Pascal's Wager for humans at death's door (i.e., all of us)

Much of the contemporary analytic discussion of Pascal’s Wager has focused on technical questions about how to express Pascal’s Wager formally in a decision-theoretic framework and what to do with it when that is done. And that’s interesting and important stuff. But a remark one of my undergrads made today has made think about the Wager more existentially (and hence in a way closer to Pascal, I guess). Suppose our worry about the Wager is that we’re giving up the certainty of a comfortable future secular life for a very unlikely future supernatural happiness, so that our pattern of risk averseness makes us reject the Wager. My student noted that in this case things will look different if we reflect on the fact that we are all facing the certainty of death. We are all doomed to face that hideous evil.

Let me expand on this thought. Suppose that I am certain to die in an hour. I can spend that hour repenting of my grave sins and going to Mass or I can play video games. Let’s suppose that the chance of Christianity being right is pretty small. But I am facing death. Things are desperate. If I don’t repent, I am pretty much guaranteed to lose my comfortable existence forever in an hour, whether by losing my existence forever if there is no God or by losing my comfort forever if Christianity is right. There is one desperate hope, and the cost of that is adding an hour’s loss of ultimately unimportant pleasures to the infinite loss I am already facing. It sure seems rational to go for it.

Now for most of us, death is several decades away. But what’s the difference between an hour and several decades in the face of eternity?

I think there are two existential ways of thinking that are behind this line of thought. First, that life is very short and death is at hand. Second, given our yearning for eternity, a life without eternal happiness is of little value, and so more or less earthly pleasure is of but small significance.

Not everyone thinks in these ways. But I think we should. We are all facing the hideous danger of eternally losing our happiness—if Christianity is right, because of hell, and if naturalism is right, because death is the end. That danger is at hand: we are all about to die in the blink of an eye. Desparate times call for desparate measures. So we should follow Pascal’s advice: pray, live the Christian life, etc.

The above may not compel if the probability of Christianity is too small. But I don’t think a reasonable person who examines the evidence will think it’s that small.

Internally eternal life

Suppose that starting this year (2019), I and all people who are important to me will do the following: We will live for 20 years on a delightful planet, and then travel through spacetime both 20 years back and to another delightful planet, and repeat ad infinitum.

Then, we won’t exist after the year 2039. But notice that this needn’t matter to us! Indeed, we are no worse off than if we skipped the time travel, and lived forever, moving between delightful planets every 20 years.

This is yet another thought experiment showing that what is important to us is internal and not external time.

Will dogs live forever?

Suppose a dog lives forever. Assuming the dog stays roughly dog-sized, there is only a finite number of possible configurations of the dog’s matter (disregarding insignificant differences on the order of magnitude of a Planck length, say). Then, eventually, all of the dog’s matter configurations will be re-runs, as we will run out of possible new configurations. Whatever the dog is feeling, remembering or doing is something the dog has already felt, remembered or done. It will be literally impossible to teach the dog a new trick (without swelling the dog beyond normal dog size).

But a dog’s life is a material life, unlike perhaps the life of a person. Plausibly, a dog’s mental states are determined by the configuration of the dog’s (brain) matter. So, eventually, every one of the dog’s mental states will be a re-run, too.

And then we will run out of states re-run once, and the dog will only have states that are on their second or later re-run. And so on. There will come a day when whatever the dog is feeling, remembering or doing is something the dog has felt, remembered or done a billion times: and there is still eternity to go.

Moreover, we’re not just talking about momentary re-runs. Eventually, every day of the dog’s life will be an identical re-run of an earlier day of the dog’s life (at least insofar as the dog is concerned: things beyond the power of the dog’s sensory apparatus might change). And then eventually every year of the dog’s life will be a re-run of an earlier year. And then there will come a year when every coming year of the dog’s life will already have been done a billion times already.

This doesn’t strike me as a particularly flourishing life for a dog. Indeed, it strikes me that it would be a more flourishing life for the dog to cut out the nth re-runs, and have the dog’s life come to a peaceful end.

