Suffering is the Point of Existence, According to Some

My attention has just been drawn to an article by Gerard Baker in the Times. It considers the problem of suffering, a.k.a., the problem of evil, that has been highlighted by the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster which hit Indonesia in particular, as well as Thailand, India and Sri Lanka. The approach is very different from that of the Archbishop of Canterbury (discussed by me earlier), and is rather angry in tone. It builds a flawed argument though, and the points it raises deserve critical comment. First of all, there's the remark concerning the disaster that:

In logic, the poor suffering Muslims in Indonesia who think it was a sign of God’s wrath are less evidently wrong than those who insist that it disproves God’s existence.

That's quite wrong. There's no logic to the idea of an almighty God who causes tsunami's as an expression of anger. If you're almighty, you get your will done all the time. Therefore, surely, nothing can upset you. What's more, if you ever did get upset, you wouldn't need to start a tsunami to punish the people who'd annoyed you, hitting lots of innocent people at the same time. You could send thunderbolts precisely aimed at each and every one of them, avoiding all collateral damage. If the US airforce can do smart bombs, it has to be admitted that an almighty God can do even smarter ones. Or are we meant to suppose that everyone who suffered in this incident, from little primary school children in their classrooms, to old women in their kitchens, is a direct target of God's wrath? Even the pious worshippers caught while praying? No, the notion of a wrathful God doesn't make sense in logic, and is considerably harder to believe than a merely callous one.

Later, the article points out correctly that the existence of a single child suffering from cancer is as much of a challenge to belief in a benign God as is a big disaster such as the Indian Ocean tsunami. It notes also that people are more apt to think about the problem of suffering when something huge like the Tsunami event happens than at other times. For some reason, though, the author seems to think this is a problem for atheists. Atheists know already that any suffering demolishes the notion of an almighty, benign God. They don't need big disasters to remind them. It is believers who are surprised, either by big disasters, or by events that bring tragedy close to them. Then they wonder why they are supposed to look to God for comfort, when God could have prevented the tragedy in the first place, but presumably chose not to.

Baker makes the following interesting remark:

...there is a tendency to take a little too literally the insurance company terminology that describes earthquakes and hurricanes as “acts of God”.

That's slightly topsy-turvy, since the insurance terminology comes from a pre-existing custom of attributing natural disasters to God or other supernatural forces. Such attributions of course were quite literal, and they made sense when there was no science of geology or metreology, not because of an innate tendency to believe in God, specifically, but an innate tendency to look for purpose when big events occur. That's a detour, though. The main thrust of Gerard Baker's argument is becomes apparent when he asks us to imagine a world in which

there were not only no earthquakes, floods and storms, but that there was no innocent suffering and never had been in the history of the earth.

That is naturally the kind of world that we would expect a
benign, all-powerful God to create. Baker continues,

Such a fair, challengeless world might be a wonderful place to live. But I don’t think that it would be recognisably human.

Perhaps it would be unrecognisable, but why does that make it a bad thing? Apparently, because life without misery is pointless:

If we have reason to doubt the point of our existence in this world, surely we would understand it even less in that one.

That makes no sense to me at all. The point of existence is pleasure. Even for a religious believer who excercises self-denial for the sake of salvation, this is true, since their aim is to get to Heaven, which by all accounts is a pleasant abode. The only person who would disagree with this for a reason is someone who says, such as some Buddhists and Hindus do, that existence is an aberration, and pleasure a distraction that keeps us caught up in it. But such people are insisting that existence in this world is pointless, and they say so precisely because of the suffering it involves. Since suffering does not enhance pleasure, it does not serve the point of of existence.

Archbishop Doubts God, Carries on Regardless

In the Sunday Telegraph the other day, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wrote an article in reaction to the Asian earthquake and tsunami disaster, in which he says the following:

The question: "How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?" is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't – indeed, it would be wrong if it weren't. The traditional answers will get us only so far.

Interestingly, the Archbishop does not go on to provide a non-traditional answer. Instead, he poses another question:

So why do religious believers pray for God's help or healing? They ask for God's action to come in to a situation and change it, yes; but if they are honest, they don't see prayer as a plea for magical solutions that will make the world totally safe for them and others.

That's an interesting question. Why do believers pray for things, since most of the time, they don't appear to expect action from God in response? The Archbishop doesn't answer that question, either. What he does do is go on to state in quite bald terms the problem of evil:

If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God? Wouldn't we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties?

