, especially with respect to all the animals living terrible lives in the wild and in captivity.
I completely agree with this post; my optimism is more a personality trait and feeling that I got very lucky in the random draw of the universe than it is a statement of my belief about the world. To be honest, it’s easy to detachedly agree the world sucks because of animals I never see or hear and still enjoy the rich human connections and prosperity our species has built. It’s not good that it’s so easy to ignore the evil of the world, but it’s how it is. And evolution wasn’t interested in making my moral sense care about people 500,000 miles away than my friends and family, despite me intellectually valuing our worth the same and wishing I cared and donated more.
If Nagasawa’s argument is as you present it then it clearly doesn’t work, but it does sound like he’s getting close to a point that I do think is true: that to believe the problem of evil is unsolvable commits you to a degree of philosophical pessimism.
I’d go further and argue that to believe in the formulation of the problem of evil that all holds all evil to be unjustifiable, not just some, necessarily commits you to antinatalism.
I don't actually think you'd need to be a pessimist to believe the PoE is unsolvable. Consider one option: You believe that there cannot be gratuitous evil given theism, and that there is certainly gratuitous evil. You may still judge that the world is very very good. For example, the world may be essentially paradise except that there is a single gratuitous toe-stubbing at one point. This would be incompatible with theism, but it would be strange to say that that requires that I'm some kind of pessimist here--at least that would be stretching what I intuitively associate with pessimism.
It's another question how plausible an attitude like this is, but I think it's clearly possible.
I’m going to have to write a whole article on this at some point. But though I agree it’s definitely possible for such a world to exist, it’s much harder to make the case that any particular natural evil in our world is necessarily gratuitous, without which the argument from evil doesn’t work. Many argue that wild animal suffering is such an evil, but it seems like believing that does commit you to the belief that the world as it exists is on balance unjustifiably evil and would be better off not existing.
Actually, I don't think the PoE requires that for any particular instance of evil, that evil is gratuitous--simply that at least one instance is gratuitous, which is a much easier bar to clear (of course assuming you think gratuitous evil is incompatible with theism, which I'd probably want to regret).
I also don't see why thinking that there is a lot of gratuitous evil requires that you be a pessimist. There can be a lot of bad stuff but even more good stuff. If I judge that (as I would take it most optimist atheists would do (in the sense of being optimists about the world as a whole)). Now, maybe the point is that there is so much animal suffering that it'd be hard to seriously believe it to be gratuitous and the world be good without an afterlife or something, in which case fine, that's probably right.
Why can’t you believe that our world’s evil is justifiable if the only alternative is no world at all, but unjustifiable if you’re an all-powerful God who could have designed things differently?
I suppose the counterargument is multiverse stuff. After God is done creating the better alternative worlds, why shouldn’t God go on to create our world too, given that it’s better for it to exist than not exist?
But that’s just the repugnant conclusion of totalism. Or more specifically, totalism combined with a rule that exact copies don’t count, because otherwise God could just create more copies of the better worlds instead of ours. If you believe that, then sure, your conclusions follow. Personally I don’t believe in totalism.
It only commits you to pessimism if you consider the belief that any gratuitous evil at all exists to be pessimistic. I guess it's technically pessimistic compared to the alternative, but only because the alternative is so wildly optimistic. The idea that literally no gratuitous evil ever has occurred or will occur is the most extreme form of optimism possible - proponents of the PoE just have to believe that that extreme position is implausible. Also, most proponents of the PoE also believe that the Evil God hypothesis is refuted by the problem of good, which is at least as strong as the PoE. So, the same reasoning would imply that PoE proponents are also optimists for believing in gratuitous good.
Believing that all evil is incompatible with theism definitely doesn't commit you to antinatalism either. The argument for the logical PoE relies on God's omnipotence. It doesn't say that it's wrong for God to create. It says that, given that God could've prevented all evil from befalling his creatures (something ordinary people who reproduce can't do), he would have.
