The Odyssey Theodicy

Martin C Cooke

 

The following is basically the last half (without the footnotes) of ‘Omniscience and the Odyssey theodicy’ (renamed in December as ‘The Jump Theodicies’), which is my response to Mawson’s 2008 paper ‘Divine eternity’ (a chapter of his 2005 book ‘Belief in God’). Incidentally, the abstract for my response is (as of November 2008):

 

Mawson has recently argued that, since an Open theistic God cannot—whereas a timeless one can—know what we will freely choose, so he is not completely omniscient; and nor is he omnipotent, whence his beneficence is accidental. But the truths that can be known are indefinitely extensible, and an Open theistic God can—whereas a timeless one cannot—learn forever. And while God is epistemically perfect he cannot be fully justified in being completely certain that he is the only divinity. To help him investigate that question empirically, heavenly souls—such as he would probably make—would probably have asked to be born into a world in which he was causally and epistemically distant, were he able to learn. Human suffering and divine hiddenness follow from an omnipotent God’s perfect goodness most plausibly under Open theism, which is therefore probably true.

 

So, to begin with, let ‘God’ name the deliberate creator of this universe ex nihilo, if there is one (or three), and let Open theism be the hypothesis that God has kept his—or her (or indeed, their)—options open, to some extent. Open theists ought to say something about how God could have—let alone why he actually—allowed the famous evils of this (his) world. Swinburne thinks it not only very good that we can make free and consequential choices, but so good that our having such powers outweighs the world’s evils, whose possibility is required for that good to be great enough to outweigh them (which seems a bit circular to me). Our freedom is supposed to be so good only because we may thereby cause a fair amount of suffering to others. And Swinburne also thinks that, ‘in order to have a choice between good and evil, agents need already a certain depravity’ because otherwise they would always choose the former (although that is not obviously undesirable). But surely such consequential choices should be made, not in depravity but in wisdom; and furthermore, how could the value that our choices have in virtue of their being freely made depend upon whether the predictable consequences actually or only apparently occur?

Deception is wrong, ceteris paribus, and God is perfectly good, but still. If anyone created opportunities for displays of compassion, charity and self-sacrifice, and had a choice between deceiving all the participants or else torturing some of them, and then chose the latter to avoid being deceitful, would that not display a marked lack of those very virtues? Had the former been chosen, no sane participant would have objected to such modest and well motivated deception, had they been informed of it later. And choosing the latter to avoid being deceitful would be, not just vile but absurd, if the opportunity had arisen via deception anyway, e.g. by keeping the participants ignorant, and by hiding from them (to ensure their depravity). And what is relatively clear is that the laws of nature are rather deceptive (according to Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein and so forth). And since it is undeniable that suffering really does happen, so one’s theodicy should explain why there should not be more deception.

Mawson’s Bambi was the usual fawn, dying horribly and alone after a forest fire. It seems to me that a good reason to overrule natural laws—or to have decreed sufficiently flexible ones in the first place—would be to save Bambi from such suffering. Should Bambi suffer so to save you from being a bit more deceived than you are anyway, e.g. by your senses? Bambi ends up in Heaven, which is nice, but why not a miraculous rescue first, or where the sufferer is not so tidily alone, at least a fair amount of anaesthesia? Not that lives full of suffering could not be good lives, as Swinburne emphasised. The suffering might be in a good cause, for example. But that cause would have to be more than causing the goodness of such lives, since suffering is not in itself good but is rather bad, by definition, ceteris paribus. And since we cannot—as Swinburne had already noted—choose such a life of suffering before we exist, so if we did not exist before our births—as Mawson also presumes—then we cannot have, rather heroically, volunteered. The problem is that, even if God is like a parent to us, and even if parents do have the right to inflict suffering upon their children against their will, it is surely only right to do so when that is the lesser of two evils; and yet there was originally no evil, just God.

Mawson thinks that our being unable to ask non-existent children if they want to be born is no reason not to bring children into such an imperfect world, but I wonder. Not knowing that a possibility is safe is often some reason not to actualise it. And if one knew, of some possible people, who would and who would not be glad that they existed, one should, ceteris paribus, prefer to actualise the former. Those who agree with Mawson may just be passing the buck to God, who presumably allows each birth for a good reason. If so then the problem is that God cannot pass that buck. So I wonder, why not make us someplace more heavenly and ask us if we want to come here? It might be objected that, before our souls could get to a better place than this, they would have to be built up via such earthly suffering as builds good characters. But prima facie a perfect person would be able to—and would want to—make better souls to begin with. And how plausible a motivation for the creation of a world as soul-destroying as this one (seems to be) is such soul-building? To build the characters of our own children we do not, if we have a choice, drop them at random into an unruly wilderness, keeping those that cope well enough and throwing back (or away) those that do not. We rather create, insofar as we can, safe places for educating them, which we are therefore justified in sending them to whether or not they want to go.

