The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil

Name: The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil
Author: Brian Davies
ISBN: 082649241X

by Brian Davies

I don’t think the problem of evil is a very compelling argument at all, when considered as an objection against God’s existence. Brian Davies would agree with that. That doesn’t mean, however, that evil is not mysterious or that the question of why God would allow evil is not mysterious. Those are very deep and mysterious questions. However, if the claim is that the existence of evil is somehow incompatible with God’s existence, so that it constitutes a refutation of God’s existence, I don’t think that’s a very strong argument at all. And neither would Davies. He approaches the problem of evil in a way that’s informed by the understanding of God’s existence and nature that is represented by Aquinas. In this book Davies looks at the problem of evil through a Thomist lens. One of the things he wants to emphasise is just how different the approach of the classical theist tradition toward the problem of evil is from the sort of approach you see in a lot of contemporary philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga or John Hick or Richard Swinburne. This is where this distinction that I drew earlier, between classical theism on the one hand and theistic personalism on the other, plays a big role. The theistic personalist, as I mentioned earlier, is someone whose starting point when thinking about God is the thesis that God is like we are — a member of the general class or category ‘persons’ — and he’s just different from us in not having the limitations that human persons have. If you approach the question of God’s nature that way then it’s very easy to start thinking about God as a kind of moral agent, just as we are. This is to think of him as someone who has certain moral duties, someone who exhibits certain moral virtues and so forth. And then the problem of evil starts to look like it’s a question of how God can be morally justified in allowing the evils that he allows. Questions arise such as: is God violating some duty by not eliminating evil? Is God somehow less than virtuous by not eliminating evil? This is the way that the problem of evil starts to look if you think of God as one person alongside others. “On analysis, there is no strict inconsistency between God’s existence and the existence of evil. ” What Davies emphasises in this book is that from the classical theist point of view — from the point of view of someone like Aquinas — this is simply the wrong way to approach the question. The conversation gets off on the wrong foot if we think of God as a kind of moral agent who, just as human beings do, has certain moral obligations and can intelligently be said to have or to lack certain moral virtues and so forth. As Davies emphasises, for a classical theist writer, God is not a moral agent. It doesn’t mean that we can’t attribute to God attributes such as goodness and love. Davies is keen to stress that he’s not denying that. It certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attribute to God certain personal attributes like intellect and will. Davies, just like Aquinas, would emphasise that we ought to attribute those things to God as well. The point, though, is that it’s a mistake to think that this entails that God is a kind of moral agent. One of the reasons that it’s a mistake is that the sorts of things that we usually attribute to moral agents are not intelligibly attributed to God. For example, we think of a moral agent as being courageous or being cowardly. Someone can intelligibly be said to be courageous or cowardly only because he faces certain dangers. Courage is a matter of doing the right thing in the face of danger, so that we attribute courage to someone precisely when he does that. But God is never in danger. God is outside time and space. God is immaterial, so he doesn’t have a body. There’s no such thing as God being wounded or in danger of getting a disease or in any other way capable of suffering any kind of harm. So it doesn’t make any sense to attribute to God a virtue like courage or, for that matter, to attribute to him a vice like cowardice . Concepts like these simply have no application to God. If we approach the problem of evil as a problem of how to justify God as a moral agent in the face of evil, we’re getting the conversation off on the wrong foot. For Davies and other Thomists, goodness is grounded in the natures of things. The right way to approach the question of goodness is to think of models like the way we would describe something as a good specimen of a kind of thing. We might say, for example, that a certain dog is a good specimen of its kind because it exhibits all the dog-like features — all the features that are typical of fully functioning healthy dogs. It has four legs, a tail, it barks, it scampers about and so forth. We would say that it is a good specimen of a dog in a way that a dog that was missing a leg because it got hit by a car, or is sickly and lies about lethargically, is not a good specimen of a dog – at least not if we’re trying to indicate to someone who does not know what a dog is what is characteristic of its kind. Goodness and badness has to do with how well or badly something lives up to the paradigm case of the kind. In the case of a tree, say, a tree with healthy roots and healthy bark is a good specimen of a tree, whereas one with weak roots and its bark all ripped off is a bad specimen of a tree, because it doesn’t live up as well to the pattern or paradigm of what makes something a fully functional healthy tree. This analysis of goodness and badness goes back to ancient thinkers like Aristotle, and medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas incorporated itinto their own thinking. For that reason, for Aquinas, there’s a lot that we can know about morality even apart from religion. There’s a lot we can know about what makes for a good human