Well wait a moment, if you believe it would be necessarily wrong for a God to create beings that will suffer when they could have done otherwise, why would it not be wrong for a human to create a being that will suffer when they could have done otherwise (not had children)? Now you could argue that it may still be a better thing to have children than not even if it would be even better if they didn’t suffer. But if we agree that it is wrong to knowingly subject someone to gratuitous suffering, and every human suffers, and all suffering is gratuitous, it seems like you have just as much of a moral duty as God to not create something that can suffer.
I don't believe it would be necessarily wrong for God to create a being that will suffer *if he couldn't have done otherwise.* It's only wrong if God could have created the being without letting that being suffer, and even then, it's the "letting that being suffer" part that's wrong, not creating the being. The difference with humans is that humans don't have the ability to prevent their children from ever suffering, whereas God does.
The value structure is this:
Creating a being with no suffering ≻ creating a being with some (non-horrednous) suffering ≻ not creating the being at all.
For parents, only the last two options are available, so there's nothing wrong with choosing the second. For God, all three options are available, so he would choose the best option of all, which is the first.
Now of course, you might object by saying that some suffering is necessary for a greater good, and so the first option is not always available to God. But that's precisely the claim that defenders of the logical problem reject. They think that, since God is omnipotent, he could always achieve whatever greater good the evil is supposed to be necessary for without allowing the evil. Logical-problem-proponents accept that, *if* it were impossible for God to create a being without allowing that being to suffer, and there was no alternative to create a non-suffering being, then it would be okay for God to create the being who suffers. It's just that they don't think it's logically possible for that to be the case.
I haven’t read the book, but to me from your description. It sounds like it’s correctly pointing out that the problem of evil isn’t a problem for belief in a benevolent all powerful God it’s a problem for optimism in general. Believing in a good God is just one variety of optimism, but evidence that the world is full of evil is evidence against any worldview that suggest that there isn’t a significant amount of evil in the world. Of course, if like me, you’re not an optimist, then the problem of evil isn’t really a problem for you.
I haven’t read Nagasawa’s work on this, but it kind of sounds like he’s just talking about too different kinds of problems that aren’t related in any interesting way. For theists, evil is an evidential problem because it’s evidence against a view they hold. For atheists (and everyone else), evil is a psychological problem because evil sux and should make you sad.
I started to read the book, based on the cool title. I have written a book and some articles on the topic, so I was intrigued. I was sorely disappointed.
His "problem of evil for atheists" has the form "If you're an atheist with such-and-such philosophical beliefs B, then the existence of suffering of various kinds is mysterious". In each case, my reaction was "Who the hell believes B??? I certainly don't, and I don't know any philosophers who do".
I haven’t read the book either, but sounds like what it may be getting close to is the fact that so many atheists still want to hold on to belief in objective moral values. If an atheist looks at the world and sees it as good or bad, that person is making a moral judgment while at the same time believing there is no supreme moral authority to which we can appeal. It seems to me that an atheist, regardless of any personal optimism or not, shouldn’t ever assess the world as objectively good or evil, but they do talk that way quite a bit.
I don't think that's the problem. The problem is specifically atheists who want to hold that the world is good in the face of evil. He allows that atheists who are pessimists (i.e. who think the world is bad) escape the argument--but these still make a judgement about the value of the world, which they might very well take to be objective.
Yes that’s the issue from my perspective. That judgment they are making about whether the world or is not good is a moral judgment. So they are atheists who are still subscribing to whatever they see as objective moral values. I’m of the opinion that objective moral values cannot exist without a perfectly moral higher authority. (Even my favorite theologian would disagree with that I think, but I’ve never heard a persuasive argument to the contrary.)
I hear what you’re saying, and again, it’s certainly a reasonable position. But I’ve just never found any of those atheistic arguments for objective morality to be persuasive mainly because, as you reference in your introspection, it is all derived from human reasoning, which is inherently limited for something like that. As an avid fan of history, I’m not at all convinced we humans are in any position to divine (no pun intended) objective moral values.
But I think I could just as well operate under a theory that the MGB is the perfect moral exemplar as I could in saying the MGB is morality itself. Either one, I think, works for me.
