The following six premises are logically incompatible:
Pain is intrinsically bad.
Pain is a quale.
Qualia are real entities.
All real entities are God or created by God.
God isn’t intrinsically bad.
Nothing created by God is intrinsically bad.
A theist could turn this into an argument against qualia.
I myself am inclined to deny premise (1).
22 comments:
(4) All real entities are God or created by God.
(6) Nothing created by God is intrinsically bad
I think these propositions could be thought about too. One could invoke the same sort of intuition the definitions of omnipotence, namely that there is a distinction between strong and weak actualisation, and that therefore God could weakly actualise the existence of intrinsically bad things. Thus (6) could be rejected?
One would also then have to clarify what it means for something to be created by God...Does weak actualisation count as creation? If not, then (4) could be rejected?
I'm also inclined to reject 1. "Intrinsically bad" is a little loose; qualia of pain sure do feel bad, but they can serve good purposes, and there may be a sense in which a being has pain but is not negatively affected or stressed by it.
Professor,
Could one not hold a deprivation account of pain,(similar to a deprivation account of evil) whereas pain is not a qulia that exists, but rather, the lack of the qulia of bliss? This allows pain to be intrinsically bad, but not something created by God.
I don't think this works well for qualia. Evil is indeed the privation of the good, but qualia seem to be real perfections. Leibniz said however that pain is somehow less perfect than pleasure, because pain involves consciousness of weakness (while pleasure consciousness of power), and weakness is not a perfection.
It is a tricky issue. I tend to think that we should, as Pruss said, reject 1. Might be similar to how God can know disturbing things without being affected; God might have the perfection of pain but not be negatively affected by it (perhaps because God has no weakness and pain, at least its negative aspect, involves consciousness of weakness as Leibniz suggests)
#6 is the problem. [The verse in Isaiah says God created even evil]
I agree that (1) is deniable; but I don't think that addresses the central point of the argument (if I've understood the point). He could have used "misery" or something instead.
(2) and (3) are the real problems. "Quale" is not well-defined; and, even if it were, it most certainly would not be a "real entity" any more than "a pain" is a real entity.
Comparing (1) with (5) and (6), you get another problem: I think there is an equivocation on "bad". The only thing even slightly inclining us to accept (1) is because we intuitively think it means "pain is a bad experience", where "bad" just means "unpleasant". And there is no force at all to (5*) or (6*) where "bad" is replaced with "unpleasant", is there?
Avraham: You'd have to point out the specific verse you mean, because I can give you several that make it clear there is no unrighteousness or badness in God, nor can He act wickedly (Job 34:10; Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 92:15...).
Unknown:
A chair lacks bliss but isn't in pain, though.
Isaiah 45:7. Though the interpretation is disputible (of course), we should hesitate to ascribe human morality univocally to God. I won't dispute that there has to be significant overlap, otherwise calling God all good would be meaningless, but I have sympathies to the orthodox jewish position of just biting the bullett and accepting the evil (at least what we recognize as such) as part of Gods created order, and putting a justification for it on the backseat.
Dominik:
The creating of justifications and explanations is itself a Scriptural practice. Abraham was right to ask whether the Judge of all the Earth would really not do what is right. Elihu was correct to say that the Almighty does not act wickedly. Even God Himself spends time in Ezekiel explaining that He does not desire to bring destruction even upon the wicked, but desires that they would change to doing what is right so that He can bless them.
Isaiah 45:7 is not a matter of interpretation; but of translation. It is usually translated as saying that He makes peace/prosperity/weal and he also makes calamity/disaster/woe. The contrast is with peace or prosperity, not with moral goodness. God did indeed create the opposite of peace and prosperity (viz. "woe" or "calamity") for those individuals and nations that deserved it. But, God did not create evil (as the passages I cited before indicate).
Pruss:
In addition to the other misgivings I mentioned, I wonder about (4). I was not created by God, was I? And yet, I am surely a "real entity".
Michael:
You were created by God.
