What to believe III (after bashing relativism, what about revelation?)

In my previous posts within this series, I started by laying out three aspects of our reality (what in the old times used to be called “first principles”, if you wish) that seemed to me indisputable, namely:

·         The universe is designed (has been created by a mind).

·         There are minds in it (starting with our own) in the universe that are essentially similar to the one that created it.

·         Those minds can “understand” how the ordered universe (the “cosmos”) works by “reverse engineering” it. Reality is, at bottom, rational

Acknowledging that those are not, nowadays, the most widespread, universally accepted notions of ontology (to put it mildly, as I answered a commenter on the previous post, in what used to be called “the West” they have become downright unfashionable) or epistemology, I devoted some space to review (and discuss) the three main arguments against those overarching principles, namely:

·         The deepest thinkers within our tradition have conclusively “shown” that the universe is empathically NOT designed (summary of my answer: no, they haven’t)

·         The existence of minds, starting with our own, is a slick trick played by evolution and can be explained without resorting to any kind of purposeful designer (summary: we are more certain of our own mental experiences, we have a more “clear and distinct” access to it, than of the existence of an external reality outside it, as famously noted both by Descartes and Berkeley, so no amount of information purportedly deduced from the observation of such external reality can have enough force to convince us of the
inexistence of our mental processes PLUS the sheer improbability of the mechanism of evolution itself arising by hazard, given it requires a prodigiously finely tuned set of basic, fundamental constants regulating the interactions of matter and energy much before any biology can arise, is enough to make the most parsimonious explanation of such minds that they are the conscious intent of an intelligence endowed with volition and thus able to act purposefully)

·         Finally, the undeniable existence of evil in the world (of the three variants identified by Leibniz: physical, metaphysical and moral), the vast amount of senseless suffering and finitude and death pervading all nature is enough to question the avowed goodness of the designer. And if the designer is evil, all bets are off. Why suppose he has given us the gift of knowledge (or the potential for acquiring knowledge that most people stupendously and blatantly and lackadaisically waste during their lifetimes) out of love or sympathy or pity? He may as well have made us necessarily self-deluded and provided us with a very blunt capability of understanding, condemning us to pursue truth without having the real pre-conditions for ever achieving more than an infinitesimal part of it (not a benevolent God, but a deceitful spirit, resorting again to Descartes terminology)

Due to self-imposed space constraints, I only got to answer up to the second objection. Time, then, to turn our attention to the third one.

Part I (cont.) – Response to common objections (still tryin’, really exhaustively, to be even-handed here, man!)

Just to put things in perspective, the history of trying to reconcile the idea of a just, good and all-powerful designer with the everyday occurrence of bad things to good people (or to sentient beings entirely shorn of any moral consideration) is a long and illustrious one. Its most known and paradigmatic formulation comes directly from Epicurus (who lived between 241 and 270 BC), although we don’t find it in any of his (preciously few) surviving writings, but in a quote from Lactantius, that tells us that if God were supremely good and supremely powerful, he wouldn’t allow any evil in the world. But evil was undoubtedly present in it, so there is no such a creature as a traditionally understood supreme being, a being that is simultaneously infinitely good, infinitely powerful and interested in our well-being… or in the well-being of sentient creatures in general (as pain, suffering and finally death afflict not just the human species, but that of every sentient creature).

Powerful stuff, that has called from a number of eminent minds of a more theistic bend to try to counteract it by denying some of its implications (a good summary can be found in Problem of evil -I just donated again, what am I to do but recommend its usually superb content?-). In its most basic form, it can be construed as a trilemma, in which not all of the following statements can be true at the same time:

1.       There is an all-powerful and all-knowing being (let’s call him God). Logically, there can only be one (if there were more than one, their wills could clash, and give rise to every kind of logical inconsistencies and paradoxes)

2.       Such all-powerful being is perfectly good for us. He has volition, and wills what is best for the sentient creatures he has created (let’s leave aside for a moment how problematic that “us” may become… what if he wills the good only of a certain chosen few, at the expense of all the rest of creation? How does he decide if there are different goods to be attained in which different groups end up partaking in different proportions of the overall goodness?)

3.       There is “gratuitous” evil in the world, evil that serves no higher purpose, that doesn’t cause any good to come about that more than compensates the suffering that it imposes in some of the creatures capable of experiencing such suffering. The actual world we live in is NOT the best of all possible worlds (as a world in which such gratuitous evil didn’t occur would be obviously better than this one)

They cannot be true because 1&2 => !3 (one AND two necessarily imply NOT three). An all-powerful and all-knowing God who at the same time was good and cared for us is incompatible with the allowance of bad things happening for no reason, or, using another term, with a  “suboptimal” universe, as he would have used his infinite power and wisdom to create a better one (better suited at least for the sentient creatures that he would have populated it with).