Granted, the dog won’t be bored by the re-runs. In fact, probably the dog won’t know that things are being re-run over and over. In any case, dogs don’t mind repetition. But there is still something grotesque about such a life of re-runs. That’s just not the temporal shape a dog’s life should have, much as a dog shouldn’t be cubical or pyramidal in spatial shape.

If this is right, then considerations of a dog’s well-being do not lead to the desirability of eternal life for the dog. As far as God’s love for dogs goes, we shouldn’t expect God to make the dogs live forever.

This is, of course, the swollen head argument, transposed to dogs, from naturalist accounts of humans.

But maybe God would make dogs live forever because of his love for their human friends, not because of his love for the dogs themselves? Here, I think there is a better case for eternal life for dogs. But I am still sceptical. For the humans would presumably know that from the dog’s point of view, everything is an endless re-run. The dog has already taken a walk that looked and felt just like this one a billion times, and there is an infinite number of walks that look and feel just like this one to the dog ahead. Maybe to the human they feel different: the human can think about new things each time, because naturalism is false of humans, and so differences in human mental states don’t require differences in neural states (or so those of us who believe in an eternal afterlife for humans should say). But to the dog it’s just as before. And know that on the dog’s side it’s just endless repetition would, I think, be disquieting and dissatisfying to us. It seems to me that it is not fitting for a human to be tied down for an eternity of a friendship with a finite being that eventually has nothing new to exhibit in its life.

So, I doubt that God would make dogs live forever because of his love for us, either. And the same goes for other brute animals. So, I don’t think brute animals live forever.

All this neglects Dougherty’s speculative suggestion that in the afterlife animals may be transformed, Narnia-like, so that they become persons. If he’s right, then the naturalistic supervenience assumption will be no more true for the animals than for us, and the repetition argument above against dogs living forever will fail. But the argument above will still show that we shouldn’t expect brute animals to live forever. And I am dubious of the transformation hypothesis, too.

At the same time, I want to note that I think it is not unlikely that there will be brute animals on the New Earth. But if so, I expect they will have finite lifespans. For while an upper temporal limit to the life of a human would be an evil, an upper temporal limit to the life of a brute animal seems perfectly fitting.

Open theism and "never" facts

Suppose a version of open theism on which facts about future free choices have non-trivial truth values which God doesn’t know. Then here is a disquieting feature of this open theism, given eternal life. It implies that there are truths that God never finds out.

For instance, even in an infinite future, there are free actions that I will never do, but which I will have an opportunity to do on infinitely many days. For instance, perhaps I will never sing Amazing Grace three minutes to midnight on a Tuesday, or drink wine at 7:12 am of a prime-numbered day (numbering, say, from the first day of eternal life), even though both of these are possible. Likely, I will never recite all of War and Peace in French, though I would be free to do so. But such “never” facts facts will always depend on future free actions. Thus, on the variety of open theism under discussion, God will never know these facts. He will always just know an increasing number of “never-yet” facts: Alex has never yet recited War and Peace in French, but maybe he will.

It seems harder to reconcile the existence of facts that God will never know with omniscience than the existence of facts that God does not yet know. If there are facts that God will never know, then there is an aspect of reality that is closed to God. That can’t be right.

It’s worse than that. On this version of open theism, not only are there truths that God never comes to know, but there are truths that God never comes to know but that he can know. Here is an example: Either today I don’t write a blog post or I never recite War and Peace in French (assuming that I won’t recite it). Since God will always know that I do write a blog post today, he won’t know this disjunction, or else he’d be able to figure out from it that I will never recite War and Peace in French. (Cf. this paper.)

This is an uncomfortable position.

Eternal life and the crucible of character theodicy

Consider the crucible of character theodicy, that we are permitted by God to meet with great evils in order to form a character with virtues like courage and sacrificial love whose significant exercise requires significant evils.

I take it that it’s clear that forming such a character is worthwhile. But there are at least three problems with this theodicy:

1. While such character formation is valuable, is it valuable enough to justify our suffering great evils? Wouldn’t it have been better if God just gave us the virtues directly, rather than having us pay a great price?