I don't think that's the intent of the argument about optimism, but that would be a terrible argument against atheism anyway. Nothing about atheism precludes you from making objective value judgements. By definition, *objective* moral values do not depend on the position of some authority we have to appeal to.
Well, yes, I didn’t intend to say that was the intent of the argument of optimism. I said the way the argument was stated (at least in the piece I read here) was getting close to the question of objective moral or moral realism because if you are expecting the world to be good, but find it not good, you’re making a value judgment.
I respectfully disagree, however, with your comment about objective moral values. Objective moral values, by definition, are morals or moral truths that exist independently of human belief. That doesn’t mean they would also have to be independent of a maximally great being. That was the famous Euthyphro dilemma, which theists have answered.
I know that many atheists want to ground moral realism in other things like reason, human flourishing, evolution, “human experience”, etc. But none of it is persuasive to me.
That’s also why I’ve never been a big fan of the moral argument for God, even though I am am a Christian. To me, that argument is begging the question unless you’re going to to appeal to same arguments for moral realism that secular philosophers do.
> Objective moral values, by definition, are morals or moral truths that exist independently of human belief.
I think this is an arbitrary redefinition of the word "objective," and it's also not true even by the standard of someone who holds to a form of God-dependent morality: If there was an alien species that had their own stances on morality, their stances would not be objective simply because they aren't human. "Objective" means "stance-independent," so objective morality cannot simply be defined by God's stances.
> That was the famous Euthyphro dilemma, which theists have answered.
I don't think theists have satisfactorily answered the Euthyphro dilemma, except for those who agree that morality does not depend on God (which imo is a the most reasonable position for theists to take, including Christians). Any answer that makes morality dependent on God, regardless of whether it's his commands or his nature, makes God's omnibenevolence meaningless and morality arbitrary. So while I agree with you that it's a bad objection against theism or Christianity, I do think it's a good objection against any moral theories that make morality dependent on God, and against the moral argument in particular.
> That’s also why I’ve never been a big fan of the moral argument for God, even though I am am a Christian. To me, that argument is begging the question unless you’re going to to appeal to same arguments for moral realism that secular philosophers do.
I think you're exactly right here, and this is part of why the Euthyphro dilemma is brought up in discussions of the moral argument. The moral argument requires one to commit to the horn of the Euthyphro dilemma where morality depends on God and to argue for that position. But any general objections that be can given against all secular theories of morality to justify that commitment can also be applied to all versions of theistic morality.
Well I guess for me morality being derived from a maximally great being wouldn’t be arbitrary at all because such a being would never make arbitrary judgments. But I understand your position and appreciate the exchange.
Why wouldn't a maximally great being make arbitrary judgements? If the standard for what judgements are the most great doesn't come from the MGB itself, then sure, it wouldn't make arbitrary judgements because it would have to abide by that external standard. But this is exactly the horn of the dilemma that must be denied by those who think morality comes from God.
If the standard for what judgements count as great is just, "Whatever the MGB judges to be great," then the MGB's judgements are indeed completely arbitrary. Being maximally great places no constraints on the MGB's decisions in this case, because anything it does is automatically considered right no matter what.
Ontologically, one big part of the MGB is that such a being is morally perfect. The MGB doesn’t have opinions. The MGB just knows what is perfectly moral and what is not, and it would be against the nature of the MGB to go against perfect morality. Thus, no arbitrary morals.
But let me put the question back on you. A few posts ago, you said nothing about atheism precludes objective value judgments. So if a MGB cannot identify what is objectively good or not good, how do human atheists? Can you point to a something all human atheists objectively agree is good or bad; and if so, on what basis?
Unless you plan on being a sociopath nihilist, the problem of evil affects everyone. Just because you choose to define a belief as not being affected by evil it does not mean that you are not affected by evil.
The difference between theism and atheism with the problem of evil is that theism chooses to wrestle with it, while atheism just closes their eyes and pretends it does not exist.
