luvluv

I'm retyping here an excerpt from C.S. Lewis's A Problem of Pain, in order to defend one aspect of the Problem of Evil Argument. I am trying to advance the argument that the unecessary suffering that we describe is the result of the necessity of the stable, fixed environment.

The following is found on pages 26 through 31, and I will add them as I finish them. This is for the benefit of all those who are participating in the other POE threads who haven't read the book (inconvienient, because I keep referring to it).

Here is 26-28 (More to come):

"There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a "self", can exist except in contrast with an "other" a something which is not the self. It is against an environment, and preferably a social environment, an environment of other selves, that the awareness of Myself stands out...

Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between. A creature with no environment would have no choices to make: so that freedom, like self-conscuousness (if they are not, indeed, the same thing) again demands the presence to the self of something other than the self.

The minimum condition of self-consciousness and freedom, then, would be that the creature should apprehend God and, therefore, itself as distinct from God. It is possible that such creatures exist, aware of God and themselves, but of no fellow-creatures. If so, their freedom is simply that of making a single naked choice - of loving God more than the self or the self more than God. But a life so reduced to essentials is not imaginable to us. As soon as we attempt to introduce the mutual knowledge of fellow-creatures we run up against the necessity of "Nature".

People often talk as if nothing were easire than for naked minds to "meet" or become aware of each other. I see no possibility of their doing so except in a common medium which forms their "external world" or environment. Even our vague attempt to imagine such a meeting between disembodied spirits usually slips in surreptitiosly the idea of, at least, a common space and a common time, to give the co- in co-existence a meaning: space and time are already an environment. But more than this is required. If your thoughts and passions were directly present to me like my own, without any mark of externality or otherness, how shoudl I distinguish them from mine? And what thoughts or passions could we begin to have without objects to think and feel about? Nay, could I even begin to have the conception of "external" and "other" unless I had experience of an "external world"? You may reply, as a Christian, that God (and Satan) do, in fact, affect my consciousness in this direct way without signs of "externality." Yes: and the result is that most people remain ignorant of the existence of both. We may therefore suppose that if human souls affected one another directly and immaterially, it would be a rare trimph of faith and insigt for any one of them to believe in the existence of the others. It would be harder for me to know my neighbor under such conditions than it is now for me to know God: for in recognising the impact of God upon me I am now helped by things that reach me through the external world, such as the tradition of the Chruch, Holy Scripture, and the conversation of religious friends. What we need for human society is exactly what we have, a neutral something, neitheryou nor I, which we can both manipulate so as to make signs to each other. I can talk to you because we can both set up soundwaves in teh common air between us. Matter, which keeps souls apart, also brings them together. It enables each of us to have an "outside" as well as an "inside", so that what are acts if will and thought for you are noises and glances for me; you are enabled not only to be but to appear: and hence I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance"

luvluv

"Society, then, implies a common field, or "world" in which its members meet...


But if matter is to serve as a neutral field it must have a fixed nature of it's own. If a world or matieral system had only a single inhabitant it might conform at every moment to his wishes - "trees for his sake would crowd over into a shade." But if you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will. Nor is it clear that you could make your presence known to me - all the matter by which you attempted to make signs to me being already in my control and therefore not capable of being manupulated by you.

Again, if matter has a fixed nature and obeys constant laws, not all states of matter will be equally agreeable to the wishes of a given soul, nor all equally beneficial for that particular aggregate of matter which he calls his body. If fire comforts that body at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance is reduced. Hence, even in a perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals which the pain fibres in our nerves are apparently desinged to transmit. Does this mean an inevitable element of evil (in the form of pain) in any possible world? I think not: for while it may be true that the least sin is an incalcuable evil, the evil of pain depends on degree, and pains below a certain intesity are not feared or resented at all. No one minds the process "warm - beautifully hot - too hot - it stings" which wanrs him to withdraw his hand from exposure to the fire: and if I may trust my own feeling, a slight aching in the legs as we climb into bed after a good day's walking is, in fact, pleasurable."

(Almost done)

luvluv

"Yet again, if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispotitions, equally agreeable even to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distrubuted so that it is equally conveneint and pleasurable to each member of a society. If a man travellling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going inthe opposite direction must be going up hill. If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is very far from being an evil: on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil, that of competition and hostility. And if souls are free, thaey cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem by competition instead of courtesy. And once they have advanced to actual hostility, they can then exploit the fixed nature of matter to hurt one another. The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neghbour on the head. The permanent nature of matter in general means that when human beings fight, the victory ordinarily goes to those who have superior weapons, skill, and numbers, even if their cause is unjust.

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the resluts of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in wich wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freeedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principal were carred out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighborhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith: but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him - if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his likeing - then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once the limits within common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free willsinvolve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."

That's it. So this is where I'm arguing that the so called unnecessary evils are in fact necessary overall.

Steven Carr

I think you have just disproved the existence of Heaven.

Ot at least disproved that there are angels in Heaven who have free will.

Steven Carr

But I did like his analaogy of God's behaviour to somebody in a game of chess.