Now, you don’t need to have been around for a long time to realize that there seems to be a stupendous amount of flat-out, non-redeemable (by serving a higher good) bad things happening all around us. As a theologian once put it to me, the problem is not “evil” per se, but “so, so much evil!”. That may be why some religious traditions have given different answers to such problem by jettisoning at least one of the three incompatible statements, the one they found more problematic, or less amenable to their previous epistemic commitments:

·         After the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, a number of Protestant and reformed Jewish theologians concluded that God was probably not that powerful, after all. Maybe because he respected too much human freedom (so he was not capable of rescinding it even after it became obvious we were grossly abusing it beyond recognition), maybe because he was constrained by previous decisions, all he could do in the face of the horrors we humans were visiting on one another was empathize with our plight and cry with us and for us. I’ll only point here that I’ve always had trouble with this position, and with the moment of its historical emergence: The vastness of unnecessary (and, from our limited understanding, truly unintelligible) suffering even before we humans started developing modern means of killing each other is staggering enough to not being much amenable to influence by fifty million more of people being slaughtered in a little more than five years, even if a percentage of them were entirely innocent women and very small children. Similarly innocent women and children (of different races and even species, some of them almost as endowed with self-consciousness and ability to suffer as ourselves) have been dying horrific deaths for eons and eons without the Abrahamic faiths taking note and seeing much problem. Some of those deaths are narrated in the book they all consider sacred with a distinctive approval, as if the creator proved his omnipotence precisely by allowing and encouraging them… However, I can sympathize with believers who would rather give up the idea of a powerful figure that can protect them with guaranteed success than reject that of the caring, loving entity that, even if he cannot protect, at least shares their suffering and anguish and is always by their side, no matter what (and, one cannot avoid noting, no matter how materially ineffectual such loving presence may be).

·         As long as there have been religions, some of them have never been very strong on the caring side (to put it charitably). Battle gods, thunder gods, war gods, plague gods and the like were never famous for the care and understanding they showed towards their followers. Even outside polytheism, Eastern traditions tend to find alien the concept of a creating principle that is somehow analogous to our mind, with its volition and craving, willing and desiring, and tend to think of such principle in more impersonal terms (which exclude the whole emotional shtick, with its associated terms like “love”, “compassion”, “mercy”, “care”, “understanding”, “sympathy”, etc.) Within the West, Spinoza would be a fine example of a kind of pantheism that excludes God “caring” much for anything (as caring implies a striving, which in turn presupposes an absence, a lack of perfection, that for the Dutchman was incompatible with his concept of the Deity). We will see, when we deal with the implications of what our reason can impel us to believe as more likely than not, that indeed the statement about the “goodness” of the Deity is the one we can derive less consequences from, as such goodness is a most complicated, obscure and at times even contradictory concept, most easily manipulated and distorted. You cannot have anything remotely resembling the intuitive concept of God (designer/ creator of all of reality) that is not quite close to all-powerful (and probably all-knowing, as power and knowledge are but two aspects of the same reality), while you can very well have a God that is indifferent, even actively inimical, to human flourishing. Or, to put it more gently, you can have an all-powerful designer/ creator of the universe (which still deserves the appellation of God) that has an idea of what flourishing consists of very different from our own, and who thus guide us towards, or merely allows to happen, a number of occurrences that we find highly aggravating/ demeaning/ affronting and outright bad (that is, that allows for a lot of evil to happen in pursuance of his own goals, entirely unknown to and unshared by us).

·         Finally, a number of people don’t seem to have any problem accepting that this is, indeed, the best of all possible worlds, and that the evil we see is but a fleeting annoyance, a drop in an ocean of bliss and well-being. That position, within our tradition, is most famously and best exemplified by Leibniz (and savagely mocked by the witty Voltaire in the figure of the much maligned and derided Doctor Pangloss in his play Candide -as an aside, I can’t for the life of me understand why Voltaire, a most overrated author with very little deep or original to say, is universally acknowledged to have demolished a much more thoughtful and fruitful writer as Leibniz… those kinds of vagaries of fame make one indeed question if there is some good providence taking care of the developments of history after all, or we are all in the hands of some highly idiosyncratic “malin genie”), although I have to recognize that it was most forcefully presented to me by a Muslim cab driver in Chicago (why I was discussing Theodicy with a cab driver there and then would take me too far from the already tenuously followed thread of these posts, so I’ll leave that for another day), who answered my question about young kids being blown to smithereens being a credible basis to question the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God with a shrug, and a retort: “who says dying young is bad for them or their families in any meaningful sense? They go to paradise earlier, where they can enjoy untroubled ‘til their parents, if they are rightful and just, will meet them and enjoy their company forever”.