life, where we can bracket off the question of God’s existence. If what’s good for a human being has to do with the nature of a human being — with what is conducive to fulfilling our nature, the ends and purposes that we have to realise in order to flourish as the kind of thing that a human being is — and human nature is what it is whether or not it was created by God, it follows that there is a lot about morality that we can know apart from the existence of God. I don’t want to say that according to Aquinas, every aspect of morality can be dealt with apart from the question of God’s existence,. That wouldn’t be correct. But at least a large part of morality can be determined by bracketing off questions about God’s existence and nature. In that way, moral goodness is not directly metaphysically grounded in God’s nature. But indirectly it is, because Aquinas thinks that when God creates the world — when he makes human beings, for example — what he’s doing is making things according to the divine archetypes, the ideas or patterns that exist in the divine intellect. Here Aquinas is building on Augustine and earlier predecessors in the medieval tradition. Aquinas would take what Plato famously thinks exist in the realm of the Forms — the Form or pattern of being a human being, a triangle, a dog etc. — and hewould locate those, just as Augustine did, in the divine intellect. He thinks that when God creates, he is creating something in the world of concrete physical things that instantiates the archetype or pattern that pre-exists in the divine mind. In that way the natures of things ultimately derive from some idea in the divine intellect. You can say that in that sense the nature of a thing — and thus what’s good or bad for it — derives from God. But its direct grounding is still in the thing itself. What’s good and bad for human beings is directly grounded in their own nature, rather than in the divine will for example. That’s the important point to emphasise. The reason it’s bad for us to murder or to steal is not because God has arbitrarily decided to decree that we shouldn’t steal. It’s rather because given the nature that we have, we cannot flourish if we murder and steal from one another. That would be true for Aquinas even if it turned out that God didn’t exist. It would still be bad for us to murder and steal because it’s contrary to what is required for our flourishing as the kind of things that we are. Aquinas certainly thinks that the existence of anything, even for an instant, depends on God keeping it in being. So, ultimately, we wouldn’t have the natures we have if God weren’t keeping us in existence. But that’s true of every feature in the world. Nothing would exist or operate the way it does if God wasn’t keeping it going. For Aquinas, there’s nothing special in that regard about our essence or teleology that requires God to keep them in existence. Again, it’s true of every aspect of the world. One thing to emphasise is that while Davies does not think it’s correct to think of God as a kind of moral agent, nevertheless he certainly thinks that we can and ought to attribute to God attributes such as goodness and love. His point is simply that the way in which God can be said to be ‘all good’ or ‘all loving’ is at best misleadingly thought of on the model of someone living up to his moral obligations. It’s not a matter of exhibiting moral virtues like courage or compassion because, as I say, God cannot intelligibly be said to have the sort of features that call for virtues like courage. How then should we think of God’s goodness? For Davies, as for Aquinas, the goodness of a thing has to do with how well or badly it actualises the potentials that are inherent in its nature. We say, for example, that a good tree is a good tree because it more fully actualises the potentials that are inherent in something by virtue of being a tree. A tree has the potential to sink roots into the ground and take in nutrients and water through them. To the extent that it does so, it’s a better tree than it would otherwise be. When we get to God, we are talking about something which is fully actual. There’s no unactualised potential in God whatsoever. And so, if goodness has to do with actualisation and badness with the failure to actualise a potential, then God, who is always fully actual, would have to be fully good. That would follow from this analysis of what it is to be good. That’s why we have to think of God as perfectly good, even if we’re not thinking of God as being a moral agent. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In denying that God is a moral agent, Davies certainly doesn’t want to say that God has no interest in how things go for human beings or his creation in general. He certainly doesn’t want to say that God is not providential. He would affirm all of those things about God. God never does anything without some purpose, or without some good in view. In saying that God is not a moral agent, he’s simply trying to avoid anthropomorphising God and making God out to be too human-like. You might even say he’s concerned with not trivialising the nature of God’s goodness. The way Davies likes to put it is that it’s a mistake to think of the claim that God is all-good as being the claim that God is particularly well-behaved, as if God is a kind of a Boy Scout who has won all the merit badges. God’s goodness, for Davies, is greater than that. It’s higher than that, not less than that. Another aspect of the question where Davies borrows from Aquinas, and from other medieval writers like Augustine, is the idea that God allows certain evils to exist because, and only because, he’s drawing out some greater good from them. There’s always a larger end in view that God has in mind even if we don’t. Even if we can’t see the full picture, God can. The idea is that the way divine providence works ensures that whatever evil God allows always plays a role in securing the greater good. There’s no arbitrariness or irrationality to it.

