I haven’t read the paper yet. Did the author make that claim, or anything like it? Based on @John_Harshman discussion with @Rope, in this very thread, I suspect the answer is “no” and I suspect you haven’t read the paper. Glad to be wrong.
No I only read the opening post, which seems to make this claim explicitly. But I concede the title may be clickbait.
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Hi Rope, just got around to reading your paper. I think you proved your point very effectively, the problem of evil isn’t worsened by evolution and universal common ancestry.
I don’t think @John_Harshman’s criticism is valid, as the second half of the paper deals with the issue of natural selection as a process (only the first half deals exclusively with deep time).
Rum’s criticism seems to be partially valid. Negative mutations do lead to (apparently unjustified) suffering, which worsens the problem of evil. However, negative mutations would exist in both a creationist and evolutionary world, so this isn’t exclusively a problem of evolution.
Now that you’ve shown that evolution doesn’t make the problem of evil worse, how do you deal with the problem itself? Is there a particular theodicy you subscribe to?
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An evolutionary creation, and thus a necessity for Deep Time (over the shorter time required for a YEC) would however appear to magnify any imbalance (positive or negative) between animal suffering and animal happiness. Rope seems to think that he has addressed this balance, but I am less certain that he has done so satisfactorily.
People really should read the paper before commenting in this thread. It’s not all that long.
I think my criticism is valid, but I’m not all that interested in arguing the point. Still, the criticism was directed at the first half, and even though he makes my point in the paper, much of the discussion in that first half refers to evolution when it’s really talking about deep time.
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I think that’s Rope’s point, that evolution [edit: deep time] doesn’t add any “net suffering per animal” (so to speak) but merely magnifies existing imbalances. Thus if there is more suffering than happiness in an average animal’s life, then the problem of evil is equally difficult in a world with only 100 creatures than in a world with natural selection and deep time, so evolution doesn’t worsen the problem of evil. Maybe I should let Rope speak for himself though.
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I’m not sure if I can see the logic there. Yes, either way the ‘Problem of Evil’ would be a problem. But “if there is more suffering than happiness in an average animal’s life”, then more animals equates to more net suffering, and a “worse” problem. In the same way 100 people being tortured to death is a ‘worse problem’ than a single person being tortured to death. CS Lewis, whom Rope quotes, seems to think otherwise, but it doesn’t seem that even Rope accepts his position (and I certainly don’t).
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There is no reason for mutation to exist in a creationist world, and certainly not negative ones.
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On p. 395 I do concede that the scale of deep history will add something to the problem if the life of the average animal adds more bad than good to the world. So, that is something defenders of the problem of scale could try to establish to keep using the problem. Here’s what I say:
One way of changing this equation would be to assume that the creation of each mortal creature on average adds more bad than good to the world. In that case, adding more creatures would make the world a worse place, and our world with its billions of creatures is a very bad place indeed. But then it would seem that God’s goodness is incompatible with creating even one mortal creature capable of suffering, and we would have plenty of evidence against theism regardless of evolution. This view of the world would also lead to a kind of problem of evil for atheists, as noted by Nagasawa, and to antinatalism, for then our parents would probably also have been unjustified in giving life to us, and we ourselves should also avoid procreating.
To clarify a potential misunderstanding, I do not mean to argue that the existence of additional goods in a larger world itself justifies the increased amount of evils. I am simply pointing out that the overall proportion of suffering in the world is the relevant factor for determining the severity of the problem, rather than the scale of the world. Defending the problem of scale would require showing why the same logic would not also lead to the (absurd) conclusion that a hundred-creature world is better than one with a million, due to the lower absolute amount of suffering. I am also arguing for reorienting the discussion to focus on the problem of the mortality and suffering of individual creatures, and whether God is justified in creating even one such creature. Due to the principle of repeatability of reasons, what is at issue is explaining types of suffering, and so the scale of evolutionary history does not add to the severity of the problem.