The problem of evil is therefore the question of why a perfect person would create, not just Heaven, but the Earth too; or more picturesquely, what our ubiquitous creator was thinking, leaving a pair of innocents alone with a subtly truthful serpent in a garden built around forbidden (not hidden) fruit. It is incoherent that we could inherit guilt for what we had not done (as some Original Sin theodicies claim) but perhaps we are like this because of what we did do, in some previous life. If we are essentially our souls rather than our brains—as both Swinburne and Mawson think we might be—then we could have had previous lives. One of the reasons why a substantial dualism, with our minds to arising from soul-brain interactions (in some lawful way), is explanatory is that theism is already fundamentally monistic. Neuroscience has not yet discovered souls within our brains, but nor has it shown that there is no micro-psychokinesis there. And since our memories depend heavily upon our brain-states, in this life (even under dualism), our ignorance of previous lives is also uninformative. But the world’s unfairness might be regarded as some evidence for reincarnation, and there is even some theological evidence for reincarnation (e.g. Matt. 11), especially if we are being Inclusivistic. But what happens here is too unfair for it to be very plausible that this world was divinely designed for reform. And it is hard to see why a perfect being would have made us to be such as could have become (in a better world than this) so bad that we deserved such a punishment. Still, perhaps we asked to be born.

Perhaps we were originally noble and well informed, having been created in a heavenly paradise with none of our current problems, of physical and mental suffering, moral depravity and divine obscurity. We could still not have been asked whether or not we wanted to exist, but without such problems that is surely less of an obstacle to our creation. And a perfect person would plausibly have wanted to make some heavenly souls, cf. how composers want there to be orchestras. Now, we know for sure that people are possible, and such attributes as goodness and elegance do seem to demand less explanation than their opposites do, ceteris paribus, so a perfect person has a relatively high prior probability. So, if it is also likely that such a person would create a world such as this, then he probably did. So the question arises, is it plausible that some of those souls would probably have requested a temporary incarnation somewhere less heavenly, where they would be relatively ignorant and ignoble? A good creator would probably have allowed such a request, had they (we) good enough reasons for making it, but what possible reasons could they (we) have had? If Free Will theodicies are essentially correct, despite the aforementioned problems, then we might have wanted to become depraved so that we could make important choices imperfectly, but since there are such problems that may not be very likely. So I shall argue (below) that what is plausible is that God knows perfectly well that he cannot know—not so surely—that he is the only divinity.

The following theodicy does not require that there are any other divinities, so it does not require that there is anything about them—save their non-existence—for God to know. But if there were divinities they would be in his external world—a world he does not perceive (and which may not exist)—and so knowledge of them (of their non-existence, for example) would be, for him, empirical. The Odyssey theodicy is that we asked to be this far from our heavenly home—that distance being causal and epistemic, rather than spatio-temporal—in order to help God, either to find such divinities as there are (in the outer darkness) or else, by failing to divine any, to fill out his partial belief that there are none. It is presumably the latter; and note that it is not that we should be trying to find other divinities, out here. Rather, we should be aiming for a closer relationship with God, while we are here—e.g. by living (as though) in his family—so that how we do that can be transcendentally examined. That coheres well with the collective testimony of humanity, which is most clearly that we should be trying to put ourselves in touch with our transcendent creator, who decrees such as the Golden Rule.

