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Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate
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December 4, 2024
Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate (2024) by James Sterba and Richard Swinburne
In this book, Sterba and Swinburne debate the classical problem of evil. This is a topic with a long and complex history that I won't summarize here (the Wikipedia article I linked gives a good introduction).
Only a very bad God could permit the suffering I endured by reading this book. Richard Swinburne, arguing for the superstition side, finds ways to insult the intelligence of this reader in nearly every paragraph. Swinburne, being a theologian, is unanchored to facts or evidence, which is to say unachored to reality. Therefore he is able to revise the properties of his imaginary God as necessary to make it somewhat compatible with all the evil in the world. James Sterba, arguing for the reason side, tries to stanch the flow of nonsense, but largely agrees, bafflingly, to grant much of Swinburne's fabulism, while trying to show how Swinburne's version of God is incompatible with the evil in the world, in particular with the "horrendous" evil. While Sterba's arguments for the most part hit home with me, I had to work harder than necessary to decode them, because Sterba's writing style is too often the opposite to what you see described in books about "plain language". Run-on sentences, subject and predicate divided by multiple subordinate clauses, etc. Many of Sterba's sentences required me to read them two or three times, and even then it was hard to be sure I had it. I was reminded of this quotation from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman, about a sociologist who encrusted simple concepts in impenetrable language. When you have to rewrite passages of a book to make sense of them, you're reading a book that a competent editor didn't. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence might be on the verge of eliminating this instance of gratuitous suffering from the world, by translating academese into plain language for us.
I had the thought that some of Sterba's turgid prose might have been clarified with some diagrams, but I was too lazy to try drawing them. And it's not the reader's job to illustrate a book.
Both Swinburne and Sterba employ multiple acronyms I've never seen anywhere else, defined only at their first appearances. If (i.e., when) you forget an acronym when it reappears 20 pages later, there is no glossary to make lookup simple. I pity the reader of a paper copy who doesn't have an e-reader's search function. My advice: take notes as you go.
I would probably have to write another book to detail everything I didn't like about this one. But I can give a very brief taste. Here's one example, where Swinburne writes:
If we subjected an anesthetized human to the same treatment of being eaten alive, the human would not have any conscious experience of suffering. But what human observer could not see this as a tremendous evil being done to the unfeeling victim?
Now, whether or not the caterpillar has sufficient neural complexity to have subjective experiences, humans who observe the caterpillar's horrific fate certainly do. And this created difficulties for human observers who are less sociopathically detached than Swinburne apparently is. In particular, the parasitoid wasps have no other way to reproduce. This left natural theologians struggling to explain why their omni-benevolent God would have specifically designed these wasps to lay their eggs in this particularly macabre way, rather than in some other way we humans might regard as more humane. Generally speaking, we humans view it as more humane to kill quickly rather than slowly, when killing is necessary. Yet here the parasitoid wasp larva kills the host caterpillar as slowly as possible.
But in keeping with Swinburne being at least a little bit wrong about almost everything he writes, he's not even right about the sophistication of invertebrate brains. In particular, he seems unaware of the octopus. According to Wikipedia: "Octopuses have a complex nervous system and excellent sight, and are among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates."
But Swinburne points out, correctly, that it's currently impossible to know if nonhuman animals experience pain in ways like humans do. None of us can see directly into the subjective experience of any other human, let alone the experience of an animal that lacks the language to argue for its own experience. So just for fun I asked Google Gemini about this:
The three kinds of pain experience indicators that Gemini lists seem compelling to me. For example, seeking out pain relief sounds very telling. That's a response to pain that is in a different class than something that might be explained by instinct or reflex, such as immediately withdrawing from a painful stimulus, or crying out. To seek pain relief seems to require some level of intention and abstract thinking ability.
And cognitive empathy - how could this be merely reflexive? It seems easiest to explain in terms of an animal having mirror neurons similar to a human's, along with subjective experiences for the neurons to mirror. Trying to explain this behavior in terms of unfeeling animals behaving purely by instinct begins to sound absurd.