Recommended by

Edward Feser

"I don’t think the problem of evil is a very compelling argument at all, when considered as an objection against God’s existence. Brian Davies would agree with that. That doesn’t mean, however, that evil is not mysterious or that the question of why God would allow evil is not mysterious. Those are very deep and mysterious questions. However, if the claim is that the existence of evil is somehow incompatible with God’s existence, so that it constitutes a refutation of God’s existence, I don’t think that’s a very strong argument at all. And neither would Davies. He approaches the problem of evil in a way that’s informed by the understanding of God’s existence and nature that is represented by Aquinas. In this book Davies looks at the problem of evil through a Thomist lens. One of the things he wants to emphasise is just how different the approach of the classical theist tradition toward the problem of evil is from the sort of approach you see in a lot of contemporary philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga or John Hick or Richard Swinburne. This is where this distinction that I drew earlier, between classical theism on the one hand and theistic personalism on the other, plays a big role. The theistic personalist, as I mentioned earlier, is someone whose starting point when thinking about God is the thesis that God is like we are — a member of the general class or category ‘persons’ — and he’s just different from us in not having the limitations that human persons have. If you approach the question of God’s nature that way then it’s very easy to start thinking about God as a kind of moral agent, just as we are. This is to think of him as someone who has certain moral duties, someone who exhibits certain moral virtues and so forth. And then the problem of evil starts to look like it’s a question of how God can be morally justified in allowing the evils that he allows. Questions arise such as: is God violating some duty by not eliminating evil? Is God somehow less than virtuous by not eliminating evil? This is the way that the problem of evil starts to look if you think of God as one person alongside others. “On analysis, there is no strict inconsistency between God’s existence and the existence of evil. ” What Davies emphasises in this book is that from the classical theist point of view — from the point of view of someone like Aquinas — this is simply the wrong way to approach the question. The conversation gets off on the wrong foot if we think of God as a kind of moral agent who, just as human beings do, has certain moral obligations and can intelligently be said to have or to lack certain moral virtues and so forth. As Davies emphasises, for a classical theist writer, God is not a moral agent. It doesn’t mean that we can’t attribute to God attributes such as goodness and love. Davies is keen to stress that he’s not denying that. It certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attribute to God certain personal attributes like intellect and will. Davies, just like Aquinas, would emphasise that we ought to attribute those things to God as well. The point, though, is that it’s a mistake to think that this entails that God is a kind of moral agent. One of the reasons that it’s a mistake is that the sorts of things that we usually attribute to moral agents are not intelligibly attributed to God. For example, we think of a moral agent as being courageous or being cowardly. Someone can intelligibly be said to be courageous or cowardly only because he faces certain dangers. Courage is a matter of doing the right thing in the face of danger, so that we attribute courage to someone precisely when he does that. But God is never in danger. God is outside time and space. God is immaterial, so he doesn’t have a body. There’s no such thing as God being wounded or in danger of getting a disease or in any other way capable of suffering any kind of harm. So it doesn’t make any sense to attribute to God a virtue like courage or, for that matter, to attribute to him a vice like cowardice . Concepts like these simply have no application to God. If we approach the problem of evil as a problem of how to justify God as a moral agent in the face of evil, we’re getting the conversation off on the wrong foot. For Davies and other Thomists, goodness is grounded in the natures of things. The right way to approach the question of goodness is to think of models like the way we would describe something as a good specimen of a kind of thing. We might say, for example, that a certain dog is a good specimen of its kind because it exhibits all the dog-like features — all the features that are typical of fully functioning healthy dogs. It has four legs, a tail, it barks, it scampers about and so forth. We would say that it is a good specimen of a dog in a way that a dog that was missing a leg because it got hit by a car, or is sickly and lies about lethargically, is not a good specimen of a dog – at least not if we’re trying to indicate to someone who does not know what a dog is what is characteristic of its kind. Goodness and badness has to do with how well or badly something lives up to the paradigm case of the kind. In the case of a tree, say, a tree with healthy roots and healthy bark is a good specimen of a tree, whereas one with weak roots and its bark all ripped off is a bad specimen of a tree, because it doesn’t live up as well to the pattern or paradigm of what makes something a fully functional healthy tree. This analysis of goodness and badness goes back to ancient thinkers like Aristotle, and medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas incorporated itinto their own thinking. For that reason, for Aquinas, there’s a lot that we can know about morality even apart from religion. There’s a lot we can know about what makes for a good human life, where we can bracket off the question of God’s existence. If what’s good for a human being has