I’m an atheist optimist who also believes the world is pretty obviously evil, especially with respect to all the animals living terrible lives in the wild and in captivity.
I completely agree with this post; my optimism is more a personality trait and feeling that I got very lucky in the random draw of the universe than it is a statement of my belief about the world. To be honest, it’s easy to detachedly agree the world sucks because of animals I never see or hear and still enjoy the rich human connections and prosperity our species has built. It’s not good that it’s so easy to ignore the evil of the world, but it’s how it is. And evolution wasn’t interested in making my moral sense care about people 500,000 miles away than my friends and family, despite me intellectually valuing our worth the same and wishing I cared and donated more.
If Nagasawa’s argument is as you present it then it clearly doesn’t work, but it does sound like he’s getting close to a point that I do think is true: that to believe the problem of evil is unsolvable commits you to a degree of philosophical pessimism.
I’d go further and argue that to believe in the formulation of the problem of evil that all holds all evil to be unjustifiable, not just some, necessarily commits you to antinatalism.
I don't actually think you'd need to be a pessimist to believe the PoE is unsolvable. Consider one option: You believe that there cannot be gratuitous evil given theism, and that there is certainly gratuitous evil. You may still judge that the world is very very good. For example, the world may be essentially paradise except that there is a single gratuitous toe-stubbing at one point. This would be incompatible with theism, but it would be strange to say that that requires that I'm some kind of pessimist here--at least that would be stretching what I intuitively associate with pessimism.
It's another question how plausible an attitude like this is, but I think it's clearly possible.
I’m going to have to write a whole article on this at some point. But though I agree it’s definitely possible for such a world to exist, it’s much harder to make the case that any particular natural evil in our world is necessarily gratuitous, without which the argument from evil doesn’t work. Many argue that wild animal suffering is such an evil, but it seems like believing that does commit you to the belief that the world as it exists is on balance unjustifiably evil and would be better off not existing.
Actually, I don't think the PoE requires that for any particular instance of evil, that evil is gratuitous--simply that at least one instance is gratuitous, which is a much easier bar to clear (of course assuming you think gratuitous evil is incompatible with theism, which I'd probably want to regret).
I also don't see why thinking that there is a lot of gratuitous evil requires that you be a pessimist. There can be a lot of bad stuff but even more good stuff. If I judge that (as I would take it most optimist atheists would do (in the sense of being optimists about the world as a whole)). Now, maybe the point is that there is so much animal suffering that it'd be hard to seriously believe it to be gratuitous and the world be good without an afterlife or something, in which case fine, that's probably right.
Why can’t you believe that our world’s evil is justifiable if the only alternative is no world at all, but unjustifiable if you’re an all-powerful God who could have designed things differently?
I suppose the counterargument is multiverse stuff. After God is done creating the better alternative worlds, why shouldn’t God go on to create our world too, given that it’s better for it to exist than not exist?
But that’s just the repugnant conclusion of totalism. Or more specifically, totalism combined with a rule that exact copies don’t count, because otherwise God could just create more copies of the better worlds instead of ours. If you believe that, then sure, your conclusions follow. Personally I don’t believe in totalism.
It only commits you to pessimism if you consider the belief that any gratuitous evil at all exists to be pessimistic. I guess it's technically pessimistic compared to the alternative, but only because the alternative is so wildly optimistic. The idea that literally no gratuitous evil ever has occurred or will occur is the most extreme form of optimism possible - proponents of the PoE just have to believe that that extreme position is implausible. Also, most proponents of the PoE also believe that the Evil God hypothesis is refuted by the problem of good, which is at least as strong as the PoE. So, the same reasoning would imply that PoE proponents are also optimists for believing in gratuitous good.
Believing that all evil is incompatible with theism definitely doesn't commit you to antinatalism either. The argument for the logical PoE relies on God's omnipotence. It doesn't say that it's wrong for God to create. It says that, given that God could've prevented all evil from befalling his creatures (something ordinary people who reproduce can't do), he would have.