There's an admission there that it would take a "religious genius" to make sense of of a great disaster like this in terms of some sort of divine plan, and that no-one has yet come up with a plausible explanation of that kind. Rowan Williams has presented, quite clearly, why it is that disasters like this often cause religious believers to lose their faith, and non-believers to be confirmed in their lack of faith, in a benign God. What's odd is that he doesn't give anything recognizable as a reason why believers should keep their faith. He merely says—

The extraordinary fact is that belief has survived such tests again and again...

—which is something unbelievers can assent to, though unbelievers would ascribe the persistence of faith to indoctrination or the power of suggestion. It's not clear that Archbishop Williams would disagree. In his article, he explains that believers

have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence.

Again, this is nothing an unbeliever would disagree with. Believers are stunned into silence by "some reality", because such reality cannot be accounted for by the system they believe in. The most astonishing passage comes next:

These convictions are terribly assaulted by all those other facts of human experience that seem to point to a completely arbitrary world, but people still feel bound to them, not for comfort or ease, but because they have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart.

Christian convictions are "terribly assaulted" by evidence that the world is really arbitrary, rather than guided by benign supernatural forces, yet they stick to those convictions because of self-imposed habits. That's an argument that atheists use against religious people! Why is the Archbishop of Canterbury using it? Well, the Archbishop is arguing for religious belief, it turns out, but not by presenting any counterarguments to the Argument from Evil, which he seems to accept cannot be countered. Rather, his strategy reveals itself in the following:

The odd thing is that those who are most deeply involved... are so often the ones who spend least energy in raging over the lack of explanation. They are likely to shrug off, awkwardly and not very articulately, the great philosophical or religious questions... Somehow in all of this, God simply emerges for them as a faithful presence. Arguments "for and against" have to be put in the context of that awkward, stubborn persistence.

In other words, shrug off your doubts, don't get involved in arguments "for and against" (because there are no arguments for), but just stick stubbornly to your belief, despite that the evidence shows you are wrong. In short, shut up, don't think, believe. The only reason given why you should follow this suggestion is that, according to the article, religious believers are more compassionate than unbelievers. That's a very dubious claim, and the Archbishop's main evidence for it is that religious people are

so obstinate and inconvenient when society discusses abortion and euthanasia...

I'm impressed by the casuistry of this, given that the Archbishop's office is itself is rather flexible on such matters!

When Monotheists Fail to Understand Morality

Morality is a term that comes to us from Latin. Cicero, during the first century BC, used the word 'moral' to translate the Greek word 'ethikos', from which we get our 'ethics'. (The etymology of 'moral' and 'morality' is given here.) Morality is not a theological concept. It is simply the set of principles and beliefs by which we decide what conduct is right or wrong, regardless of what might be the basis of those principles and beliefs, and regardless of whether or not they involve religion or supernatural beings.

A moral code might or might not be derived from divine command. The codes Cicero considered were not. He approved of Stoicism and disapproved of Epicureanism, both of which were atheistic, and therefore of necessity, secular, systems. Even for someone who believes that a God exists who has issued commands that we should conduct our selves in a particular manner, it is not automatically the case that it is moral to to follow those commands. The notion that it is moral to obey God, and immoral to disobey God is one that is open to challenge. God might have issued a command on a whim, and obedience to that command might be harmful or neutral in its consequences to everyone. It certainly possible to reasonably doubt that it is right to obey that command, or that it is wrong to disobey it. The possibility of such doubt implies that morality as such may issue from something other than the command itself.

If it is the case that God threatens those who disobey him with terrible punishments, and offers great rewards to those who do certain things that God's commands, and it is certain that those punishments and rewards will indeed be dished out as promised, then it can be argued that it is moral to obey God because obedience brings happiness and disobedience brings suffering. Such is a consequentialist morality, not strikingly different from any other consequentialist morality. It even conforms, potentially, to utilitarianism, a modern ethical system commonly associated with atheism. Another way to argue that it is right to obey God is to say that God loves us paternalistically, and it is natural and proper that we should reciprocate by loving him filially. This can be understood as a tacit appeal to natural law theory. In a monotheist world, God might be the ultimate source of morality without his commands being the highest rules, by virtue of being the source of nature, from which both natural law and consequences emerge.

These considerations do not always seem to be borne in mind by monotheist apologists. Rather, it is all too common for them to make the assumption that morality equates with God's commands. That assumption defies usage, since most believers as well as unbelievers rest at least some of their decisions about what conduct is moral on secular grounds (discussions of insider dealing, energy policy, and television advertising are all often discussed in terms of morality, for instance, without reference to divine pronouncements on those topics), yet, astonishingly, it is an assumption that rests on nothing.