to do with the nature of a human being — with what is conducive to fulfilling our nature, the ends and purposes that we have to realise in order to flourish as the kind of thing that a human being is — and human nature is what it is whether or not it was created by God, it follows that there is a lot about morality that we can know apart from the existence of God. I don’t want to say that according to Aquinas, every aspect of morality can be dealt with apart from the question of God’s existence,. That wouldn’t be correct. But at least a large part of morality can be determined by bracketing off questions about God’s existence and nature. In that way, moral goodness is not directly metaphysically grounded in God’s nature. But indirectly it is, because Aquinas thinks that when God creates the world — when he makes human beings, for example — what he’s doing is making things according to the divine archetypes, the ideas or patterns that exist in the divine intellect. Here Aquinas is building on Augustine and earlier predecessors in the medieval tradition. Aquinas would take what Plato famously thinks exist in the realm of the Forms — the Form or pattern of being a human being, a triangle, a dog etc. — and hewould locate those, just as Augustine did, in the divine intellect. He thinks that when God creates, he is creating something in the world of concrete physical things that instantiates the archetype or pattern that pre-exists in the divine mind. In that way the natures of things ultimately derive from some idea in the divine intellect. You can say that in that sense the nature of a thing — and thus what’s good or bad for it — derives from God. But its direct grounding is still in the thing itself. What’s good and bad for human beings is directly grounded in their own nature, rather than in the divine will for example. That’s the important point to emphasise. The reason it’s bad for us to murder or to steal is not because God has arbitrarily decided to decree that we shouldn’t steal. It’s rather because given the nature that we have, we cannot flourish if we murder and steal from one another. That would be true for Aquinas even if it turned out that God didn’t exist. It would still be bad for us to murder and steal because it’s contrary to what is required for our flourishing as the kind of things that we are. Aquinas certainly thinks that the existence of anything, even for an instant, depends on God keeping it in being. So, ultimately, we wouldn’t have the natures we have if God weren’t keeping us in existence. But that’s true of every feature in the world. Nothing would exist or operate the way it does if God wasn’t keeping it going. For Aquinas, there’s nothing special in that regard about our essence or teleology that requires God to keep them in existence. Again, it’s true of every aspect of the world. One thing to emphasise is that while Davies does not think it’s correct to think of God as a kind of moral agent, nevertheless he certainly thinks that we can and ought to attribute to God attributes such as goodness and love. His point is simply that the way in which God can be said to be ‘all good’ or ‘all loving’ is at best misleadingly thought of on the model of someone living up to his moral obligations. It’s not a matter of exhibiting moral virtues like courage or compassion because, as I say, God cannot intelligibly be said to have the sort of features that call for virtues like courage. How then should we think of God’s goodness? For Davies, as for Aquinas, the goodness of a thing has to do with how well or badly it actualises the potentials that are inherent in its nature. We say, for example, that a good tree is a good tree because it more fully actualises the potentials that are inherent in something by virtue of being a tree. A tree has the potential to sink roots into the ground and take in nutrients and water through them. To the extent that it does so, it’s a better tree than it would otherwise be. When we get to God, we are talking about something which is fully actual. There’s no unactualised potential in God whatsoever. And so, if goodness has to do with actualisation and badness with the failure to actualise a potential, then God, who is always fully actual, would have to be fully good. That would follow from this analysis of what it is to be good. That’s why we have to think of God as perfectly good, even if we’re not thinking of God as being a moral agent. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In denying that God is a moral agent, Davies certainly doesn’t want to say that God has no interest in how things go for human beings or his creation in general. He certainly doesn’t want to say that God is not providential. He would affirm all of those things about God. God never does anything without some purpose, or without some good in view. In saying that God is not a moral agent, he’s simply trying to avoid anthropomorphising God and making God out to be too human-like. You might even say he’s concerned with not trivialising the nature of God’s goodness. The way Davies likes to put it is that it’s a mistake to think of the claim that God is all-good as being the claim that God is particularly well-behaved, as if God is a kind of a Boy Scout who has won all the merit badges. God’s goodness, for Davies, is greater than that. It’s higher than that, not less than that. Another aspect of the question where Davies borrows from Aquinas, and from other medieval writers like Augustine, is the idea that God allows certain evils to exist because, and only because, he’s drawing out some greater good from them. There’s always a larger end in view that God has in mind even if we don’t. Even if we can’t see the full picture, God can. The idea is that the way divine providence works ensures that whatever evil God allows always plays a role in securing the greater good. There’s no arbitrariness or irrationality to it."

Arguments for the Existence of God · fivebooks.com