You don’t care enough to not do it.
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I would describe my current view as skeptical theism, which means I don’t think any of us have enough knowledge to determine if an evil is gratuitous or not. To know that we would have to know every possible past and contingent future. I can’t say whether or not malaria is a necessary evil, because I don’t know how evolution could have occurred in every possible universe, nor do I know God’s plan for the future and how its existence might be used by him. That’s why I disagreed with Rope’s title, “Why Evolution Does Not Make the Problem of Evil Worse,” and thought that yours was more appropriate (“Why We Cannot Know Whether Evolution Makes the Problem of Evil Worse”).
I recently read a book, Theology of the Manifest by Steven Nemes, which attempted to cut through all the metaphysical bullshit that often plagues philosophy and theology (that you and @Roy have often complained about), and develop a purely phenomenological theology. I found his comments on the problem of evil at least interesting:
This version of the argument [from evil] is probabilistic in nature. The idea is that the existence of God is improbable in proportion to the probability that certain evils in the world are gratuitous as defined above. By way of response, some philosophers deny that the existence of gratuitous evils is actually incompatible with God’s perfect goodness. Interesting as that line of argument may be, the present work is sooner concerned with the epistemic status of the judgment that an evil is gratuitous. The position called “skeptical theism” denies that such evaluations of evils can be justified. This is also the line of attack to be taken here, although as approached from a specifically phenomenological perspective.
The question is whether a person can come to a justified judgment that some evil that takes place in the world is gratuitous. It was noted earlier (§2) that a judgment is typically formed on the basis of an appearance; people form judgments as a way of expressing how things seem to them. Someone might therefore propose that certain evils seem gratuitous. Perhaps one just intuitively “sees” that they are gratuitous, or perhaps the reason why they seem gratuitous could be that the concerted effort to discover or to conceive of a justification for them has until now fallen short. Nothing one can see or imagine seems adequate to the task of justifying the evil with which one is presented in the World. Indeed, prolonged reflection on the evils one can find in reality serves for many people only to strengthen the conviction that they are gratuitous. Nothing in fact can make sense of why they happen. It would be one thing if one had an impression only once and under less than certain circumstances; such judgments do not have a firm basis, being founded upon a limited interaction with their object. It is another thing altogether for the same impression to remain after repeated investigation.
This line of reasoning may seem persuasive to some, but it can be seen to be phenomenologically confused in light of the earlier elucidated transcendental structure of experience (§6). Simply put, it is not in fact possible for an evil to appear to be gratuitous stricto sensu. To understand this point, consider what Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:
For each object, just as for each painting in an art gallery, there is an optimal distance from which it asks to be seen—an orientation through which it presents more of itself—beneath or beyond which we merely have a confused perception due to excess or lack. Hence, we tend toward the maximum of visibility and we seek, just as when using a microscope, a better focus point, which is obtained through a certain equilibrium between the interior and the exterior horizons.
As he says, for every object there is an optimal position from which it demands to be seen. It must therefore be specified from what “position” the gratuity of an evil could appear. Consider how to say that an evil is gratuitous is to say that it is not justified by anything that comes before it, simultaneously with it, or after it in time. The gratuity of an evil is consequently a relation that it bears (or perhaps rather the lack of a certain sort of relation) to all other events in time. And yet, as was pointed out earlier (§§2, 5), relations cannot appear except through the givenness of the relata. The necessary “position” from which such a quality could appear is therefore an essentially transhistorical one located outside of the flow of time; only thence could all events be given at once. Yet it is obvious that such a perspective is impossible for human beings to assume. The awareness of an evil takes place through the mediation of one’s lived body, which is always subject to the flow of time. This lived body is not an instrument through which one becomes aware of things, but rather what one is; one is this lived body that sees, hears, and feels. There can therefore be no escaping the limitations it imposes on one’s vision of things, since one cannot escape oneself. This is how it is impossible for the gratuity of an evil to appear stricto sensu.