The point here is that we have to adopt an extremely bleak view of the life in order for the scale to make things worse, which would then make the problem of evil pretty darn bad even without the added scale. Moreover, the argument would anyway have to end up claiming that God’s creation of a smaller amount of creatures would also be unjustified / morally evil. Thus, even on such a bleak view of animal lives, it seems one should focus more on the type and proportion of suffering, before potentially moving on to the scale.
I also point out that such a bleak view seems to have large costs, as argued by Nagasawa. If animal lives on average really add more bad than good to the world, then could we reasonably have any admiration for nature, or existential optimism without contradiction? Should we work towards sterilizing wild animals and ending all life on Earth, so this endless cycle of suffering could be brought to an end?
I don’t think animal lives are that bleak, though, and argue for this a bit in the paper, although it’s not the main focus. The references go into more detail. For those who want to read a very optimistic take of the issues, I recommend Jon Garvey’s book God’s Good Earth (2019). Garvey argues, among other things, that an evolutionary understanding actually gives little reason to think that animal lives are full of pain and suffering, because there would be little selective advantage to that.
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Thanks Andrew!
Yes, it seems that with harmful mutations the problem is harmful mutations, rather than evolution. And those could exist in a creationist world as well.
My own favored theodicy is a combination approach - there’s lots of different types of evil and suffering, so there’s also likely to be multiple different explanations for why God allows suffering. Michael Murray develops this kind of approach in his book Nature Red in Tooth and Claw. Basically, I think most of the major approaches to theodicy can be combined in this way to reduce the severity of the problem and make it more intelligible why God might allow suffering for a limited time. For example:
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Neo-cartesianism: I do not agree with the extreme forms of this, but I think it’s probable that a lot of animal suffering (say, of animals with radically less developed brains) is different in type from human suffering. (See Calum Miller for a defense of this, Trent Dougherty for the case against)
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Free will defenses: Sure, it’s plausible to me that angelic and human free will has made the extent of suffering much worse than it would be otherwise. (See John Peckham, Theodicy of Love)
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Soul making: Yes, it’s plausible that the creation purposefully include challenges meant to allow for the testing and growth of character in preparation for eternity. (Trent Dougherty develops this and applies it to animal suffering)
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Evolutionary theodicy: Sure, I think the value in animal autonomy and the regularity of nature can explain some suffering. See the work referenced in my article.
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Skeptical theism: It’s plausible that we won’t be able to understand everything about why God allows particular instances of suffering, even though this will be problematic if taken to the extreme of God’s full unknowability.
Of course, there’s also objections and lots more to say on each, but this is just to give you a general idea of my approach.
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Here’s another instance of saying “evolution” when you mean *deep time ".
And here.
And here too.
It has been estimated that in the total history of anatomically modern humans something on the order of 100 billion people have been born, approximately 50% of which died before the age of 8 years old.
That’s just for humans, a species that goes unusually out of their way to take care of their offspring.
I will here just note the obvious non-sequitur at play here. Animals aren’t selected to suffer most of their lives, they’re selected to survive and reproduce. The suffering of sentient organisms is a byproduct of the selection for survival and reproduction in the kind of circumstance they find themselves, where competition for mates, predators and other potential dangers lurk around the corners.
Being able to experience pain, stress, and anxiety are adaptations to keep you alive. You sense bodily harm in a way that makes you act to avoid more, the adrenaline keeps you awake and fast, being anxious and stressed makes you sensitive to sudden loud noises and quickly moves you into flight or fight mode when startled. Being stressed and agitated also communicates your state of mind to others around you, alarming them to potential dangers they haven’t seen themselves.
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Being able to experience pain, stress, and anxiety are adaptations to keep you alive. You sense bodily harm in a way that makes you act to avoid more, the adrenaline keeps you awake and fast, being anxious and stressed makes you sensitive to sudden loud noises and quickly moves you into flight or fight mode when startled. Being stressed and agitated also communicates your state of mind to others around you, alarming them to potential dangers they haven’t seen themselves.