2. Even if it is valuable enough to justify our suffering great evils, wouldn’t it be better if we suffered fewer or lesser ones?

3. What about those who suffer and develop a vicious character?

I think these three problems can be overcome if we think about heavenly life as an infinite value multiplier.

Ad 1: There is clearly some additional value to having virtues that were formed through significantly free exercises of them rather than having had these virtues imposed on one. In heaven, on infinitely many days one has and enjoys the value of having virtues. But if one has formed these virtues through significantly free exercise, then on infinitely many days one also has and enjoys the additional value of having virtues that were thus formed. That’s an infinite additional increment. So as long as the disvalue of the sufferings in this life was finite—which surely it was—it’s worth it.

Ad 2: The greater the sufferings that one endured courageously and the greater the sacrifices one made in love, the more fully one owns the resulting courage and love. For in more extreme exercises of these virtues, one has a greater opportunity to abandon the path of virtue, and one’s presence on that path is more truly one’s own. And this deeper ownership over one’s virtue—bearing in mind, of course, that all one has is a participation of God, and that grace is deeply involved—adds an additional value of virtue-ownership throughout an infinite number of future days. Hence, it adds an infinite amount of value, which is surely worth it.

Ad 3: This is probably the most serious worry. Start with this thought. God is choosing whether to snatch Judas up to heaven in the first moment of his existence, imposing on him a perfectly virtuous character, or to give Judas the opportunity to freely develop and own that character. A toy model for this an extended utility calculation. On the first option, we have an expected utility of

• V(eternal unowned virtue),

where V is value. On the second option, we have an expected utility of

• pV(eternal owned virtue) + (1 − p)V(Judas chooses vice)

where p is the probability that Judas would come through the crucible well. (Of course, this line of thought requires rejecting theological compatibilism and Molinism.) Here, V(eternal unowned virtue) and V(eternal owned virtue) are each infinite and positive. Plausibly, V(Judas chooses vice) is negative. Is it infinite? That’s not clear. One might think that on orthodox Christian views of hell, it is both negative and infinite. But that need not be the case. It could be that the suffering and vice in hell actually decreases from day to day, so that the total amount of suffering and vice over eternity is actually finite (think of how 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 2).

If V(Judas chooses vice), the argument still isn’t over, but I will assume that V(Judas chooses vice) is finite—we could just build that into the theodicy. In that case, we can basically neglect V(Judas chooses vice)—when the other quantities are infinite, a finite subtraction is only going to be a tie-breaker.

So now the question is whether V(eternal unowned virtue) is bigger than or equal to pV(eternal owned virtue). And here it seems very reasonable simply to make a sceptical theist move. We don’t know what was Judas’ probability of coming through the crucible well. We don’t know exactly how V(eternal owned virtue) compares to V(eternal virtue). It could be that a day with owned value is three times as valuable as a day with unowned virtue. If so, then as long as p > 1/3, God’s giving Judas the opportunity for freely choosing virtue was worthwhile.

There are many objections, of course, that one can make. Here’s one that particularly comes to my mind: Wouldn’t it be better for God to first give people the opportunity to freely choose a virtuous character, but then if they refuse to do so, to impose that character on them? After all, at least some infants go to heaven after death. But they haven’t developed a virtuous character through the described kind of crucible. And so it seems that God imposes on them a virtuous character.

There are two things I’m inclined to say to this. First, there is a relevant difference between the case of imposing virtue on an infant and imposing virtue on someone who has chosen against virtue. Second, those who choose virtue own their virtue more fully if they had the possibility of not having that virtue at all.

What do we mean by "finite"?

The standard mathematical definition is a set is finite provided that its cardinality is a natural number. But what are the natural numbers? Think about all the non-standard models of the natural numbers, models of arbitrarily high cardinality, and note that if we use one of these high-cardinality models as what we mean by "natural number", we will get a different extension for "finite". So how do we manage to pick out one particular meaning for "finite" or "natural number"? I want to offer four options.