The basic idea (see below) is that we thought that by becoming more distant from—while belonging to (since originating in) and hence longing for—that which is now transcendent, we would be likely (enough to outweigh the dangers) to become more sensitive to any divinity there is. But perhaps you do not think it likely that we are—all of us—such as would have chosen to leave a heavenly paradise, to investigate such an abstract possibility. An undetected entity with powers akin to God’s would have been a possible threat to our heavenly home, however (especially if a Divine Wish metaethics is true), and perhaps the only possible threat. And we do seem to be such as dream of adventure, when we are young. Had you been living an idyllic life you may well have found such a possibility worth investigating, at some slight risk; the risk would have been relatively slight because death—a safe return home—would have been all but inevitable, because the external danger was only from other divinities (which furthermore, we may presume, do not exist) and because there could be soul-building for any self-inflicted damage, due our peccability. Alternatively we may have thought of other divinities as potential companions for our beloved God, of our helping to discover them as a good gift, e.g. to thank him for paradise. And as philosophers we may also find a more purely scientific curiosity both good enough and likely to be found in our more purely spiritual souls, whatever our minds are now like. There are many possibilities.

And perhaps lots of souls volunteered for this, or maybe only a few did. If we had incarnated somewhere safer before this, that might have informed our decision to come here, but either way God would have ensured that we were well informed and not under any pressure to volunteer without really wanting to, because he loves his creatures; why else would he create them? Making souls that would ask to be part of such a terribly terrestrial investigation might seem a bit too much like making pigs that want to be eaten, but insofar as we are good, and would not think of such a motive as good, nor would God, since our goodness derives from his. A better analogy would be the making of animals that naturally want what their creator would want were he one of them, which is a non-vacuous modality if God might incarnate alongside us (cf. Jesus). It would be good to create good people to live freely someplace heavenly, and their goodness being by definition their desire to act in accordance with God’s wishes could hardly make it otherwise. Maybe God’s love for us included such hopes for us as that we might freely choose to help with his investigations. By analogy, it would hardly detract from a symphony’s aesthetic worth that it also told a good tale. Or God may have preferred us not to request such lives as these, but let the final decision be ours. He would surely have shown us what was possible, but I wonder if we would have expected any of us to become as bad as some did. Perhaps we decided—in our (forgotten) wisdom—that the very bad should be more completely distanced from God—cast into the outer darkness (so to speak)—since that could lead to their being even more sensitive, allowing them to pay their debt, which might precede their reform or their annihilation, or might even—were that for the best—last forever.

What seems relatively clear, to me, is that a perfectly good creator could allow his creatures to make some relatively small sacrifices, e.g. as part of their self-defence, or as their gifts to him, which he could accept out of his love for them. And there are such sacrifices because being this far from Heaven means that we can be seriously hurt, and harm, because of the general rule of natural laws here. Mawson’s explanation is that natural laws are ‘necessary for there to be a world with agents who enjoy the freedom to be less than perfect to one another.’ His explanation of God’s obscurity is similarly that it would detract from that freedom of ours, were God more obvious. And perhaps such enjoyment can be good, by analogy with an adventure holiday. But I think that such dangers should result from something more like a free choice than a kidnapping. According to the Odyssey theodicy, natural laws exist in order to facilitate our scientifically effective distance from God.

We asked to be born, on this theodicy, but we did not ask to be victims of bad luck (or malice). Rather, we thought of being here as worth the risk of bad luck (or being hated). Natural disasters occur randomly because physical laws are objectively probabilistic, in order to facilitate soul-brain interactions. Such disasters are individually meaningless, so they are side-effects of our causal distance from God that contribute to our subjective distance. They make this seem like a Godless world. Presumably we chose to incarnate randomly too, since that would have been fairest, so there is also no question, on this theodicy, of why anyone would have asked for one of the terribly poor starts in life that are all too common here. Of course, since God could halt this investigation at any especially terrible time, it may seem odd that he has not already done so, given the evils of this world (and the heavenly alternatives). But by allowing these lives, he would have chosen to do so only if things got too bad by the lights of those who had asked for this, when we asked. And bad as agony is, the biggest obstacle to God agreeing to this creation would—in his wisdom—have been our greater liability to sin while here.

Whether due to ignobility or ignorance, our peccability is ultimately due to our distance from God, who is the origin of ethics as well as physics. Perhaps the extent of our peccability here—despite our being perfectly created—is some evidence that we are up against absolute nothingness here, that (as I presume) there are indeed no other divinities. And presumably it was part and parcel of the creation of this world that the rule of natural law would be reduced as and when our increased peccability required, e.g. via salvific miracles. Relatively modest interventions—e.g. ones made by angelic souls who had asked for involvement but not incarnation—could be expected to be the norm, since that would help to maintain God’s distance most effectively. So, the posited investigation requires—and hence this theodicy explains—not only the relative independence of this world from God (whence its evils), but also a range of relatively obscure interventions. The combination of those two—hiddenness and revelation—could seem to indicate a rather bumbling God, on any theory of time, so it is notable that this theodicy shows that they cohere well with God’s competence if time is dynamic.