Because it is impossible for the gratuity of an evil to appear, this supposed experience of the gratuity of evils must be reinterpreted. The same thing seems to be happening here as in the case of Plantinga’s doxastic experiences mentioned earlier (§5). One’s felt inability to see the meaning or justification of an evil is being projected onto the evil itself as a real property under the name of “gratuity.” One cannot see what good the evil serves or why it is necessary, and this inability to see the justification is interpreted as its nonexistence. And yet these are two different things. Suppose one cannot lift a weight; it does not follow that it is unliftable tout court, but only that it is unliftable-to-one, which is another way of saying that one is unable to lift it. Similarly, from the fact that one is not and cannot be in a position to see the justification of an evil in relation to the rest of history, it does not follow that such a justification does not exist. Indeed, because such a relation is the sort of thing one could never see in principle, given the inhibiting limitations of one’s lived body subject to the flow of time, it becomes clear that what is appearing in such experiences is not actually the gratuity of the evil but only one’s inability to make sense of it. One is “running into” the limitations of one’s sight.
Incidentally, this also seems to be the theodicy (or lack of theodicy?) held by some of the biblical authors, including the author of the book of Job.
That quote was definitely something of a mouthful. In spite of the overly-dense jargon, I think I understand what the author is trying to say, though I think they may be abusing the verb/noun pair appear/appearance – using a less-frequently-used, and in-this-context counter-intuitive sense of these words.
And although I think I can understand what the author is trying to say, I am not at all sure if I agree with it.
The story of Job is probably one of my least favorite Bible stories.
If we must assume we are unable “to see the meaning or justification of an evil”, for any evil, then we would seem to be unable to make any moral decisions. Any decision we make could, from the appropriate (but unknowable) “transhistoric” viewpoint have evil consequences that we are unaware of.
To grant agency would appear to also be to grant the ability to judge. Yes, it is possible (even likely) that this judgement is flawed, but it is all we have. But I would see failure to use it to the best of our ability as an abdication, and condemnation from its granter for using it as undermining the gift of its granting.
Yes, it is possible for a creator god to hide an actual good behind an apparent (in the sense of “appearing to the senses or mind, as distinct from… what really is”) gratuitous evil – but I would see such a trick as worthy of a trickster-god such as Loki.
That’s correct. Any action we take could have unforeseeable unwanted consequences in the future. That just seems obviously true to me — for example, if someone saved young Adolf Hitler from death, they would be doing something good according to their knowledge, but inadvertently contribute to the Holocaust. The best we can do is do good according to our limited knowledge. I think the skeptical theist position can be boiled down to the following logical argument:
(1) Gratuity is a relationship between an event and all other events.
(2) One cannot fully understand a relationship without knowing all relata.
(3) No human can know all events.
(4) Therefore, no human can know if any evil is gratuitous.
Edit: evil consequences → unwanted consequences
It seems to me that skeptical theism is not a very plausible position.
If it were just that the idea that there were reasons why could not perceive it would have a low plausibility. But it is worse than that - it must be logically impossible to achieve the same goods with a lesser evil.
But isn’t the implication of this viewpoint that our “best” is sufficiently flawed that we should simply not bother? If we cannot recognise “gratuitous” evil, how can we expect to recognise any evil?
This viewpoint seems to solve the ‘Problem of Evil’ by redefining all good and evil as inherently inscrutable.
Let’s try this:
(1) ‘It has an evil result’ is a relationship between an event and all other events.
(2) One cannot fully understand a relationship without knowing all relata.
(3) No human can know all events.
(4) Therefore, no human can know if any event is evil.
I agree with that argument, and I think this is a problem that everyone trying to make a moral judgment has to face, not just skeptical theists. I’m sure you can think of examples from your own life where you meant well in doing an action but it had an unforeseen bad consequence. Does that mean you were wrong to try to do good in the first place? I don’t think anyone but the most pedantic utilitarian would claim that.
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You argue against your own point. Our judgments of the effects of our own actions and our judgments of gratuitous evil make use of the same information. Our effectiveness in estimating both should be similar. If we can do one we should be able to do the other, and if we can’t do one we should be unable to do the other. Now, clearly we can’t do either perfectly, but you seem to be claiming that we can judge the effects of our own actions well enough not to be useless. If so, we should be able to judge gratuitous evil similarly. We don’t have to be right in every case in order to come to a reasonable conclusion for the aggregate of all cases or to make a reasonable estimate, say more likely correct than not, in particular cases. Sometimes we will be mistaken, and determine evil to be gratuitous when it isn’t, or necessary when it isn’t, but that doesn’t matter for the general point as long as our judgments are reliable enough.
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Bravo. That, indeed, is the seldom-addressed problem of evil. I do not think that any culture not already steeped in this strange faith could possibly look at the Bible and see it any other way.