In three ways: There is indirect causation by a chain of causes going back to the beginning of the universe; there is God's direct creation of your soul (because humans are special); and there is (perhaps most importantly) God's cooperation with your parents' gametes' reproductive activity which gave causal oomph to that activity.
Pruss: I have to say I disagree heartily with your second and third "ways". And, interestingly, the first "way" doesn't carry the "theism and qualia" argument we're discussing. Point (4) isn't strong enough for the argument if all we mean is that God initiated the chain of causes. Nor do I think anyone holds (6) where "created" includes being the mere initiator of the chain of causes. That was sort of my point.
So, setting aside the first "way"....
The second "way" presumes dualism, and neither scripture nor philosophy have ever given me any good reason to be a dualist. And there are many non-dualist theist philosophers (even Christian philosophers, like Peter van Inwagen and Tim O'Connor).
And the third "way" is utterly confusing to me. I'm quite sure that all the "oomph" needed to produce me was provided by my parents, insomuch as the "oomph" is always provided by the parents of any animal. Can you elaborate on this? I mean, lots of cell reproduction and other biological processes are going on in animal bodies all the time; why should sexual reproduction be special?
Regarding the third way, I don't think the biological processes are special in this way. *All* creaturely causation requires God's giving it oomph. This is closely related to the fact that God is not just the creator but the sustainer.
If you think that all cases of causation are participated in actively by God, and you think qualia are real entities, then I can definitely see why your argument would pose a problem and why you might want to see about denying (1).
I, for one, have no reason to think God adds anything at all on top of the causal powers of His created beings (indeed, that would seem to make Him much more active in all cases of evildoing than the Scriptures or the concept of a perfectly good God would warrant). And I have very strong reasons to think that qualia are not entities and do not exist at all. But, if you hold both of those views, and hold (1), then yes there would be a serious problem.
The verse in Isaiah was pointed out where it says that "God created evil." But just to answer the issue I should add that when it comes to things beyond my understanding I defer to Kant about the things in themselves. That would be everything beyond the possibility of experience.
However I am not saying 100% like Kant because I think the limit that Kant places on Reason can be pushed back. This is the way I understood Hegel based on my reading of McTaggart on his Hegel's Logic.[]
the word in Isaiah God creates "evil" [Ra] is the most simple basic word for evil that exists in Hebrew.רע and there are other words for calamities.
Avraham:
1) As I've indicated, there are too many other scriptures that make clear He is not the source of evil for it to make any sense to cite just this one verse as some sort of counter to them all. That way of approaching the Scriptures (or any document for that matter) is not appropriate.
2) Rah is used throughout the Bible to mean things like "unpleasant", "calamitous", "difficult", etc. It's ridiculous to think that it MUST mean "moral evil" in this case without considering the context. And the context is first a contrast of light vs. darkness and then peace vs.... "moral evil"?? Of course not. The opposite of peace (Heb. שָׁלוֹם = "shalom") is calamity or disorder or something like that. That's probably why so many translations do use words like "calamity" here.
I think there is an extended sense of "create" in which God creates evil. This is true even on Augustine's privation theory. If I make a donut, I make the hole in it, too, even though, literally speaking, there are no holes.
But, Pruss, if I make a complete piece of bread with no hole in it, and then someone else comes along and punches a hole out of, I did not create the privation. Even if I created the "someone else", the privation (the hole) was their free choice, no?
Suppose I create a machine that moves along a long piece of bread, maybe 10 feet long, and after every inch of movement it flips a quantum coin and if it's heads, it punches a hole. I run the machine and as a result there are about 55 holes in the bread. It seems intuitively correct to say that I made these holes, even if literally holes do not exist.
Of course, but people are not machines, and our choices are not random. Besides, there would be no intrinsic good in designing the machine that way, rather than in a way that totally forbids hole punching (or just not making the machine at all). Whereas truly free agents (whose choices therefore have moral worth) are an intrinsic good.
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