1. Physics. The world gets described by a lot of equations. In these equations, mathematical objects (numbers, Hilbert spaces, etc.) represent features of the real world. We then constrain our interpretation of mathematical terms like "finite", "natural number" and "real number" by the requirement that the mathematical objects correspond as closely as possible to the features of the real world. In other words, we privilege those models of the natural numbers which fit the physical world. Note that this very much requires a significant dollop of scientific realism.

2. The future. We use the infinity of future days to define "finite": a natural number is any number that we will ever reach by counting once per day. This requires the actual world to have an infinite future.

3. Causal finitism. According to causal finitism, no object has an infinite causal history. But, very plausibly, any finite number of causes can be the causal history of an event. We can use these modal claims to constrain the interpretation of "finite".

4. God. Maybe God simply chose one extension for "finite", "natural number", etc., and made our words correspond to that. Cf. this.

Rites of initiation and the problem of evil

As an initiation rite, Brazil's Satere-Mawe people make gloves with hundreds of bullet ants woven in, stinger pointing inward, and the boy who wants to become a man is expected to wear them for ten minutes, and the incredible pain lasts for hours. According to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, the bullet ant sting is the worst of the Hymenopteran stings. Schmidt describes the experience of a single sting as follows: "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel." (Here is a man dedicated to science.)

Now, consider this. The boy suffers horribly for a large part of a day, but then he's a man for half a century. The memory of having stood up to close to the worst pain that nature fling at him has a deep value. How much value? It need not be so great, actually, for the ordeal to be worth it. Let us suppose that the disvalue of the suffering is 10,000 units. Then as long as he gets a mere four units of value from the suffering for every week of his life (say, he remembers the experience four times a week, and it gives him one unit of value each time), it is worth it. The longer his future life as a man, the greater the value. (This is just for priming intuitions. In fact, we need to contend with incommensurability.)

Now, maybe, in this case the pain is just much too great to pay off sufficiently in added meaningfulness over a future 50 years. Having skimmed (too painful to read carefully!) the description of the pain, I myself doubt it is worth it. Though it has to be noted that unless the adult men of that community are by and large sadists, in their judgment it is worth it, and they're better judges than wimpy I! Still, let us grant that it's not worth it.

But still, maybe a minute of wearing the ant-gloves would be worth it, if it made more meaningful a future manhood of fifty years. Scaling, ten minutes might be worth it if it made more meaningful a future manhood of five hundred years.

The point here is that a painful initiation ritual will be worthwhile if it makes more meaningful a future state of sufficient length. But now suppose that I am going to live for a million years. Then it does not seem absurd to say that a year of quite severe suffering could be worthwhile as an initiation ritual. Suppose I am going to live for a billion years. Then a hundred years of suffering might well be worthwhile, given the added value over the course of the subsequent 999,999,900 years.

But in fact if theism is true, then very likely we will live forever, since it is very likely that a good God would want persons to live forever. If so, then a suffering-filled initiation ritual that lasts for about a century would surely be justified, even if it only added a little value to each subsequent day (as long as the value did not quickly tend to zero in the limit as time goes to infinity).

Let's put it this way. It seems not improbable that if God made a person that was going to blissfully exist for a year, God could have justification to allow that person to suffer intensely for a second first. If he made a person that was going to blissfully exist for a ten years, he might easily find justification to allow that person to suffer for ten seconds first. And, by the same reckoning, if the person were to exist for three billion years, he might find justification to allow her to suffer intensely for about 90 years. After all, 90 years is to 3 billion years as a second is to a year.

Or consider it this way. Suppose you're going to live for three billion years, but every year you will experience a second of intense suffering, in a way that contributes to the meaningfulness of the rest of your life. It does not seem absurd to suppose that God could have a reason to arrange things so. But if so, then it likewise should not seem absurd to suppose that God could arrange it so you'd suffer 90 years, and then live out 2,999,999,910 years of bliss. And if we live not just for three billion years, but forever, this is even easier to imagine.

In the face of eternity, a finite amount of suffering is just a blip.