When you use a word in a manner that defies ordinary usage, you need to have good reasons to do so, and to make those reasons clear. Convincing attempts to explain why morality is equated with God's law are seriously lacking. The nearest thing to such efforts generally boils down the the following argument, which is conspicuous for being short by at least one premise: God is good (even when he seems bad), therefore what God commands is good. Where is the reason for supposing that God is good? It seems to have been omitted. (We find this flawed assumption both in the essay upon which I was commenting in my "Is Morality Above God?" and the reply to my comments, by the same author.)

It is all very well for monotheists to say that their particular conception of morality is "whatever the most powerful being happens to command", but that conception is not, never has been, and cannot be the general definition of morality.

Is Morality Above God?

I came across an essay by one Ohta Yuuki here, that makes the following curious claim:

It is impossible that morality is above God.

In defence of that claim, it presents the following points by way of argument:

1. Because it is not reasonable to conceive a lawgiver who is restricted by the rules that he himself has made.


2. If God did not create morality, then there has to be some other, greater being who has imposed the moral law to God,


3. in which case the God who obeys the law is no longer the true God, because he is not omnipotent.


4. If morality itself anyhow just existed before God, without being created, then we should call the morality God, not some other being who must obey it.

I have to say, I find both the claim and the arguments given in defence of it strikingly odd. First of all, there's the implicit definition of morality as being whatever conduct the most powerful being happens to demand. That's a construal of morality that I'm sure Joseph Stalin would have assented to most vigorously, but is it right?

Most secular systems of ethics do not base their ideas of what is moral on who makes the orders. Generally, a certain behaviour is counted good or bad regardless of whether someone in authority demanded it. Usually, some sort of calculus of the consequences of the action plays an important role. Under consequentialism, of which many variations exist, the sum of the value of the consequences of the action for all parties affected is the determining factor of whether a behaviour is morally good or not, and under classic utilitarianism, the value of those consequences is measured hedonic terms, i.e., in terms of pleasures and pains.

It may be worth pointing out here that one doesn't have to be an atheist to follow a secular system of ethics. Most religions do not have equivalents of the lists of commandments attributed to the Supreme Being (or indeed to any deity) that we find in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

If secular systems of ethics exist (and we have found that they do), then can God be judged by them? We might wonder if there can be any point in doing so, since we have scant prospect of punishing or rewarding a powerful deity for anything it does. However, it is not obvious that we cannot, for, contrary to Ohta Yuuki's point (1), above, it is usual to suppose that in a just world, no-one, even a lawgiver, is above the law. It may be that God is beyond reward and punishment, but that doesn't mean he is beyond good and evil, because ethical rules, under secular systems may be objective rules, in which case, any agent, whether human or supernatural, can be judged good or bad, according to their behaviour — at the judge's own risk, of course.

Point (2) is negated if morality is an objective or quasi-objective principle that arises from nature, which is what secular ethics is. In that event, if it is not created by God, it no more needs to be created by a "greater being" than does anything else that arises out of nature.

Point (3) does not stand up to scrutiny. Obedience to a moral code does not in principle make one less powerful than disobedience to it. A code is scarcely a moral code if obedience to it is not a matter of choice. Therefore, it would be perfectly possible for an almighty being to follow a moral code by choice, and still be immortal.

Point (4) implicitly defines God as "the oldest thing that exists", which is a seriously inadequate definition of God. God doesn't have to be the oldest thing that exists. The defining characteristics of God do not include age, but do include being almighty, all-knowing and (in some sense) benevolent. A moral code, even if older than God, fails to possess those defining characteristics.

So the argument given above to support the assertion that "it is impossible that morality is above God" is a catalogue of wrongness. Interesting wrongness, but wrongness all the same.

The Demiurge

"When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void."

-- Genesis 1:1. (RSV)

The situation described in the first verse of the Bible is reflected in Plato, in Timaeus, where he proposes that the material world is created by a powerful being that he calls the Demiurge. Plato thinks the Demiurge is good, and intended the world to be as good as possible (as close as possible to the Ideal), but could not make it perfect, because the raw material was Chaos. This neatly deals with the Problem of Evil, but wouldn't work for conventional notions of the Christian God, because that God is supposed to be almighty, which the Demiurge is not. At least one theologian, David Griffin, uses the idea of pre-existing Chaos to explain evil.