Garvey’s argument in the book takes this into account - his point is that stress is indeed an adaptation to evoke appropriate responses in time of crisis, but this does not make it evolutionarily useful as “the customary state of prey animals. What would be the evolutionary point of that anyway?” (my emphasis) So the question is: While stress has its uses, would it be expected from an evolutionary point of view for animals to be in a state of stress all the time? I don’t see any non sequitur here.
Maybe you could respond that animals need to be in a state of stress all the time because of the constant struggle for resources, but Garvey uses books by ecologists like Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, and Griffin, Animal Minds, to argue the contrary. According to Colinvaux, for example,
Peaceful coexistence, not struggle, is the rule in our Darwinian world. A perfectly fashioned individual of a Darwinian species is programmed for a specialized life to be spent for the most part safe from competition with neighbors of other kinds. Natural selection is harsh only to the deviant aggressor who seeks to poach on the niche of another. The peaceful coexistence between the species, which results from evolution by natural seleciton, has to be understood as an important fact in the workings of the great ecosystems around us.
Too optimistic? Most of us writing about the problem of evil are accustomed to think of nature in more violent terms, and I know there have been others who argue for a more negative view of nature. However, I at least cannot dismiss this as the ramblings of some philosopher-theologian stuck in their office and out of touch with nature. Paul Colinvaux was an ecologist with plenty of field experience.. All this is incidental to my article, although it is certainly stuff I would be happy to learn more about from other biologists. I would also love more literature references to check out on the proportion of animal suffering and stress, if you happen to know of good studies.
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I think your mistake is first of all to think this can be merely tallied up in total hours spent stressed versus non-stressed. They say it takes ten times as long as you’ve spent stressed to recover from it fully.
Another problem is you’re considering only the lives of adults, rather than the innumerable offspring that never make it to adulthood. I invoke the example of sea turtles hatching.
Rope, I would suggest that this ‘problem for atheists’ exists purely in Nagasawa’s imagination – a “problem of evil for imagined atheists” rather than for real atheists.
It relies on the fallacy that atheists (or theists or agnostics for that matter) are purely rational in their life choices.
I would suggest that nobody is that rational. All our lives are a mess of spur-of-the-moment choices, emotion, instinct, and cultural pressures.
This view also runs into the problem that parents rational expectations of the lives their children might lead are not homogeneous. Those who would have the lowest expectations, are also likely to have the least leisure time to contemplate views such as Nagasawa’s, so will likely have children regardless. Those with the leisure for such contemplation are likely to have far higher expectations, and so it is far less obviously irrational for them to have children.
@Roy and @John_Harshman, as fellow atheists, what do you make of Nagasawa’s views, both described above, and quoted by me here?
@Faizal_Ali, as a psychiatrist, do you find Nagasawa’s analysis of human motivations to be reasonable?
I would again have to disagree. Every day, on my daily walk, I “admire” the calls of the Tui and the Bellbird, and the antics of the Fantail and Native Pigeon. Intellectually, I know, if I put thought into it, that these birds are subject to predation, disease, starvation, etc – but generally I don’t. ‘Out of sight out of mind’ is a thoroughly normal part of human cognition and psychology. Nagasawa would seem to be ignoring this (either intentionally or unintentionally) in his analysis.
Similarly, “existential optimism” would seem better explained by normal human psychology than confected into a tortured argument for tortured atheist minds.
I would conclude by suggesting that humans are never completely “without contradiction”, and that to assume otherwise is irrational.