And just to further poke at Swinburne's "vertebrate-ism", I asked Gemini about octopuses:
Now, I'm not suggesting that octopuses have complex mental lives to fully rival a human's. But it may be that they experience a lot more pain than Swinburne thinks any invertebrates can.
OK, that was a lot of retort triggered by just a few lines from Swinburne. I could do much the same thing for the rest of Swinburne's share of the book, making this review a book in its own right. But I'll stop here, except to mention that both Swinburne and Sterba accept libertarian free will (with Sterba allowing that he prefers compatibilism but he accepts libertarianism for the debate). They agree that free will is a highly contentious topic, and that to engage with it would massively enlarge the book. Fair enough, but to dismiss the case against libertarianism puts the book on the same epistemic footing as astrology and geocentrism. See for example Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky, which obliterates any scientific basis for free will. That is, there is not the slightest hint of any activity in the brain which is uncaused by prior natural processes. Such uncaused activity would seem to require violating the conservation laws, which would mean that every time I have a thought it means a miracle happened in my head, to paraphrase Steven Pinker. If my mental life is not a continuous sequence of miracles, it means that every thought I have, and therefore every choice I make, must have been caused by natural events that happened before.
The only reason to suspect we have free will is our intuitive sense that we have it. But human intuition has been shown unreliable before. For example, before Galileo, almost everyone believed their intuitive sense that they stand on a solid, unmoving Earth, and the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars wheel around us every day. Now we know that almost everything our intuition told us about cosmology is illusory and wrong. No one with understanding of science history can feel confident taking intuition as the final word on anything - except for the existence of intuition itself.
Now, a huge part of Swinburne's theodicy hinges on humans having free will, which is convenient for the victim-blaming strategy that lets God off the hook. However, as a whole category of predestinationist Christians have long understood, free will for humans cannot be compatible with an all-powerful God. Free will also cannot be compatible with prophecy, if - as Swinburne declares - God's omniscience does not extend to knowing what all our future choices will be. But if God cannot know everything that every human will ever do, how can God predict the future where humans are involved? As an atheist, I don't suspect that prophets are anything but charlatans, but legions of Christians believe in prophecy.
Consider, for example, the prophecy that a particular human will be born centuries in the future. For this to happen, a staggering number of humans must make precisely the correct choices at the correct times. All the intermediate humans had to be born with exactly the right genomes so that the future human's parents would be brought into existence and find each other and mate at exactly the right moment to bring exactly the right sperm and egg together. This micromanaging of human choices would have to have occurred all the way back through the ancestral line. And it's not just the ancestors themselves, but also everyone else who could have interfered at any point in the process.
In this book, Sterba and Swinburne debate the classical problem of evil. This is a topic with a long and complex history that I won't summarize here (the Wikipedia article I linked gives a good introduction).
Only a very bad God could permit the suffering I endured by reading this book. Richard Swinburne, arguing for the superstition side, finds ways to insult the intelligence of this reader in nearly every paragraph. Swinburne, being a theologian, is unanchored to facts or evidence, which is to say unachored to reality. Therefore he is able to revise the properties of his imaginary God as necessary to make it somewhat compatible with all the evil in the world. James Sterba, arguing for the reason side, tries to stanch the flow of nonsense, but largely agrees, bafflingly, to grant much of Swinburne's fabulism, while trying to show how Swinburne's version of God is incompatible with the evil in the world, in particular with the "horrendous" evil. While Sterba's arguments for the most part hit home with me, I had to work harder than necessary to decode them, because Sterba's writing style is too often the opposite to what you see described in books about "plain language". Run-on sentences, subject and predicate divided by multiple subordinate clauses, etc. Many of Sterba's sentences required me to read them two or three times, and even then it was hard to be sure I had it. I was reminded of this quotation from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman, about a sociologist who encrusted simple concepts in impenetrable language. When you have to rewrite passages of a book to make sense of them, you're reading a book that a competent editor didn't. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence might be on the verge of eliminating this instance of gratuitous suffering from the world, by translating academese into plain language for us.
I had the thought that some of Sterba's turgid prose might have been clarified with some diagrams, but I was too lazy to try drawing them. And it's not the reader's job to illustrate a book.