A major problem of this approach is that it makes the idea of God redundant. We don't need to posit a Demiurge to explain how pre-existing matter was shaped into the world we know and live in, because modern physics gives us a better account (in that it explains more things in more detail with a better foundation in empirical evidence). An advocate of belief in the Demiurge cannot say, for instance, "Physics only takes you as far back as the Big Bang, but what happened before? You need God to account for what happened before." The reason being, of course, that God's creative role would have been played after the Big Bang.

A Gnostic cosmogony has it that there is an overall Creator, and the Demiurge is responsible for the creation of the Earth, but the Demiurge and the overall Creator don't quite get along. The Demiurge is a malign spirit, so it creates a world full of evil and suffering and destructive desires. It is also contended that the Demiurge doesn't know about the overall Creator, but mistakenly believes itself to be the ultimate creator of things. Some Gnostics argued that the Old Testament God was this evil Demiurge, while the New Testament God was the good Creator. This Gnostic idea finds its way into the writings of William Blake, and also the recent His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (except that in His Dark Materials, there is no overall Creator, and the Gods and Angels have all emerged spontaneously from the "Dust", which seems to be the material substrate from which all consciousness is formed.)

These Gnostic ideas were very popular once, but were almost completely suppressed after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. In modern times, they have become fairly popular once more (The Gnostic Society). They remain blasphemous to most conservative Christians, though.

Aside from the redundancy of the Demiurge, mentioned above, there's also the problem that once we decide God is not almighty, it becomes open to speculation just how mighty he is, how he came to be, and whether or not other beings like him might exist. The questioning mind finds itself looking for a theogony to go along with the cosmogony. If God "just emerged", there's no obvious reason why other Gods wouldn't "just emerge" at around the same time, as they do in Hesiod's account of the origin of the Greek Gods, or in traditional Japanese accounts of the origin of their Gods.

Does Zeus Exist?

Zeus is the King of the Gods, in Ancient Greek religion. A son of Cronus the Titan and grandson of Gaia, he rules a heaven that he shares with various other Gods. It is claimed by some that the idea of him is ancient, and crosses the whole of the Indo-European world, so that in India, he appears as Dyaus Pita in the Vedic religion (precursor of modern Hinduism), and in Rome he is Jupiter, while to ancient Germanic people he was called Tiwas, from whose name we get the day-name, Tuesday.

During the fifth and sixth centuries AD, worship of the Greek and Roman pantheon was violently suppressed at the orders of Christian Bishops and Emperors. Temples were destroyed, metal statues were melted into coins, and marble ones reduced to lime; books were burned, and priests and devotees were crucified, beheaded, burned, fed to beasts and otherwise despatched to Hades -- or, if they were lucky, merely exiled or forced to convert. Unsurprisingly, worshippers of Zeus are these days very thin on the ground. The fact that no-one worships Zeus nowadays is not proof that he doesn't exist, though, any more than the fact that lots of people worshipped him in the past was proof that he does or did exist.

How, then, can we answer the question of whether Zeus exists, or ever existed?

The emptiness of mount Olympus, could count as evidence against the existence of Zeus, if we assume that the story that Zeus and his fellow Gods live on that mountain is meant to be taken literally, and that their usual form is physical, so that they should be visible when we look. On the other hand, some of the usual arguments that can be used against the existence of the Christian God cannot be applied to Zeus. For instance, the argument from evil. Since it is not taken for granted that Zeus is consistently benign towards human beings, and nor is he almighty (just very mighty), it is not paradoxical that there should be evil in the world under his rule.

It cannot be ruled out that Zeus is dead. The Vedas have Indra killing Dyaus Pita. Perhaps Zeus's apparent failure to protect his followers from persecution at the hands of Christians during the 5th and 6th centuries indicates that he was at least a bit poorly during that time.

First Post & Introduction

Hi, this blog is where I talk about religion from my secular standpoint. I'm somewhat friendly towards certain kinds of paganism (polytheism, ancestor worship), as well as to nontheistic Buddhism, but not so sympathetic towards the monotheistic religions. I was taught at school that the shift from polytheism to monotheism was a step forward in intellectual sophistication and in civilization more generally. Now, I think it was the opposite. Monotheism, with its totalitarian, anti-intellectual tendencies, destroyed most of the great achievements of ancient Greco-Roman civilization, suppressed learning, and issued in the Dark Ages. The Christianization of Rome was to that Empire what Mao's Cultural Revolution was to China, only worse, and longer lasting in its destructive effects.

Useful relevant link: Kenneth Humphreys has compiled Putting the Dark into the Dark Age, an excellent summary of how Christianity put European civilization back for many centuries, and is likely to be rather shocking, if you're unfamiliar with the information it contains. It gives a good picture of the narrowminded nature of monotheism.