Transcript PHIL/RS 335

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The Problem of Evil:
McCabe, “The Statement of the Problem”
* We experience evil in the world.
* We recognized the obligation to prevent evil things
from happening, but acknowledge that much of it is
out of our control.
* Recognition of the obligation, implies that the failure
to act when one could is itself evil.
* God does not intervene to prevent the evil we
experience.
* Two possible explanations: God is powerless to do so
or God fails to do so (God is wicked).
* Neither of these possibilities is consistent with the
theistic account of God.
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* Some people have responded to the problem of evil by
distinguishing allowing evil to happen (tolerance) and
bringing evil about (willing it).
* Classic example (allowing something bad to happen to
prevent something else bad from happening).
* Maybe God can’t stop the evil we experience because
something even worse would occur.
* While a something like this may be a feature of human
experience, it is so because we lack the power to
handle the situation. If we say that God is in the same
situation, we are acknowledging that God lacks the
power to do otherwise (essentially embracing the first
horn of the dilemma).
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Others have insisted that to insist that God could not do otherwise is not
to limit God, but to observe something that we have already noted;
namely, that God nor any being cannot do that which it is conceptually
impossible to do.
If we accept this, then it could be argued that making a world without evil
is a conceptual impossibility.
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McCabe points out that this insistence on qualitative opposition makes a
rather fundamental error, failing to distinguish between two forms of
opposition: contrary and contradictory.
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Why? Perhaps because there is no good without evil.
On this line of thinking, “world without evil” is as nonsensical as “square
circle.”
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Contrary: presence of one implies the absence of the other, but not vice
versa.
Contradictory: absence of one implies the presence of the other.
This argument assumes a contradictory relationship between good and
evil, but surely the opposition is only a contrary one (5).
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* The first two responses focus on the first horn of the
dilemma (God is powerless). The next three try to dissolve
the dilemma by denying the very existence of evil.
* The first of these is akin to Kant’s insistence that Being is not
a real predicate.
* In general, advocates of this position deny that statements
like, “X is evil” are really attributing anything to X. Rather,
they are expressions of sentiments (synonymous, for
example, with “I don’t like X”).
* McCabe responds by insisting that statements like “x is evil”
may not be predications, but that doesn’t mean they are
merely mean they are expressions of feeling either. Though
we don’t see it here, he is an Aquinean (Aristotelian) about
this and insists that ascription of evil is a categorical rather
than predicative ascription.
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* Another form that this third response takes is the
cosmological (Demean) version that accepts that our
experience is experience of evil but that we falsely
generalize from that experience to the whole.
* The experience of evil is essentially a failure of context. If
we could ‘see’ the whole, we’d ‘see’ that it is good.
* McCabe’s response covers familiar ground: part/whole
thinking.
* Essentially, something can be a part of something in one of
two ways: Materially (as a whole itself) and Formally (as part
of a larger whole).
* We can acknowledge that as formal parts of a putatively good
universe, the evil bits vanish into the whole, but we can only
make the argument in question by ignoring their material
being, but it is precisely this which provokes the problem.
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* A final form of the dissolution of the problem
takes the most direct form: Evil is nothing but
the absence of Good.
* When we talk about evil, we are mistaking a
negation for something that is real.
* McCabe insist that there is nothing new in this
version. It relies on the same reasoning as
Response 2, and fails once again because of a
confusion between contrary opposition and
contradictory opposition.
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* The fourth attempt to respond to the problem of evil
attempts to sidestep, rather than dissolve, it by insisting that
the causal agency of evil is not God, but humans.
* Essentially, this is an attempt to deny the reality of natural
evil and reduce it all to moral evil.
* Without questioning this reduction, McCabe highlights that
even focusing solely on moral evil doesn’t get God off the
hook.
* God is certainly not responsible for the things we do, but God
did create us with certain tendencies, desires, etc., and
though we are free, we are not independent of this creation.
* God could have created us differently, with different
tendencies, desires, etc., still free, but inclined to choose
differently than we do.
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* At this point, McCabe thinks that he has
demonstrated that the problem of evil is a real
problem. It can’t just be explained away, and
theists do have to address it.
* However, there may be two different obstacles
to addressing it.
* It’s a mystery (can’t be solved).
* Can be solved, but not a task for theologians but
for philosophers.
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* It may be argued that the transcendence of God
defeats any of our efforts to approximate an
understanding of the divine or its creation.
* All of God’s choices are equally absurd from our
standpoint, so we should respect that absurdity and
not try to make sense of it.
* This is the key for McCabe. Accepting the starting
point is the right way to address the question, but
the starting point doesn’t lead us to acceptance,
but to a better understanding of what we are
addressing it.
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* Speaking of God is the preeminent theological
task.
* Of course, that doesn’t mean that philosophers
can’t chime in.
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