So Why Bother?

I forget who used this illustration (William Rowe comes to mind, but I'm not sure why, and besides, I'm not using it the way the author originally intended) but imagine a possible world where the only sentient creatures were rabbits who suffered terribly. Would God create such a world, even if the balance of good to evil were favorable?

Such a question illustrates a number of things. First, if one's intuition is that there is something inconsistent in God creating such a world, then the balance between good and evil is not the only thing that constitutes what makes for a good world. There simply seems to be something overridingly wrong with vicarious evil. The other thing to note that the fixation on the quantity of evil in a given world is not determinative. One should imagine that a world of pathetic rabbits still contains less evil than this one.

I say this because I have made a point of not invoking such modern tragedies as the Killing Fields, the Holocaust, any of Stalin's purges or the Russian famine. To employ these simply to make a philosophical point is trivialize these events. They are evil that are a part of the course of human events that were so large that those involved were simply swept up as if in a tsunami.

Instead, I would like to look at a single event (wish I pray I don't reduce to a mere illustration) I heard about not month ago and invite you to magnify it as you may. A local court magistrate drowned not too long ago. He died in an attempt to rescue his teenage son. He managed, but at the cost of his own life. Imagine that he had not been with his son. The son himself would have drowned. The family would have grieved, perhaps terribly, but any parent will recall friends of their youth who held all the joy and promise of life and then were taken. No parent is prepared for such a thing but most who have lived through such a blow come through bent but not broken. Yet this is not what happened. Instead the son must live with the guilt of living. (On the other hand, had the father judged that he would have been unable to save his son, he would have been justified in failing to attempt the rescue but at the guilty cost of wondering whether he was in fact responsible for his child's death.) One can feel guilt for that which is not one's fault. The son is faced not only with the loss but a feeling of responsibility for the tragedy of his loss and the grief of his family, even if he were simply caught in a freak event. Turns such as these can break a person. They have the potential of blunting or utterly ruining one's very humanity and such wreckage tends eat away not only one ones self but everyone involved. Feel free to come up with larger or more graphic stories, provided that they are not so large that you can no longer fill pain of your own soul being emptied into a hollow shell. I think this captures what Marilyn McCord Adams calls the horrors and horrendous evil.

In a nutshell, Adam's response to the problem of evil is not to treat it as a riddle to be solved. Like Tully (whom a may be able to treat in more depth later) “solutions” have a tendency to miss, perpetuate or justify evils per se. Like Tully, Adams is critical of any defense that relies on a favorable balance between good and evil that does not account for the dehumanizing affects of evil.

Instead, while she provides grounds for why evil may be possible--relying on the infinite distance between human beings and God in a fashion that would remind some of Rheinholdt Niebuhr--she goes on to argue that the specific contribution Christianity brings is the teaching that Christ bore these horrors in himself and triumphed over them and as such we who are incorporated in Christ also shall have these evils not merely compensated for, but destroyed. I should hasten to add that for Adams, human being were created for beatitude and that anything short of universal beatitude fall short of the vision of evil being destroyed. Before I go on, I would like take a slight detour on this point.

Last year, in the pages of journal Faith and Philosophy, (April 2008, vol 25, no. 2, pp. 123-140) Marilyn McCord Adams has leveled a series of criticism on Plantinga's latest answer to the problem of evil. In passing I should mentioned that Adams sees Plantinga moving from a simple defense (what van Inwagen calls a Just-so Story) to a theodicy (or an explanation for why God should permit evil). Rightly or wrongly, I'm still treating Plantinga's latest offering as a defense that serves as only a possible account, but an account that draws on upon a specific Christian tradition that was not itself designed as an explanation to a philosophic problem but instead was directed to God in praise for what was seen as the wonder of his grace.

Allow me to reflect on only four of Adam's criticisms. Let me also say that the relative weight I give these are my own.

• Despite Plantinga's attempt to distance himself, his analysis appears to have God suffering from Munchausen by Proxy syndrome.
• As Plantinga presents the felix culpa defense, it would seem that we not only earned the horrors we inflict on each other, but need them for our own good.
• Plantinga's new defense suffers from same critical problem as the free will defense, it treats only the good of world as a whole and not the good for any given individual.
• Plantinga does not give enough attention to the difference between the Atonement and the Incarnation

Munchausen syndrome is where one places oneself in grave or extravagant situations for the sole purpose of winning glory by overcoming them—winning glory or attention for their own sake. Munchausen by Proxy is placing someone else in such a situations for the purpose of getting attention for oneself. In the case of God, this would be his showing the depth of divine love placing us in grave danger and then rescuing us by extravagant means. Plantinga addressed this in his original article. Plantinga stated that God doesn't owe us anything either now and certainly not before creating us. Moreover, God doesn't need our praise or gratitude and so would not be motivated to act to win it. Adams would agree with this, but then comes back and asks who is this extravagance for.¹

This leads to the next two criticisms. Lets say that God allowed us to fall for our sakes. In this case the horrors we endure are for our own good and we are such creatures who are so constituted so as to require the horrors we visit upon ourselves. Now Plantinga could affirm that now being in a world plagued with evil, some what we suffer may well be for our good as a way to ween ourselves from the passing nature of the world and some evils are suffered because good people oppose evil and pay the consequence. Yet these beg the question. This world has a perverse way inflicting evils indiscriminately on those who simply accept it for what it is, but takes pains to make life all the more miserable for those who oppose its order. Yet either these evils seem either not to serve any good or the good the serve is only a consequence of their initial existence.

The reason for this is that Plantinga's argument depends on on any good for any given individual but that the Atonement in this argument functions as a great good in itself. The Atonement is a global good or a good that makes the world as a whole better, but does address individuals per se.

The above two criticisms are a direct result of Adam's own take on the problem of evil and should one not accept her larger project, these arguments would not hold that much water. I hope to address this in more detail later, but right now I would like to pursue the forth criticism on this list. Plantinga does appear to treat the Atonement and the Incarnation as the same thing. Granted, that within Christian theology, given our sinful state, the two go hand-in-hand, but they are not the same thing. Unless the fall was necessary to some end in itself, one could have the great good of the Incarnation without the Atonement. If all the Atonement does is cancel out the Fall, then the great good of the Incarnation without either Fall or Atonement would make for a world a good as this one which has both the Fall and its canceling Atonement.

Here I dare say the fault lies not with the sentiment “O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem,” but that Plantinga's argument hasn't fully captured the notion that this fall and this redemption will lead to better things for us (as opposed to simply a better balance of good and evil in the world in general) than had neither occurred.

1I should note that part of Adam's larger project is explanations for evil are ultimately counterproductive (for reasons that I may get to later). What Adams offers from the Christian tradition instead is that in Christ God did not simply compensate for evil but overcame it, making it null and void.