But does it not beg the question to suppose eternal life in responding to the problem of evil? Not at all. The problem of evil is an argument against theism. Theism makes eternal life for any created persons very likely. Thus, if the problem of evil is to make a significant dent in the probability of theism, the problem of evil has to work even if there is eternal life, or else a good argument against eternal life is needed.

Death and the problem of evil

Death is the great non-moral evil. Therefore, the problem of non-moral evil is, in the main, the problem of death: Is an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being likely to allow death?

But not all death seems to be a problem. The argument: "Grass dies, therefore God doesn't exist" seems unconvincing (why? because the death of grass isn't a bad thing? because it's necessary for evolutionary processes that organisms die?). We are only really bothered by the problem once we deal with critters that are conscious and capable of sophisticated lives. It is not at all clear that the world would be better if mussels lived eternally and did not reproduce—it seems that an ever-refreshed generation of mussels is no worse, and may even be better aesthetically.

So, now, let's think about an evolutionary sequence, and see if we can come up with a problem for God. Algae and other simple critters evolve, with individuals dying, and their deaths essential to the evolutionary process. And we are not bothered theologically by their deaths. We get more and more sophisticated critters, until eventually we get to ones where we're bothered theologically by their deaths (maybe only humans fall in this category, or maybe it is a rather larger class). Consider the case of the first of the more sophisticated critters, call him Jake, whose death bothers us theologically. (Maybe Jake is Adam, or maybe Jake is some whale, or horse, or whatever.) If we're bothered theologically here, it's apparently because we have an inclination to think God should have acted differently here.

But how should God have acted differently here? I see two suggestions, the second coming in two sub-options.

1. Maybe God shouldn't have allowed the mutations and recombinations that led to Jake's existence. Maybe he should have kept the critters of the world below the level of sophistication at which death worries us. But that doesn't seem what God should have done—indeed, the world without Jake does not seem to be better than the world with Jake, and in fact the world with Jake seems the better world.

2. Maybe God should have given eternal life to Jake. But how? One option is that he can give Jake an eternal life after the end of his normal lifespan on earth. But if the atheological argument from death is predicated on the concern that God didn't do that, then the argument needs to be supplemented with evidence that God didn't do that. And such evidence is not, in fact, available. (Imagine that someone argues against theism: "God, if he were perfectly good, would create physically undetectable persons." Surely the right retort is: "If so, what evidence do you have that he didn't?") The other option is that God can either miraculously sustain Jake forever on earth or modify his nature and environment in a way that allows him to live forever on earth. But this, obviously, leads to a problem of overcrowding, which would, in the end, require some of Jake's descendants to be transfered to somewhere else—unless God also took away Jake's ability to reproduce, or took that ability away in the descendants. But the suggestion that what God ought to have done is to modify Jake or his descendants so he can live forever on earth and cannot reproduce does not appear morally compelling.

If these are the main alternative suggestions, then there is no atheological argument to be made from Jake's death.

Objection: The problem isn't death, but early death.

Response: I think this is mistaken. First, suppose I lived a million years. And finally it's time for me to die tomorrow. Is that death any less fearsome because it was preceded by a million years of life than if it were preceded only by 70 years? It does not appear that a merely finite extension would help. (And of course we have arbitrariness problems here: How much should God extend the life by? However much he extended it by, we could complain that there should be more.) In fact, if anything, a death after a million years would be the worse. (Consider how we feel about cutting down a 300-year-old tree versus cutting down a 10-year-old tree.)

Against my response, however, there is an intuition that there is a time for people to die—a time at which continued life has a diminished value. So the evil is not so much an early death, as a premature death—a death prior to reaching that time. So, the suggestion goes, God should not allow Jake or anybody like Jake to die a death prior to reaching the time at which continued life has a diminished value.

I think this suggestion incorrectly—and offensively—downplays the life of old people. But let me push a different point.