What are we, then, to make of such positions? It seems to me that the response we can give has much to do (and reveals a lot about) how our own (personal, subjective, to a certain extent unique and impossible to completely share) life has gone. Because in the end, the problem Theodicy poses is not so much a Logical problem (we just can decide that there is no what I have termed “gratuitous” evil, that all the enormous amount of suffering we witness or guess truly serves a higher purpose and in the end all wrongs will be righted and all pain will be healed, and we will all be better off because of what we have suffered, regardless of how the suffering may have been unequally apportioned) as an evidential problem (how much more unlikely the vast amount of apparently senseless suffering makes the existence of that omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God?) And for answering that last question (what weighs more, the apparently senseless suffering or the purported, unseen, estimated omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence of the designer?) we have to resort to the very limited sample of what we have witnessed, and experienced, and read about. And I reckon that some people have a perspective of how the sum total of life looks like that makes the likelihood of such a benevolent and powerful God most unlikely, because from their personal vantage point there is just too much cruelty, too much pain, too much untimely and absurd death, too much wasted potential, too much unrequited love, too much anguish and despair and despondency and dejection to be somehow compensated in an uncertain moment in time, in an uncertain place.

And I deeply respect that, as I consider myself luckiest than most. Lucky in the first place not to have been touched and sullied by such pain and death and waste and lack of requital and anguish and despair and despondency and dejection. And it somehow sounds pretentious, and naïve, and even callous to tell to people affected by any of them that there is always hope… but there is always hope! And it is not me who says it, as again, from my privileged and easy standpoint being hopeful would be pretty inconsequential and effortless. It is just a pervasive trope of all great literature, of the works that better capture the human experience and the plight of man at its best and worst, to portray how in the darkest and most forlorn situations people manage to keep the flame of hope alive. Maybe just a glimmer. May be it is a devious device implanted in us by a blind evolutionary mechanism, as keeping that glimmer of hope helped those that (irrational as it may have been) held to it survive, and reproduce more than those of a more morose and pessimistic disposition. But I tend to find suspicious (and have denounced under the blanket term of “just-so stories”) most of those explanations.

So, from a position of great uncertainty, and of great humility, I’ll softly say that, as from the fine tuning of the most basic laws of nature, and the ability of our minds to understand those laws, I conclude the evidence is mostly in favor of there being a designer whose mind works entirely like ours, only on a vaster, grander scale, the existence of hope in the most desperate situation inclines me to say, much more tentatively, that such designer indeed has a benevolent disposition towards us.

Part II – so, what does all that have to do with how we should act?

Everything. A life where there is purpose, meaning and direction has nothing to do with one where we happen to be mindless pawns in a cold, uncaring universe, where things just happen to develop in a certain way without us being more than a spark of sensations and pre-ordained impressions that appeared by sheer coincidence, and will disappear without a trace. But let’s unpack what the prior triad of ideas about the ultimate nature of reality allow us to believe, in decreasing order of warrant (or of probability):

1.       There is a God (a mind that created the universe)

2.       There are such things as absolute truth and absolute beauty (the way those ideas are conceived in the mind of the original designer)

3.       Such God is positively inclined towards us (loves us). Which entails, amazing as it may sound, that this is the best possible universe of those that could be created

4.       God is “good” in the traditional understanding of the word: he cares about our happiness/ fulfillment, that’s why he put us in here with understanding and reason. Furthermore, there is also such thing as absolute goodness.

5.       We can gain knowledge of the basic ideas in the mind of God (and that knowledge would reveal the same truth, beauty and goodness for every single rational being, in every single moment of the universe’s history)

6.       Thus, gaining such knowledge is not just a possibility, but a moral, absolute obligation

7.       Thus the goal of our whole life, if we are to live well, should be to gain that knowledge, and practically apply it

I reckon that this hasty draft would require a more detailed exposition, and as any astute reader may have noticed, there is not much mention about the likelihood of the truth (or falsity) of the different and differing revelations which I advanced I would be criticizing in such threadbare consequences that our rational beliefs should have on our behavior. Alas! My wordiness again has taken the best of me and it is time to pack and leave the working of such detail for a future post.