Sceptical theism and the infinity of God

I’ve never been very sympathetic to sceptical theism until I thought of this line of reasoning, which isn’t really new, but I’ve just never quite put it together in this way.

There are radically different types of goods. At perhaps the highest level—call it level A—there are types of goods like the moral, the aesthetic and the epistemic. At a slightly lower level—call it level B—there are types of goods like the goods of moral rightness, praiseworthiness, autonomy, the virtue, beauty, sublimity, pleasure, truth, knowledge, understanding, etc. And there will be even lower levels.

Now, it is plausible that a perfect being, a God, would be infinitely good in infinitely many ways. He would thus infinitely exemplify infinitely many types goods at each level, either literally or by analogy. If so, then:

1. If God exists, there are infinitely many types of good at each level.

Moreover:

2. We only have concepts of a finite number of types of good at each level.

Thus:

3. There are infinitely many types of good at each level that we have no concept of.

Now, let’s think what would likely be the case if God were to create a world. From the limited theodicies we have, we know of cases where certain types of goods would justify allowing certain evils. So we wouldn't be surprised if there were evils in the world, though of course all evils would be justified, in the sense that God would have a justification for allowing them. But we would have little reason to think that God would limit his design of the world to only allowing those evils that are justified by the finite number of types of good that we have concepts of. The other types of good are still types of good. Given that there infinitely many such goods, and only finitely many of the ones we have concepts of, it would not be significantly unlikely that if God exists, a significant proportion—perhaps a majority—of the evils that have a justification would have a justification in terms of goods that we have no concept of.

And so when we observe a large proportion of evils that we can find no justification for, we observe something that is not significantly unlikely on the hypothesis that God exists. But if something is not significantly unlikely on a hypothesis, it’s not significant evidence against that hypothesis. Hence, the fact that we cannot find justifications for a significant proportion of the evils in the world is not significant evidence against the existence of God.

Sceptical theism has a tendency to undercut design arguments for the existence of God. I do not think this version of sceptical theism has that tendency, but that’s matter for another discussion (perhaps in the comments).

Natural law and participation in God

According to Natural Law, the right thing to do is that which accords with one's nature. But what if something really nasty accorded with one's nature? This is, of course, akin to the objection to divine command theory from the question "What if God commanded something really nasty?" Both theories can give the same answer: "That's just impossible." God couldn't command something really nasty and there just are no possible natures of rational beings that require such nastiness. As far as that goes, this is fine, though at this point in the literature there are two more steps in the dialectic to think about.

I want to, however, consider a side-step. Why is it impossible? One could think this is just a brute and unexplained impossibility, but that is unsatisfactory intellectually. Even apart from the Principle of Sufficient Reason, we don't like brute facts that look like too much of a coincidence. And it looks like too much of a coincidence that all of the nasty cases are impossible. We want an explanation.

The divine command theorist has a pretty immediate explanation. We're talking about God's commands, and necessarily God is perfectly good or, if one prefers, perfectly loving. (Of course, those divine commands who want to define the good, and not just the obligatory, in terms that involve divine choices cannot give this answer. But so much the worse for that version of divine command theory.)

I think the Natural Law answer can be similar. A nature is an essential (in the medieval sense, maybe not the modal sense) mode of participation in God. It's impossible for a rational being's essential mode of participation in God to require nastiness, because of the nature of God. (Why is God's nature that way? Maybe here we have a brute necessity. A single brute necessity is much less problematic than a whole slew of them. Or maybe we can talk of God's perfection here.)

So there is an explanatory gap that Natural Law points to, and bringing in God closes that explanatory gap. Are there other ways of closing that gap? Maybe. One would be a heavily Platonic theory on which natures are modes of essential participation in the Form of the Good. The Platonism here would be more like Plato's own Platonism than our more anemic contemporary Platonism. The participation relation would not be exemplification as in contemporary Platonism, but something ontologically meatier, more like the participation in the theistic version of Natural Law.

In any case, the question of why something nasty couldn't be required by one's nature points towards serious metaphysics.

Human nature

Human flourishing includes a number of central goods such as friendship with God, friendship with neighbor, understanding of the world, appropriate autonomy, etc. Take any two goods, G and H, other than friendship with God. We could imagine an alien race of intelligent beings that are approximately as capable of humans in terms of goods other than G and H, but that normally are much, much more capable than we in respect of G and much, much less capable than we in respect of H. Maybe these are a race of individualistic scientists and philosophers who are barely capable of friendship with their fellows. Or maybe these are a race of very friendly and socially intertwined beings who are much less good at understanding the world. Call these aliens "xens".

There is nothing morally repugnant about xens, in the way that it would be repugnant to imagine a race of beings whose flourishing consists in causing misery to others (if such flourishing is possible). If we ever meet such a race of alien beings, the reaction we should have is "Vive la différence!" We ought not think ourselves superior to them and they ought not think themselves superior to us.

But now imagine that there were a form of neurosurgery that greatly increases one's capabilities in respect of G at the cost of one's capabilities in respect of H. It would be clearly wrong to perform this surgery on one's child, and it would be dubious if it were appropriate to have it be performed it on oneself. Why? If the life of the xens is no worse than ours, but merely different, what's wrong with such surgery? I think the obvious answer is: The life of the xens is great--if you're a xen. But we are not xens, and their life isn't for us. For the xens, less of H is normal. For us, less of H is abnormal.

So, thinking about xens and neurosurgery suggests we need a notion of normalcy. And this notion had better be morally significant. Merely statistical notions of normalcy lack moral significance. Why be like everyone else? (One might worry that being different from others leads to misery. But I deny this. My childhood was a very happy one, but I was very different from others.) This suggests a natural law intuition: a life with the particular pattern of emphases among pursuits that is characteristic of normal humans is something that has a moral call on us, unlike the pattern of goods embodied in the life of xens.

Explanatory accounts of knowledge

That something like the following thesis is true seems very plausible to me, though some refinement is called for:

1. We can only know of, and perhaps even have a belief in, the existence of a basic class of properties or entities if some member of that class enters somehow into an explanation of some belief of ours.

We know about electrons, because electrons enter into causal explanations of various physical phenomena, and these physical phenomena enter into explanations of our beliefs. Knowledge of the existence of mathematical entities are harder to reconcile with (1). But perhaps the fact that 2+2=4 explains, in a non-causal way, something going on in our minds.

But what about evaluative properties such as normative or axiological ones? Let me focus on the axiological. I take it to be almost definitive of modern naturalism that axiological properties do not enter into genuine explanations. While the existence of a soup kitchen might be explained in terms of a belief in the goodness of a soup kitchen, the goodness of the soup kitchen is entirely explanatorily impotent if naturalism is right. I think the naturalist's best bet would be to identify the property of goodness with some property such as contributing to organic flourishing. But the problem reappears in regard to the property of "flourishing".

If we reject modern naturalism, we can say that flourishing is a property of accord to a thing's nature, and can account for that nature in an Aristotelian way that makes the nature be explanatorily efficacious. Or we can give a theistic story.