Suppose Jake was struck down in the full possession of his faculties, and consider instead the allegedly better life where Jake at age a starts to live with a life of diminished value, and then at age b finally dies. Now consider Jake just before age a. He is, on this story, facing a future of diminished value, followed by death. Whatever he gains from the fact that he suffers death at a time at which his life is of diminished value rather than in his prime, he loses by the fact that he is facing a diminishment of the value of his life. Both the Jake who is struck down prior to the diminishment of his faculties and the Jake who is struck down in his prime are facing a decrease in the vigor of their life, from full vigor to zero. Granted, one is facing a more gradual decrease, but the same complete destruction of life's vigor faces both.

Perhaps, though, the distinction between a premature and a non-primature death is to be accounted for differently than by reference to the diminished faculties in old age. Maybe the problem with a premature death is that one hasn't yet accomplished life's tasks.

So now the problem of death is this: Why does God allow Jake to die prior tot he accomplishment of life's tasks? Note that if that is the formulation, the problem is only really pressing if Jake is human. We do not attach a great value to a non-human animal's accomplishment of "life's tasks". We do not, for instance, feel that a great harm has been done to an animal if we render it infertile (in a humane way).

So what are life's tasks? There are three possible families of answers: (1) the tasks that are one's individual vocation, (2) tasks like education and reproduction prescribed by human nature, and (3) one's own personal goals. Option (1) will, if anything, harm the atheological case, because the notion of a vocation is, I think, essentially a theistic one, and so the existence of such tasks, if admitted, is an argument for the existence of God. Moreover, if one's tasks are the ones set by God, then who are we to say that Jake died prior to finishing them.

Option (2) is more promising. It presupposes a broadly natural law perspective that not all will share, however. But let's be concrete. What are these tasks? Obviously, the main one is the attainment of virtue. So then the claim is that what is a problem is a death prior to the attainment of virtue. But this makes much, though not all, of the problem of death a species of the problem of moral evil—the problem of why it was that one didn't develop virtue before death (the case of children is different, though). Moreover, questions of the afterlife become relevant, since the task of virtue can, surely, be continued. Besides virtue, what else is there in life's tasks? I think the main ones are: wisdom and reproduction. So is the problem that of dying prior to attaining wisdom and prior to reproducing? The wisdom case is, however, often (though not always) a matter of moral evil—one hasn't gained wisdom because one hasn't been pursuing virtue and wisdom sufficiently. And, again, the afterlife is relevant. Finally, there is reproduction. But I do not think we worry as much about the evil of dying childless as past generations did. In any case, it seems that in a case of dying childless it is on the dying that we are likely to focus.

Or maybe human nature sets us not just tasks, but also goods, and we should sample them. But I think the main goods that ought to be found in a full human life are, in fact, virtue, wisdom and progeny (though some may forego the literal attainment of the last, for the sake of the Kingdom).

The last option is of fulfillment of one's own goals. The suggestion is that we set some finite set of goals for our lives, and a full human life is one where we fulfill them all, and what is problematic is a death prior to the attainment of all, or maybe most or some, of these goals. I do feel the force of the idea that there is an evil in a death "with much undone." But I do not think personally set goals have great moral weight, unless they happen to match up with a vocation or with basic human goals—which would bring us back to options (1) or (2). Why should it matter much, to me or to anyone else, that I have set something as a goal for myself? Moreover, is it not very much bad to be cut down before one could set a goal to oneself. But surely whatever finite goals one set for oneself, after fulfilling them, given a longer lifespan, one would set more goals—or else sink into depression.

All in all, I do think the non-moral evil par excellence is death. Not early death, not premature death, but death. A million years of life followed by death exemplifies this evil just as a day of life followed by death exemplifies it. However, if we think about the evolution of Jake, it seems that the option of allowing Jake to come into existence with a finite lifespan, and then continuing Jake's existence elsewhere, is either the best option, or no worse than any other.

Evil and eternal life

(Cross-posted on prosblogion.)

Let's say I climb Mt. Everest, and then enjoy a delightful view from the top. But as I climb the mountain, I undergo various horrendous sufferings. And after I get back down, I have to undergo extremely painful surgery. Suppose that, so far, the overall value assessment is negative. If that's all that is involved, then climb wasn't worth it. The view was nice, and the good of achievement was nice, but, by far, it just wasn't worth it.