Well wait a moment, if you believe it would be necessarily wrong for a God to create beings that will suffer when they could have done otherwise, why would it not be wrong for a human to create a being that will suffer when they could have done otherwise (not had children)? Now you could argue that it may still be a better thing to have children than not even if it would be even better if they didn’t suffer. But if we agree that it is wrong to knowingly subject someone to gratuitous suffering, and every human suffers, and all suffering is gratuitous, it seems like you have just as much of a moral duty as God to not create something that can suffer.
I don't believe it would be necessarily wrong for God to create a being that will suffer *if he couldn't have done otherwise.* It's only wrong if God could have created the being without letting that being suffer, and even then, it's the "letting that being suffer" part that's wrong, not creating the being. The difference with humans is that humans don't have the ability to prevent their children from ever suffering, whereas God does.
The value structure is this:
Creating a being with no suffering ≻ creating a being with some (non-horrednous) suffering ≻ not creating the being at all.
For parents, only the last two options are available, so there's nothing wrong with choosing the second. For God, all three options are available, so he would choose the best option of all, which is the first.
Now of course, you might object by saying that some suffering is necessary for a greater good, and so the first option is not always available to God. But that's precisely the claim that defenders of the logical problem reject. They think that, since God is omnipotent, he could always achieve whatever greater good the evil is supposed to be necessary for without allowing the evil. Logical-problem-proponents accept that, *if* it were impossible for God to create a being without allowing that being to suffer, and there was no alternative to create a non-suffering being, then it would be okay for God to create the being who suffers. It's just that they don't think it's logically possible for that to be the case.
I haven’t read the book, but to me from your description. It sounds like it’s correctly pointing out that the problem of evil isn’t a problem for belief in a benevolent all powerful God it’s a problem for optimism in general. Believing in a good God is just one variety of optimism, but evidence that the world is full of evil is evidence against any worldview that suggest that there isn’t a significant amount of evil in the world. Of course, if like me, you’re not an optimist, then the problem of evil isn’t really a problem for you.
I haven’t read Nagasawa’s work on this, but it kind of sounds like he’s just talking about too different kinds of problems that aren’t related in any interesting way. For theists, evil is an evidential problem because it’s evidence against a view they hold. For atheists (and everyone else), evil is a psychological problem because evil sux and should make you sad.
I started to read the book, based on the cool title. I have written a book and some articles on the topic, so I was intrigued. I was sorely disappointed.
His "problem of evil for atheists" has the form "If you're an atheist with such-and-such philosophical beliefs B, then the existence of suffering of various kinds is mysterious". In each case, my reaction was "Who the hell believes B??? I certainly don't, and I don't know any philosophers who do".
I haven’t read the book either, but sounds like what it may be getting close to is the fact that so many atheists still want to hold on to belief in objective moral values. If an atheist looks at the world and sees it as good or bad, that person is making a moral judgment while at the same time believing there is no supreme moral authority to which we can appeal. It seems to me that an atheist, regardless of any personal optimism or not, shouldn’t ever assess the world as objectively good or evil, but they do talk that way quite a bit.
I don't think that's the problem. The problem is specifically atheists who want to hold that the world is good in the face of evil. He allows that atheists who are pessimists (i.e. who think the world is bad) escape the argument--but these still make a judgement about the value of the world, which they might very well take to be objective.
Yes that’s the issue from my perspective. That judgment they are making about whether the world or is not good is a moral judgment. So they are atheists who are still subscribing to whatever they see as objective moral values. I’m of the opinion that objective moral values cannot exist without a perfectly moral higher authority. (Even my favorite theologian would disagree with that I think, but I’ve never heard a persuasive argument to the contrary.)
I hear what you’re saying, and again, it’s certainly a reasonable position. But I’ve just never found any of those atheistic arguments for objective morality to be persuasive mainly because, as you reference in your introspection, it is all derived from human reasoning, which is inherently limited for something like that. As an avid fan of history, I’m not at all convinced we humans are in any position to divine (no pun intended) objective moral values.
But I think I could just as well operate under a theory that the MGB is the perfect moral exemplar as I could in saying the MGB is morality itself. Either one, I think, works for me.