Presumably God is our opponent and is trying to beat us all.

Thomas Metcalf

There are two consequences here.

First, your position seems to be that all the apparently unnecessary evil we observe is, in fact, necessary. If this is the case, all the "evil" I commit only exists because it produces a greater good -- otherwise, God wouldn't allow it.

Second, I don't think the "universal uniformity" response works. No one needs to ask that God remove all suffering; God could simply make humans somewhat more resistant to very painful diseases. In fact, our universal observation of uniformity depends on the actual conditions, so if crowbars became blades of grass every time we tried to whack a baby with them, we would expect this by default and not find it strange in any way.

As for free will itself, God already limits our free will -- why couldn't He limit it a bit further? If I chose to snap my fingers and cause 1,000 innocent people to suffer, I would fail. The laws of the universe do not permit this. God could alter the laws of the universe to preclude the torture of babies -- how is this any different from preventing the "snap fingers to cause 1,000 innocent people to suffer" situation?

Jack the Bodiless

luvluv:

You're saying that God's desire to preserve "natural law" takes precedence over God's benevolence. That's OK, if you're prepared to drop "omnibenevolence" from God's description.

Furthermore, you seem to be arguing that ANY interference with natural law is forbidden. God cannot quietly erase the Ebola virus from existence. God cannot even lift thistledown into the air. This nagates omnipotence. In fact, God is utterly powerless to interfere: ALL potence is gone.

Vorkosigan

Hey Luv,

in case no one else has commented, I'd just like to compliment you on your willingness to wade in here and engage, your ability to present your ideas without excessive proselytizing and your thoughtfulness. Just remember, the wealth of negative replies is a compliment to those qualities you have displayed here.

Vorkosigan

Marz Blak

luvluv--

Let me add a "yeah, what he said" to Vorkosigan's post. I truly appreciate your willingness to lay out your arguments here, in a thoughtful and non-consdescending way. It is truly a pleasure arguing with you.

Having said that, though, let me say first-off that I have never read any C. S. Lewis, fiction or non-fiction; but I would argue that the portions of his argument you have presented are insufficient ot overcome the logical problems inherent in an asserting an omnimax God with respect to the POE.

Firstly, there is the argument (presented by me in another thread) that given a triple-omni God, everything must be exactly as He wishes it to be, throughout all time. As a consequence, free will on the part of any individual within the bounds of creation is an illusion. I think that, this being the case, it is easy to see why the "free moral agent" explanation of people's ability to do evil falls apart, at least if one wants to hold blameless a God who calls them to account for such evil. To assert otherwise is to deny either God's omniscience ("He didn't know there would be such evil"), His omnipotence ("He knew there would be such evil, but having set up the universe, he had no choice but to let it play out as it did") , or his benevolence (He knew, and let it play out because reducing evil was not that high on His list of priorities"). I do not see how your argument evades this problem.

Secondly, as pointed out by Thomas Metcalf, implicit in your argument here is that all the apparently unnecessary evil we see here is necessary to God's design/purpose. (I would add suffering to this implication.) My rational observation of existence tells me that this certainly does not appear to be the case--Jack the Bodiless' example of your God's ability to eradicate the ebola virus being but one small example of this among literally hundreds I could come up with with little thought at all. This being the case, your argument here devolves into nothing more than a slightly more fleshed-out "unknown purpose" defense, which I would reject on the grounds that it is both inherently non-falisifiable and on the grounds that it contains no explicatory value whatsoever.

[edited to add explanation and for typos]

[ September 11, 2002: Message edited by: Marz Blak ]</p>

Automaton

Taking this off on an unrelated tangent:
1. There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a "self", can exist except in contrast with an "other" a something which is not the self. It is against an environment, and preferably a social environment, an environment of other selves, that the awareness of Myself stands out...
2. Higher conscious processes require self-awareness.
3. God is defined as having higher conscious processes (ie, active and profound thought).
4. God, being omnipresent, and at one point the absolute totality of existence (before he created anything), is/would have had nothing excluded from the self.
5. Thus, without the presence of other "selves", God is not self-aware.
6. Thus, not being self-aware, God could not posess higher conscious processes.
7. Therefore, God cannot exist.

Argument from <a href="http://www.philoonline.org/library/mccormick_3_1.htm" target="_blank">here</a>.

There are ways to get around this. The first one is to redefine God's properties. Omnipresent does not mean "having nothing free from the self" (somehow?), or, since time was not around when God created, there was logically no point (as there is no north of the North Pole) in which there was nothing free of God's self (but this ignores the idea of metaphysically prior points, and begs the question of how God brought time from timelessness.) Another one would be to say God does not posess "higher conscious processes", but some profound entity of abstract construction so complex that no human could ever hope to understand it, except through analogy. Quite poetic, but it does not really solve the problem, it's just admitting the theist does not know how to solve it, but rationalizes/comforts themselves in the idea that noone can solve it. The best objection would be at number 2, but I'll leave that up to you. (Yes, I realise I'm derailing a bit here, but this topic is more interesting than yet another damn argument from evil/free-will/blah-blah thread.)