But let me add a little more to the story. I did this when I was 20. I am not permanently traumatized by the suffering, and indeed by the time I am 30, my memories of the hideous pains are no longer unpleasant. But I continue to have memories of the beauty of the climb and of the camaraderie, memories of the grandeur of the epic struggle, and these memories continue to be fairly pleasant. Moreover, the feeling of accomplishment, of having overcome the pains, is nice to have. I then live on for fifty more years, continuing to have pleasant memories of that climb.

While the goods achieved at the time of the climb were not worth the suffering, when combined with the value of half a century's worth of memories, even when these memories are not particularly intensely pleasant, they may be worth it. Suppose you say the contrary. Well, then, replace the fifty years with five hundred or five million. Eventually, the cumulative value of enjoying these memories will overshadow the bads which were confined to one decade of one's life (the climb, plus about ten years during which the memories of pain were painful). (This of course reminds one of Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion. But I think there is nothing repugnant here.)

What this shows is that given a long enough life-span, our evaluations of whether some activity was worth doing can change as a result of the values of memories and of retrospective awareness of achievement. Of course, in principle, they can change in either direction. A pain might have been such that it by itself would have been worth it for the sake of an achievement, but if in fact the memories of the pain continue to be painful while the memories of the achievement fade, then it's no longer worth it.

Observe also that while it would be possible to have the pleasure of the memories of having climbed Mt. Everest without having ever had the pains, that pleasure would then be an empty pleasure, and hence either devoid of value or of much lesser value.

Suppose that in fact we live forever. There is no good argument to the contrary that doesn't presuppose the non-existence of God (here we can insert a discussion of arguments for materialism and of arguments against resurrection based on the need for causal continuity), so someone who offers an argument from evil against the existence of God cannot rely on the denial of the claim that we live forever. The above remarks show that remembering over a significant length of time can act as a value-multiplier, and when the length of time is long enough (and in particular when it is infinite), this can completely swamp the original assessment.

Moreover, memory is not the only such effect over an infinite life-span. A small change in character when prolonged over a very long time can make an enormous difference. Suppose that climbing Mt Everest, in my story, made me slightly more considerate. We might well question whether this was worth all the suffering. If I were to live in this more considerate way for five minutes, it perhaps wouldn't be worth it (Socrates will disagree). But again we have value-multiplication--if the difference remains over a sufficiently long interval, the increase in value, summed (actually, integrated) over that time, will swamp the pains of gaining it. In fact, that small difference, over an infinite amount of time, will make for an infinite good. Moreover, if virtue leads to virtue, we might here have compound interest at work.

Of course, God could produce the better character directly and maybe he could induce in us false memories. But the value of that infinite good having been produced in the right way may very well be quite high. (One thinks that the value of a good G's having been produced in the right way is proportionate to the value of G.)

These value-multiplication processes can be selective. Thus, God might very well ensure that our memories of pains not be painful to have (to do that God would need to heal traumas, etc.), while ensuring that our memories of goods be pleasant. Nor would there be anything dishonest in God's doing this. In fact, I think most of us have plenty of memories of pains where the memories aren't themselves painful, and this is no defect in this.

If this is right, then selective value-multiplication processes working in an infinite afterlife might very well, and in quite understandable ways, swamp the kinds of value assessments we get from this-worldly considerations. This possibility, which indeed is not merely a possibility but a fairly high likelihood if God exists, might not entirely undercut inductive arguments from evil, but I think it blunts them quite significantly.

And if one is worried that this undercuts our own reasons to prevent evils, all I can do is point one to this older post of mine.

Death and presentism

By "death" in this post, I shall mean the permanent cessation of the existence of a person. I do not know if death occurs (it does not occur among human persons), or even if it is metaphysically possible (it might be incompatible with divine goodness). Presentism is the view that only presently existent things and present events exist. Eternalism is the view that there are pastly and futurely existent things and past and future events. Growing Block is the view that there are pastly existent things and past events but no future ones (there are two versions of Growing Block, depending on what one says about the present).