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Hmm, I see your point, but I still think this is a problem for everyone rather than just skeptical theists. We can’t reliably predict the moral effects of an action years in the future, let alone decades or centuries, so we depend on reasonably reliable short-term predictions when making a moral judgment. But it’s precisely those long-term predictions on which the problem of natural evil seems to rest.
That’s the case iff short-term predictions are not a fairly good predictor of long-term predictions. If they aren’t, then our moral judgments based on them are once more useless. Again, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be reasonably good.
I agree, but have to note that you are stepping into semantic quicksand if you use “evil” to modify “consequences.” I don’t see how it can be coherently used to describe anything but motives.
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Good point @Mercer. What term do you think would be better to use there?
In response to @John_Harshman, I guess I would say that I don’t think our moral judgments are reasonably good in the long term. There are just too many variables and future events that we can’t know. But I also don’t think this is all that damaging to the day-to-day moral judgments that we make. When I decide to help a friend on a project, I’m not thinking about how it could affect other people decades down the line, or how (if at all) it might affect the lives of our descendants, etc., I’m thinking about how I can do good for them in the short term.
If there is anyone who thinks about all possible futures when making day-to-day moral decisions, more power to them, but I don’t think it’s possible given the limited knowledge of humans.
Unwanted, disadvantageous?
I agree.
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The first statement doesn’t follow from the first. Judgments can still be good even if we don’t take all possible factors into account. The ones we can take into account might be, as a rule, the more important ones. And if there’s no correlation between current actions and long-term outcomes, moral judgment is useless. Whether you think about long-term results is not relevant. What’s relevant is whether there’s a correlation between what you do think about and the long-term effect.
Of course if there’s no correlation in God’s acts, you’re saying that the ends justify the means. And when does that ever turn out for the best?
I would suggest it is an especial problem for skeptical theists who follow the line of reasoning contained in your original quote. They are saying do consider your moral judgement to be sufficiently reliable to assess decisions in your life, but don’t consider it to be reliable to use it to assess gratuitous evil. That appears to me to be a special pleading fallacy.
On further reflection I would have to disagree with this line of argument. Yes, the evil of an event is “a relation that it bears … to all other events in time” – but that relation is not uniform. The consequences of events, even momentous events, ‘wash out’ of history comparatively rapidly – and have their greatest impact on more immediate events. WWII was less than a century ago, and for decades had a profound effect on Europe, but the events of the post-Cold War era are rapidly erasing its effects less than a century afterwards.
I would therefore (as a matter of empirical evidence – so this thread is still stubbornly refusing to go off topic 
), that the “optimal position” to view the gratuity of an evil event is rather closer than a “transhistoric” view – the latter would appear likely to give a false impression that ‘none of this matters in the long run’.
This returns me to another problem I have with abstract theodicies (and/or abstract arguments about theodicy) – their abstractions tend to ‘wash away’ all the nuances (including patterns) contained in actual events.
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Thanks @John_Harshman and @Tim for giving me more to think about. I’ve just started reading the Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil which has an entire section devoted to the arguments for and against skeptical theism, which will hopefully help me to better understand the difficulties of this position.
Before there was a new testament… there was suffering and at least one God who didnt get much blame for it.
And then there was the Book of Job … who was KNOWN to allow for suffering. But like any Drill Sergeant, he wasnt BLAMED for it. It was just the way it was.
The global flood took innocent as well as guilty … because collective guilt was the only way to administer justice in a tribal context.
In North America, there was no way to assess individual guilt amongst the Natives … and no expectation that there would be. Very frustrating to Europeans who were used to guilt going unpunished if guilt could not be assigned.
Collective guilt was formalized and formulized by Augustine with his equation for Original Sin.
But isnt it interesting that the author of Job, having the same tools at hand, did NOT develop a concept of Original Sin? God killed off Job’s entire family to prove a point … and gave Job a brand new set - - like they were completely interchangeable!
God wasnt wrong. He was being God.
Amazingly enough, there have been millions of Christians who have lived and died good Christian lives with God more or less being no more or less a Job’s Drill Sergeant to his followers.
For more than a thousand years the Eastern Orthodox have lived devoted lives like Job; and have done so even after hearing about the old Latin logic of Augustine and Original Sin. And millions of these Orthodox Christians have shrugged their shoulders and said: “Nah, that sounds like Roman baloney. GOD is GOD and we dont need to make excuses for him.”
Making a big circle back to @Rope 's Evolution: if Job and the Flood is part of God’s system of “equity” - - his system of Evolution can be no less.