But the big problem for this theodicy is that the posited investigation is into whether it is true that God is the only divinity, and presumably he is indeed the only divinity. I presume he is; but of course, I cannot give you incontrovertible evidence that he is. And I wonder how anyone could distinguish very clearly an intuition for the truth of the proposition in question from an intuition for the more monotheistic (as opposed to polytheistic) fact that there is only one divinity behind this universe (or multiverse). After all, just to create this universe ex nihilo would presumably take unimaginable power. So a sage asserting confidently that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent (incorporeally) might—for all I know—have asserted that God has absolute power over, and so knows all about, and is acting at every bit of, while personally transcending, his creation.

And what if God regards the proposition in question as, to some extent, uncertain? Suppose, on the contrary, that God is absolutely confident that there are no other divinities. If so he would also, being omniscient (or epistemically perfect), have some true belief about why he does not have a partial belief, instead of such certainty. And what might that be? If his reason is, for example, that he is omniscient, then what of his reason for believing that? It could hardly be that all (and only) his beliefs are true, as that would beg the question. Nor could it go via his belief that he is omniscient, unless that regress might be virtuous. And even if it is virtuous, what of his belief about why it is? Could an epistemically perfect being believe that while there is no reason why it is virtuous, there need be no doubt whatsoever about beliefs—some of them (e.g. the one in question) empirical beliefs—supported in such a way? Now, I don’t know (of course), but it seems to me that if so then he might be similarly satisfied with there being no reason why he did not have a partial belief (instead of certainty) in the first place. But that would be, not so much a complete understanding of the facts as epistemic luck (were divine modalities to allow that concept to apply).

If God’s knowledge of this world is like the complete understanding that an author can have of his own stories then it is obtained at will, yet authoritatively. While his physical and ethical beliefs are true for no other reason than that he wishes them to be, they are fully supported because their holder is their sole ground. One might suppose that God’s beliefs are all the truths (in some perfect language), and that their being held by God is all that justifies them (makes them knowledge). But since omniscience would then amount to an enormous brute fact—like an autistic RoboGod’s infinite database—destroying the relative elegance of the God hypothesis, that picture of omniscience is improbable. The Open theistic picture of God’s knowledge, by contrast, has him having his beliefs as a perfect person would, rather than as a (vast) database. For us, knowledge of this world is empirical, is imperfect (if not phenomenal) and obtained with difficulty and uncertainly. What would be empirical for God would be questions like what we will freely choose (given Open theism), or whether there are any unknown beings. And it seems plausible that perfectly held beliefs on such matters should be held on appropriately external grounds. If so then God could never know for sure that there was nothing out there (in the outer darkness), if there was indeed nothing there (no dark noumena), as he would know perfectly well and as we could find plausible.

Of course, you might think that it would simply follow from God being omniscient and the only divinity that he would know that he was the only one (or three). But while that does follow from his knowing all truths, not only is it plausible (e.g. via Grim’s famous Cantorian argument) that such a class is indefinitely extensible, whence he could not (logically) know them all now, this theodicy does not depend upon God not knowing—as we know our facts (e.g. uncertainly)—that he is the only divinity, but rather upon precisely that, upon God not being fully justified in complete certainty that he is (tri)unique. Furthermore, it seems likely that God’s omniscience is just a theoretical part of his metaphysically simple essence, and so ‘omniscience’ should probably mean something more like having the most understanding that anyone could possibly have (cf. his omnipotence). So it hardly follows, from God’s omniscience, that he is sure that he is omniscient, whence it might be shown that he was probably unsure. And nor is it likely that he could deduce that he was the only divinity from his perfect self-knowledge, e.g. of his aseity, as the following analogy shows (relatively clearly). Suppose you knew that you existed within an infinitely extended infinite-dimensional space. If you could move freely in all those dimensions you might feel that you could go anywhere. But it is no more likely a priori that such a space exists uniquely than that it exists alongside infinitely many similar spaces, one tiny part of a huge hyperspace. Indeed, such a space is isomorphic to such a hyperspace.