The following argument is valid:

1. Death in and of itself is tragic. (Premise)
2. Existing within one region in space-time and being wholly absent from another region or set of regions in space-time is not in and of itself tragic. (Premise)
3. If Presentism is false, then Growing Block or Eternalism is true. (Premise)
4. If Growing Block or Eternalism is true, then a person's being dead at t consists in his existing in the region of space-time prior to t and being wholly absent from the region of space time spanning from t onward. (Premise)
5. Therefore, if Growing Block or Eternalism is true, death in and of itself is not tragic. (By (2) and (4))
6. Therefore, if Presentism is false, death in and of itself is not tragic. (By (3) and (5))
7. Therefore, Presentism is true. (By (1) and (6))

Now, one might worry that some deaths are tragic, such as those of good or happy persons, while others, those of bad or unhappy persons, are not. I am inclined to disagree, but I think the argument can be modified to handle this, for instance by modifying (2) to say that existing within one region and being wholly absent from another while being happy and good in the first region is not in and of itself tragic.

This seems to me to be a powerful argument for Presentism, as long as the Presentist can tell us what on her view makes death tragic that does not succumb to a similar argument. And I think she can do that. To be presently dead is tragic in that one does not exist even though one had existed. (This is not an instance of occupying one space-time region rather than another.) And that one will be dead is tragic in that its being the case that something tragic will happen is already tragic.

But I am still an eternalist B-theorist. So what do I deny in the argument? I have to admit that I have intuitions in favor of each of (1)-(4). But I think we can distinguish the intrinsic tragedy of death in two ways. First, we can think of the tragedy of death for the dead person, and second, we can think of the tragedy of his death for others or for the universe. When we talk of tragedy-for-others, I think we have reason to deny (2). For, yes, the total absence of a person from regions of space-time can be tragic for others, since it can entail that they cannot futurely meet this person, etc.

But the "in and of itself" in (1) and (2) probably signals that we're talking of the tragedy-for-self. But then we can actually build an argument against Presentism:

8. It is tragic for the dead person that she is now dead. (Premise)
9. Nothing is tragic for someone who does not exist. (Premise)
10. If Presentism is true, someone who does not now exist does not exist. (Premise)
11. Therefore, if Presentism is true, nothing is tragic for someone who does not now exist. (By (9) and (10))
12. Therefore, Presentism is false. (By (8) and (11))

Now we have true paradox. We have premises (1)-(4) which are all plausible and entail that Presentism is true, and premises (8)-(10) which are all plausible and entail that Presentism is false. We need to resolve this paradox. I do so, rather cautiously and not fully satisfied with this, by denying (1) and (8). What matters vis-à-vis the person himself is not so much the continuation of existence (death being its opposite), but an internal temporally infinite existence, as I have suggested in some past posts (e.g., see this one). Let me end by summarizing (perhaps in different form) some of the ideas from these posts.

Suppose that I live alone. It is, then, no better for me to live a hundred chronometric years of fulfilling and blissful spiritual and mathematical activity than it is to live fifty years of the same activity sped up by a factor of two. Well, then, it is no better for me to live for an infinite number of chronometric years, than to live the same activity at an ever increasing pace over the period of a hundred years, by having one's functioning sped up by a factor of two for the first fifty chronometric years, another factor of two for the next twenty-five, another factor of two for the next 12.5, and so on. That at the end of a hundred chronometric years I will be dead is no tragedy for me, if I have lived this life of infinite internal temporal length.

Or suppose that I have a space-time travel machine, an elixir of eternal youth and our universe is infinite spatially. In 2030, I will use my space-time machine to travel to the year 2000 in some other galaxy[note 1]. There I will live thirty good and meaningful years, and then in 2030, I will move to the year 2000 in another galaxy. And so on. Note that I do not exist in 2031 or at any later date. So I die before 2031. (Necessary truth: If I do not exist at t, but existed earlier, then I died before t.) But this death is no tragedy for me, because I am assured of an internally infinite span of good and meaningful life.

So, I cautiously deny (1) and (8) in the case of tragedy for the person. Therefore, I cannot accept either the first argument, which was for Presentism, nor the second, which was against.