Both Swinburne and Sterba employ multiple acronyms I've never seen anywhere else, defined only at their first appearances. If (i.e., when) you forget an acronym when it reappears 20 pages later, there is no glossary to make lookup simple. I pity the reader of a paper copy who doesn't have an e-reader's search function. My advice: take notes as you go.
I would probably have to write another book to detail everything I didn't like about this one. But I can give a very brief taste. Here's one example, where Swinburne writes:
Since only vertebrates have brains in any way like our brains, there is no adequate reason to suppose that any creatures other than vertebrates suffer.This is Swinburne's way to dismiss the suffering of the caterpillar being slowly eaten alive from the inside by a parasitoid wasp larva. The ichneumonidae and braconidae famously caused great problems for naive natural theologians of the 19th century. These devout men of science began with the assumption that by studying God's handiwork in Nature they would learn about the nature of God - hence, "natural" theology as opposed to "revealed" theology (i.e., "knowledge" about God deriving from "revelation"). But as natural theologians learned more about Nature, they discovered more and more horrors. (That is, things that seem horrifying to humans. Even if these things are not horrifying to the victims such as caterpillars, why would a good God have filled Nature with things to horrify us?) These horrors are hard to square with the traditional omni-benevolent God of theology, but are perfectly explained in terms of natural selection. For example, the parasitoid wasps have been shaped by natural selection to make the most efficient use of their prey. The mother wasp injects an egg into a caterpillar which then hatches, with the caterpillar providing a temporary home and food source for the growing wasp larva. The larva instinctively consumes the caterpillar's innards in a precise sequence, leaving the vital organs for last. This keeps the caterpillar alive long enough for the larva to pupate and emerge from the spent caterpillar husk as a newly-formed adult. (Fans of the Alien horror franchise will recognize these wasps as the inspiration for some of the more frightening movies that have been made.)
If we subjected an anesthetized human to the same treatment of being eaten alive, the human would not have any conscious experience of suffering. But what human observer could not see this as a tremendous evil being done to the unfeeling victim?
Now, whether or not the caterpillar has sufficient neural complexity to have subjective experiences, humans who observe the caterpillar's horrific fate certainly do. And this created difficulties for human observers who are less sociopathically detached than Swinburne apparently is. In particular, the parasitoid wasps have no other way to reproduce. This left natural theologians struggling to explain why their omni-benevolent God would have specifically designed these wasps to lay their eggs in this particularly macabre way, rather than in some other way we humans might regard as more humane. Generally speaking, we humans view it as more humane to kill quickly rather than slowly, when killing is necessary. Yet here the parasitoid wasp larva kills the host caterpillar as slowly as possible.
But in keeping with Swinburne being at least a little bit wrong about almost everything he writes, he's not even right about the sophistication of invertebrate brains. In particular, he seems unaware of the octopus. According to Wikipedia: "Octopuses have a complex nervous system and excellent sight, and are among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates."
But Swinburne points out, correctly, that it's currently impossible to know if nonhuman animals experience pain in ways like humans do. None of us can see directly into the subjective experience of any other human, let alone the experience of an animal that lacks the language to argue for its own experience. So just for fun I asked Google Gemini about this:
Me: Do chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans experience pain and suffering like humans do? I don't refer just to behavioral indicators of pain, such as withdrawing a limb from an injury, or crying out. I refer to the subjective experience of pain, which I imagine is hard to measure objectively.
Gemini:
This is a complex question that scientists and philosophers have debated for centuries. While we cannot definitively know what another being subjectively experiences, there is strong scientific evidence suggesting that chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans do experience pain and suffering in a way similar to humans.
Here's why:
* **Physiological similarities:** These great apes share many of the same neural structures and pain receptors as humans. When they experience injury or illness, their bodies release similar chemicals (like endorphins) to alleviate pain, just like ours.
* **Behavioral responses:** They exhibit behaviors that are consistent with pain, such as wincing, limping, and avoiding painful stimuli. They also seek out pain relief, such as using leaves to soothe wounds.
* **Cognitive empathy:** These apes are highly intelligent and empathetic. They show concern for others in pain, suggesting they understand and relate to the suffering of others.