Great exchange! Thank you!
I don't think that's the intent of the argument about optimism, but that would be a terrible argument against atheism anyway. Nothing about atheism precludes you from making objective value judgements. By definition, *objective* moral values do not depend on the position of some authority we have to appeal to.
Well, yes, I didn’t intend to say that was the intent of the argument of optimism. I said the way the argument was stated (at least in the piece I read here) was getting close to the question of objective moral or moral realism because if you are expecting the world to be good, but find it not good, you’re making a value judgment.
I respectfully disagree, however, with your comment about objective moral values. Objective moral values, by definition, are morals or moral truths that exist independently of human belief. That doesn’t mean they would also have to be independent of a maximally great being. That was the famous Euthyphro dilemma, which theists have answered.
I know that many atheists want to ground moral realism in other things like reason, human flourishing, evolution, “human experience”, etc. But none of it is persuasive to me.
That’s also why I’ve never been a big fan of the moral argument for God, even though I am am a Christian. To me, that argument is begging the question unless you’re going to to appeal to same arguments for moral realism that secular philosophers do.
> Objective moral values, by definition, are morals or moral truths that exist independently of human belief.
I think this is an arbitrary redefinition of the word "objective," and it's also not true even by the standard of someone who holds to a form of God-dependent morality: If there was an alien species that had their own stances on morality, their stances would not be objective simply because they aren't human. "Objective" means "stance-independent," so objective morality cannot simply be defined by God's stances.
> That was the famous Euthyphro dilemma, which theists have answered.
I don't think theists have satisfactorily answered the Euthyphro dilemma, except for those who agree that morality does not depend on God (which imo is a the most reasonable position for theists to take, including Christians). Any answer that makes morality dependent on God, regardless of whether it's his commands or his nature, makes God's omnibenevolence meaningless and morality arbitrary. So while I agree with you that it's a bad objection against theism or Christianity, I do think it's a good objection against any moral theories that make morality dependent on God, and against the moral argument in particular.
> That’s also why I’ve never been a big fan of the moral argument for God, even though I am am a Christian. To me, that argument is begging the question unless you’re going to to appeal to same arguments for moral realism that secular philosophers do.
I think you're exactly right here, and this is part of why the Euthyphro dilemma is brought up in discussions of the moral argument. The moral argument requires one to commit to the horn of the Euthyphro dilemma where morality depends on God and to argue for that position. But any general objections that be can given against all secular theories of morality to justify that commitment can also be applied to all versions of theistic morality.
Well I guess for me morality being derived from a maximally great being wouldn’t be arbitrary at all because such a being would never make arbitrary judgments. But I understand your position and appreciate the exchange.
Why wouldn't a maximally great being make arbitrary judgements? If the standard for what judgements are the most great doesn't come from the MGB itself, then sure, it wouldn't make arbitrary judgements because it would have to abide by that external standard. But this is exactly the horn of the dilemma that must be denied by those who think morality comes from God.
If the standard for what judgements count as great is just, "Whatever the MGB judges to be great," then the MGB's judgements are indeed completely arbitrary. Being maximally great places no constraints on the MGB's decisions in this case, because anything it does is automatically considered right no matter what.
Ontologically, one big part of the MGB is that such a being is morally perfect. The MGB doesn’t have opinions. The MGB just knows what is perfectly moral and what is not, and it would be against the nature of the MGB to go against perfect morality. Thus, no arbitrary morals.
But let me put the question back on you. A few posts ago, you said nothing about atheism precludes objective value judgments. So if a MGB cannot identify what is objectively good or not good, how do human atheists? Can you point to a something all human atheists objectively agree is good or bad; and if so, on what basis?
Unless you plan on being a sociopath nihilist, the problem of evil affects everyone. Just because you choose to define a belief as not being affected by evil it does not mean that you are not affected by evil.
The difference between theism and atheism with the problem of evil is that theism chooses to wrestle with it, while atheism just closes their eyes and pretends it does not exist.