Indeed, God’s direct acquaintance with his own perfection might rather lead him to believe that other divinities would, were there any, be similarly perfect, which could go some way towards explaining his lack of contact with them—on the hypothesis of their existence—since they would probably be similarly self-contained. Furthermore, even his having existed forever without getting any indication that there are any others would not tell much against their possibility, as follows. Had he not been investigating the possibility of other divinities until some finite time ago he could have expected that, were there any others, they would probably not have been doing so either (and might not be doing so now) for similar reasons. All such investigations would have been relatively safe (as described below) and hence relatively unlikely to succeed, at least to begin with. And had he always been investigating this matter—e.g. with some beginningless sequence of investigations (of order-type w*)—then, since the nature of each investigation would have to have been decided upon after infinitely many (aleph-null) previous ones, so God would have started with infinitely many very safe ones in order to best use whatever information they yielded, since counter-intuitive mathematics would make doing otherwise very unattractive. So again, having got no indication of any others would not have indicated that there were none. And given that we did request this investigation, it was always possible that we would, so a responsible God would always have wanted to investigate this matter prior to (in case of) such a request. That is a reason for this second possibility (given standard mathematics),

But either way the question arises, how would a divinity investigate such a possibility as safely as possible? A scientist investigating the possible existence of a charged object might move similarly charged particles about, wherever she thought the possible force field might have reached, to see if anything disturbs them. So for a crude analogy, consider a planet beneath starless skies sending rockets up to see if they fall back as predicted, or are deflected by something invisible. The safest investigation may therefore, by analogy, have been God observing himself (e.g. as a Trinity). God can also create (somehow) things that are not divine, and since spiritual subjects and physical objects are dependent upon and distanced from him, so by creating them he creates boundaries between himself and, if not nothingness then some transcendentally external world. So another fairly safe sort of investigation could have been God observing his creatures interacting impeccably in some heavenly paradise. And the transcendental observation of quantum-mechanical wave-functions within a lifeless universe would have been no less safe. Such particles could have differed greatly from those of this universe, but even these ones indicate that such a use was possible, insofar as the empirical evidence indicates—given an Open theistic metaphysics—that they were designed to be sensitive to our souls—wave-functions collapsing when attended to—so as to facilitate soul-brain interactions with minimal divine involvement. And if our souls resemble our creator, to some extent, then similar particles may well be similarly sensitive to any divinity.

Consequently even the lifeless beginnings of our universe could have been informative. Having obtained, in such ways, no sign of any other divinities, God would have been justifiably confident that there was little danger (of death not being inevitable, primarily) in something a bit more adventurous. The main point of this universe, on this theodicy, is that it supports biochemical brains, and hence incarnated souls. Being distant from but belonging to, and hence naturally longing for a more heavenly existence, incarnated souls may well be especially sensitive to the obscurely divine. Maybe not (of course) but that seems prima facie possible, and this theodicy requires only that such sensitivity could have been expected (not that we do embody it). Such sensitivity may be like an aesthetic sense, or the sense of being stared at, for example. But we may never know much more than that because, as there is presumably no such kind (as God would divinely instantiate) to be sensitive to, so even God may be limited to pure speculation about such possibilities.

And there are many possibilities. Perhaps the transcendental utility (and hence the dangers) of the world increased gradually, as animals (and then we humans) evolved. That may have been the safest way to proceed. Or maybe God ran through the early (physical) years of this universe in just a few moments of his (transcendental) time, like someone running a computer rapidly through a game up to some especially interesting event, after which it would be played in real time. Prehistoric suffering could be avoided that way, although animals with minds—and who can therefore suffer—are probably incarnate souls who, like us, chose to be here. And either way, we are not just sentient and social animals, relating to others of our kind through the physical, we are creative and cultural citizens, developing languages—natural (spoken and written) and formal—and other tools whose uses define what we are, here. And daydreaming, story-telling and music making are, to some extent, analogous to God’s creativity. Perhaps our innate sensitivities are, as a general rule, amplified on the ground, once we are here.

Such tales as the Odyssey, for example, have inspired us for thousands of years, with such dreams as may have made us seem—to heavenly observers—like an expanding cloud of charged particles, sensitive to (certain aspects of) such fields as might emanate from distant divinities, were there any. Admittedly that description was poetic rather than scientific, but the specifics of a realistic theodicy are bound to get very complicated. They should cohere with our best scientific theories (not to mention our theologies), insofar as they are evidentially supported, while inevitably diverging from their standard (materialistic) interpretations. So I shall leave off presenting this novel theodicy there, with its naming (for future reference).