Postscript:
After writing this I did a spell of exercycling, as I do each day. Today I listened to tracks from Queen’s final album, Innuendo, recorded while their lead singer, Freddie Mercury, was in the final stages of dying of AIDS. This section of the title track seems relevant:
If there’s a God or any kind of justice under the sky
If there’s a point if there’s a reason to live or die
If there’s an answer to the questions we feel bound to ask
Show yourself - destroy our fears - release your mask
Oh yes we’ll keep on trying
Hey tread that fine line
Yeah we’ll keep on smiling yeah (yeah yeah)
And whatever will be will be
We’ll keep on trying
We’ll just keep on trying
Till the end of time
I’ve never seen any indication that Freddie was a religious person. His determination to sing until his last breath, rather than end the pain early, may well have been irrational. Then I can only thank the universe for this irrationality, for the joy that this album has brought to me and many others, in spite of his pain (or quite possibly because of it – as his mortality is a major underlying theme of some of its most enduring songs).
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Tim, have you read Nagasawa’s article? There’s no assumption that people are “purely rational in their life choices” in there. It is assuming that rationality is desirable, sure, and that living with such a contradiction between one’s worldview and one’s attitudes is a problematic or costly psychologically. But that’s not at all equivalent to your summary.
On your response to Nagasawa: Sure, people might be able to stop themselves from thinking about many sorts of problems both on the personal, societal and existential levels. For example, it helps people forget such problems if they have lots of good things around themselves personally, have access to entertainment etc. But I can’t really make myself see that as a strong response or solution to those problems. Perhaps psychologists can comment on when this is healthy and when it is not - I agree that it’s probably inevitable to some extent.
I don’t have the time to go in depth into Nagasawa’s article with you. But for those who are interested, I would suggest just reading his piece for yourselves. Nagasawa also has a book coming out on this with OUP in 2024, in which I suppose he will engage with the scholarly literature (both favorable and critical) on his argument so far.
Rumraket, would you then claim that those animals that die young on average add more bad than good to the world? If so, how would you argue this? I would say that these also add good to the world - actually, it’s precisely because their existence is good and beautiful that we tend to see something tragic in their deaths even if it predators have their own important ecological role.
Recall that I am not arguing that there is no problem of natural evil, just that evolution does not make that problem worse. For that reason, it’s not a sufficient response to just list examples of supposed natural evils to respond to what I am saying.
What exactly is good and beautiful about an egg that gets eaten before it can hatch?
Hi Rope,
I read the paper and I liked it a lot, probably because I like your approach and the paper is written at my level. 
I agree with @John_Harshman that there are times when ‘evolution’ seems to mean ‘natural history,’ or at least there are times when interchanging those very different concepts would not change a meaning or conclusion. One clear example is on page 392:
Nor does anything then prevent the creation of three such beings, or, adding more, the creation of millions and billions of such creatures existing over the long years of evolutionary time.
I know what you mean here, and the context of your paper is in fact clear that many arguments can/should be addressed apart from evolution. Nevertheless, I would have written “…over the long eons of natural history” for clarity of various kinds (including the oddness of “evolutionary time”).
But on the positive side, regarding the argument about “scale” of suffering, you won me with the argument that ends with this, in the same paragraph I just quoted:
But if the creation of one mortal creature and the suffering it endures is compatible with God’s goodness, and even adds value to the world, as Augustine’s approach implies, then so should the creation of two such beings. Nor does anything then prevent the creation of three such beings, or, adding more, the creation of millions and billions of such creatures existing over the long years of evolutionary time.
Regarding “cruelty” and even “pointless cruelty” I didn’t need convincing about this. As a believer I was never drawn to that particular argument (when used to discredit God – as we’re seeing in this thread – or to discredit evolution). While your citation of sources that seek to minimize (or “balance”) this concern is not convincing at all (we could discuss separately if you want) to me, neither is the claim that natural history (or the current world, again both separate from evolution itself) is obviously overflowing with cruelty. For me, then, the first theme of your paper (about “scale”) was the more important to address.
All of my comments should be considered as the opinions of an apostate who finds the Christian god to be indefensible as a character and only worth considering as an elaborate and revealing creation of human minds and culture. None of my reasons involve r-selected vertebrate species or the gorging of predators on living prey, and I was always repulsed by claims that the natural world is “wasteful.”