While we cannot directly measure their subjective experience of pain, the combination of physiological, behavioral, and cognitive evidence strongly suggests that they do experience pain and suffering. It's important to treat these animals with compassion and respect, recognizing their capacity to feel pain and their need for humane treatment.
The three kinds of pain experience indicators that Gemini lists seem compelling to me. For example, seeking out pain relief sounds very telling. That's a response to pain that is in a different class than something that might be explained by instinct or reflex, such as immediately withdrawing from a painful stimulus, or crying out. To seek pain relief seems to require some level of intention and abstract thinking ability.
And cognitive empathy - how could this be merely reflexive? It seems easiest to explain in terms of an animal having mirror neurons similar to a human's, along with subjective experiences for the neurons to mirror. Trying to explain this behavior in terms of unfeeling animals behaving purely by instinct begins to sound absurd.
And just to further poke at Swinburne's "vertebrate-ism", I asked Gemini about octopuses:
Me:
Do octopuses also seek pain relief?
Gemini:
Yes, there's compelling evidence suggesting that octopuses experience pain and seek relief. Studies have shown that they exhibit behaviors such as:
* **Avoiding painful stimuli:** When exposed to a harmful substance, octopuses actively avoid the area where they experienced the pain.
* **Seeking pain relief:** They have been observed using natural remedies like rubbing their arms against rocks or plants to soothe wounds.
* **Physiological responses:** Octopuses show physiological responses to pain, such as increased heart rate and changes in skin color.
These behaviors and responses strongly suggest that octopuses have a subjective experience of pain and actively seek to alleviate it. This highlights the complex cognitive abilities and sentience of these fascinating creatures.
Now, I'm not suggesting that octopuses have complex mental lives to fully rival a human's. But it may be that they experience a lot more pain than Swinburne thinks any invertebrates can.
OK, that was a lot of retort triggered by just a few lines from Swinburne. I could do much the same thing for the rest of Swinburne's share of the book, making this review a book in its own right. But I'll stop here, except to mention that both Swinburne and Sterba accept libertarian free will (with Sterba allowing that he prefers compatibilism but he accepts libertarianism for the debate). They agree that free will is a highly contentious topic, and that to engage with it would massively enlarge the book. Fair enough, but to dismiss the case against libertarianism puts the book on the same epistemic footing as astrology and geocentrism. See for example Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky, which obliterates any scientific basis for free will. That is, there is not the slightest hint of any activity in the brain which is uncaused by prior natural processes. Such uncaused activity would seem to require violating the conservation laws, which would mean that every time I have a thought it means a miracle happened in my head, to paraphrase Steven Pinker. If my mental life is not a continuous sequence of miracles, it means that every thought I have, and therefore every choice I make, must have been caused by natural events that happened before.
The only reason to suspect we have free will is our intuitive sense that we have it. But human intuition has been shown unreliable before. For example, before Galileo, almost everyone believed their intuitive sense that they stand on a solid, unmoving Earth, and the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars wheel around us every day. Now we know that almost everything our intuition told us about cosmology is illusory and wrong. No one with understanding of science history can feel confident taking intuition as the final word on anything - except for the existence of intuition itself.
Now, a huge part of Swinburne's theodicy hinges on humans having free will, which is convenient for the victim-blaming strategy that lets God off the hook. However, as a whole category of predestinationist Christians have long understood, free will for humans cannot be compatible with an all-powerful God. Free will also cannot be compatible with prophecy, if - as Swinburne declares - God's omniscience does not extend to knowing what all our future choices will be. But if God cannot know everything that every human will ever do, how can God predict the future where humans are involved? As an atheist, I don't suspect that prophets are anything but charlatans, but legions of Christians believe in prophecy.
Consider, for example, the prophecy that a particular human will be born centuries in the future. For this to happen, a staggering number of humans must make precisely the correct choices at the correct times. All the intermediate humans had to be born with exactly the right genomes so that the future human's parents would be brought into existence and find each other and mate at exactly the right moment to bring exactly the right sperm and egg together. This micromanaging of human choices would have to have occurred all the way back through the ancestral line. And it's not just the ancestors themselves, but also everyone else who could have interfered at any point in the process.
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