Positive Liberty

In the past few days there has been a remarkable discussion going on among my blogospheric neighbors regarding the problem of natural evil in the theistic worldview. Natural evils are those that human beings do not cause. Obviously they include the recent tsunami and most other natural disasters, most diseases unrelated to behavior, and arguably death itself. I plan to be away from blogging for a few more days, so here are a number of interesting links about natural evil for my readers to chew on.

First, Dave Jansing looks at disasters from a Catholic perspective. Responding to my recent posts, he writes,

The idea that God either [works disasters] or “ignores them,” or he doesn’t exist, is ideologically flimsy. Perhaps God weeps as we do, but chooses not to intercede because to do so would remove the gift and burden of free will. If God interceded by eliminating those natural conditions upon which our Earth exists in, then the philosophical argument of “Why can’t God prevent 9/11?” or “Why can’t God stop my Daddy from dying of cancer?” starts the slippery-slope of who is “justified” to receive God’s grace and who isn’t.

Well said. I may find the existence of God hard to believe, but I find doubly hard to believe a God who denies free will. Chris of Mixing Memory threw me a link, but on the whole he preferred Brandon’s response to the problem of natural evil. As to me, I confess I don’t quite follow Brandon’s argument. Very densely written, it seems primarily to affirm the consequent of God’s existence, especially in the following passage:

[H]ow to reconcile the devastation caused by the tsunami with the existence of “an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being[?]” By ‘reconcile’ we might be asking about whether one can block a contradiction created by combining God is omnipotent, God is omniscient, God is omnibenevolent, evil exists. I don’t see there is any such contradiction to block; I have never seen a satisfactory argument that there is such a contradiction to block; attempts to argue that there is a contradiction seem to me to be doomed because they require that we be able to say for certain that we know everything relevant an omniscient being would know about the matter; and since I think the first three are all demonstrable and I am sure evil exists, I am very certain there is no contradiction that needs to be blocked.

If there is a solution to the problem of natural evil, then God exists. God exists, therefore there must be a solution. I’m not satisfied. [Note: This is a slight clarification of my earlier analysis.]

Back at Mixing Memory, Chris seems to suggest a very old answer to the problem of natural evil, namely that God’s plan could be mysterious enough to encompass even the worst of them. It strikes me as wrong, though, to posit a God who is always sufficiently mysterious. Can we make no more headway against the problem than this? If forced to choose, I would have to pick Dave’s answer as given above: The gift of free will is painful, but God, if he be admitted to exist, has given us this gift and cannot give it halfway.

Finally, Caleb McDaniel replies again, this time at his own site, Mode for Caleb. He promises that more thinking is to come, and I look forward to seeing it. But first, he pauses, sensibly:

To suggest that it all makes sense would be an affront to the bald fact of their suffering, which is simply senseless to [the sufferers] and nothing else. So compassion, in this limited and personal sense, requires me to be silent about the subject of meaning for a little while longer, instead of trying immediately to banish the mental anguish that comes from not knowing why death occurs (as if my mental anguish even compares to theirs). Will they know of my silence? No, but what else can I do?

Far be it from me to suggest that I can make sense of disaster in any way at all. It is precisely their senselessness, their existential absurdity, that makes them worth talking about. I hope that it does not seem that we are talking merely to dispel our bad feelings as quickly as possible. It is not our intent, and I would urge participants in all of these discussions to contribute meaningfully to disaster relief as well. Whatever our differences, I am confident we can agree on this.