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Yes Rope, I have even quoted to you sections of it that I found particularly problematical.
Yes “purely intellectual” would probably have been a more accurate description than “purely rational” for the bizarre thoughts and decision-making that Nagasawa is attributing to atheists. Rather than hyper-rationalism, this would seem more a form of hyper-existentialism – a taking of the maxim of “Think Global – Act Local” to such an extreme that the “global” issues become so overpowering that local action seems fruitless – an existential ‘Total Perspective Vortex’.
No Rope. People do not need “to stop themselves from thinking about many sorts of problems”, particularly those of the existential kind Nagasawa imagines. They simply rarely think about them in the first place. As I said with my own personal example, I would not typically contemplate such issues in my ‘admiration’ for nature on my daily walks – and do not think that I had ever done so until you raised the topic. I know that these issues exist, if I choose to think about them – but very rarely have occasion to do so. This is normal human psychology.
When I do think about such things, I come to the conclusion that my appreciation of the beauty in no way worsens or cheapens the suffering. I view the universe as frequently beautiful, but generally pitiless, and not-infrequently cruel.
“La Belle Dame sans Merci”, in the words of Keats – to be admired, but not entirely to be trusted.
It is neither a “response” or a “solution” to those problems – it is a statement that those problems simply don’t exist in reality. That they are imagined problems.
What Nagasawa terms “systemic evil” is too remote and disconnected from the everyday lives of most people for them to give it much thought, let alone allow it to affect how they live their lives. Yes, if contemplated, it might lead somebody to question the existence of an omnibenebolvent God, but that is the likely extent of it.
Nagasawa asks:
Why should we think that the world is overall good and that we should be happy and grateful to be alive in it if our existence depends fundamentally on a violent, cruel, and unfair biological system which guarantees pain and suffering for uncountably many sentient animals?
I would ask in return:
Why would we need to “think that the world is overall good” in order to be “happy and grateful to be alive in it”, when neither our existence, happiness nor our gratitude would make the system any more "fundamentally … violent, cruel, and unfair "? Would our ceasing to exist or being unhappy or ungrateful make anything any better?
I simply think that Nagasawa has failed to demonstrate that a problem even exists.
The expectation that atheists (or anybody else, other than perhaps philosophers) would spend a sufficient amount of time contemplating such remote existential issues, such as the suffering of all animals over the last hundreds of millions of years, that they need “to stop themselves from thinking about” them is an unwarranted assumption. Let alone that these imagined contemplations will have a significant impact on their life choices.
Addendum:
Taking the likely contributions of the influences on such life-choices, such as having a child, from least rarefied and most impactful, to most rarefied and least impactful:
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spur-of-the-moment choices (e.g. unprotected sex leading to an unplanned pregnancy), emotion, instinct, and cultural pressures
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rational constraints, and questions like ‘can we afford to have a child?’
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in a tiny minority of cases, questions like ‘is it ethical to bring another child into an already-overpopulated world?’
(Caveat: the exact emphasis on each of the above would depend on the exact type of life-choices being made. Marriage, children and the like would put heavier emphasis on (1), career choices on (2).)
But I would be surprised if even one person in a thousand (and possibly not even one in a million) would base their decisions on the balance of wild animal suffering in the world. That issue is just too far away, too tenuously related to the decision at hand, and too much part of the existing accepted-without-really-thinking-about-it fabric of life, to enter into the equation.
[End of addendum]
It leads me to wonder if Nagasawa knows any non-philosopher atheists, let alone has spent sufficient time with them to actually understand their thought-processes. (Philosopher atheists would form an unrepresentative sample.)
This Rope is why I am wholly unwilling to accept philosophers’ assessments on “the proportion of suffering”, and would demand substantiation that has some factual basis. If Nagasawa is able to come up with this completely unrealistic model of atheist cognition, why should their other assessments be assumed to be any more reliable?
The rational position would seem to be to only trust philosophers’ assessments where they have a discernible basis in objective reality.