A picture of the 2004 tsunami in Ao Nang, Krabi Province, Thailand
Dear Dr Grayling,
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed 30,000 inhabitants, and led Voltaire to write a savage indictment of any form of religious belief that thinks God has created the best of all possible worlds. The Indian ocean earthquake has killed over 150,000, and it needs no Voltaire to remind us that God does not always act for the best.
If there is a supreme intelligence that has created this universe, its purposes clearly do not include the preservation of sentient beings from all harm. Yet it remains a plausible conjecture that there is such an intelligence.
Contemporary science, especially physics, sees the universe as a beautiful and elegant structure, so interconnected and finely adjusted that the smallest difference in the gravitational constant or the electromagnetic force would destroy the possibility of a universe like this altogether. The scientific perception of the cosmos is that it is an intelligible, law-like, mathematically complex structure, which produces intelligent moral agents by a process of increasingly integrated complexity from an initial state of extreme simplicity (the big bang).
Contemporary religious thought sees the purpose of creating such a cosmos as the production of finite minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another, take partial responsibility for the world and be fulfilled by knowing the supreme mind of the creator. For most religions, the completion of that purpose is beyond the cosmos itself, which is destined for destruction but remains necessary for the production of complex, evolved carbon-based lifeforms.
Neither science nor religion deny that there are vast destructive forces in nature. Science shows how they are essential to the structure of the cosmos—without the destructive energy of supernovae, carbon would never exist, and without earthquakes the earth would not remain stable. Religion claims that such forces will not defeat the ultimate purpose of creation. Even a supremely wise creator must forge beings like us in fires that can burn as well as vivify, in a cosmos whose powers operate on principles not attuned to the preferences of moral sensibility. But the religious affirmation is that the creator can take beings like us through destruction to final fulfilment in God, and that is a goal more desirable than we can imagine.
Thus a mature religious response to disasters like the Indian ocean earthquake is not to deny the suffering and loss—it is to do everything possible to mitigate them now and in the future. It is to accept the necessity of disaster in any cosmos of which we are part, and to seek and hope for the final flourishing of a goodness whose demands are imperative and whose promises are, at least to many of us, worthy of trust.
Is this the best of possible worlds? It is the only one that could have us in it, and while we are not the best of possible beings, we are perhaps—each one of us—of great intrinsic worth.
The traditional philosophers' criticism is that, if God were omnipotent, surely God could create better laws or a better universe with us in it. I am inclined simply to deny this, and to deny that anyone could know it was true. A perfectly reasonable definition of omnipotence is "having a power greater than any other possible being, and one from which all other possible powers derive." A theist can be philosophically content with a God who is omnipotent in that sense. And that restricted sense of omnipotence is compatible with there being necessities rooted in the divine being that even an omnipotent being cannot override. One set of such necessities is the necessity of earthquakes on planets formed by the operation of general physical laws in an expanding cosmos that generates highly complex molecular structures by natural evolution. If beings of great intrinsic worth, like us, come to exist on such planets, they must be seen as integral parts of the cosmos, subject to its laws and accidents, and not as alien or optional intrusions into nature.
Therefore we are by nature liable to tragic suffering and loss. Despite this loss, if there is a creator God, it is plausible to hope that God can ensure that the worth of finite persons finds adequate realisation—that is, their existence is very worthwhile—beyond this cosmos, and in relation to God. Most major religions are founded on the testimony of those who claim to be reliable and privileged witnesses—the prophets and saints—that this is the promise of a reliable God.
Naturally I cannot hope to demonstrate such claims. But I think it can be seen that there is an adequate religious response to major natural disasters. That response does not deny the tragedy. It sets aside Panglossian views that God will not let his favourites suffer. It sees with a clear eye the amoral beauty and the terrifying power of the natural order, and looks beyond to the compassionate power of a supreme objective Good that offers nothing but itself as our ultimate reward, and that works through the necessities of the cosmos to bring all finite sentient beings towards that ultimate goal. The religious attitude aligns itself with that striving for good and is never defeated by the frequent tragedies of human existence in this cosmos. To borrow a phrase from Iris Murdoch, it proclaims, in a world of pain and loss, the imperishable sovereignty of good.
Keith Ward
Dear Professor Ward While recognising that your euphuistic remarks are intended to encourage believers to retain their faith despite the horrendous and arbitrary suffering inflicted by nature on many innocents, I find it hard to locate an explicit argument in them to the conclusion that any theodicy must offer—that the existence of natural evil is compatible with the idea of a deity whose purposes are somehow good overall.
However, I discern two suggestions in what you say. The first—a traditional one—is that God must cause sentient creatures suffering in order that his (unspecified) purposes for them can ultimately be satisfied. The second—a less traditional one—is that omnipotence should shed its original meaning and be understood in a limited way to allow that God cannot control the forces of nature, implying that he is therefore neither responsible for, nor competent to lessen, the suffering they can cause.
The argument that God's purposes require that his sentient creatures must suffer is standardly met by noting that his power makes available to him any one of an indefinitely large number of possible worlds in which he could achieve exactly the same purposes without making his creatures suffer. When this consideration is opposed to the traditional conception of God as benevolent and omnipotent, it obliges us to accept that he is either not benevolent or not omnipotent. But if he lacks either attribute, he is not the God of traditional theology.
You choose the latter option in your second suggestion. God is not omnipotent in the traditional sense; he cannot control the natural forces that inflict suffering on innocents. This prompts difficult questions for you. How can God, though thus relatively impotent, be able to create the universe? If he nevertheless could create it, why would he do so, given his traditionally attributed foreknowledge by which he could see that it will cause suffering? If he cannot himself will and direct the suffering thus caused, is he not irresponsible, to say the least, in creating such a world? No human father could build an uncontrollably dangerous machine and put his child into it, without being held criminally culpable for the consequences. Why not God?
Perhaps, to limit God's responsibility in this respect, you implicitly mean to limit his foreknowledge too. But by exonerating God from responsibility for natural evil by repudiating the traditional definition of him as omnipotent and omniscient, you owe us an account of what your unrecognisable replacement being is, and why it should be of interest to people who for millennia have thought they were dealing with the traditionally conceived one.
There is anyway a fatal problem with your suggestions. To say both that God makes us suffer natural disasters for our ultimate good, and that the natural disasters that cause such suffering lie outside God's control, is to assert a contradiction: you are saying that God does what he cannot do. This is an incoherent thesis. But that, for theology, is nothing new.
Yours, AC Grayling
Dear Dr Grayling The incoherent thesis is your own invention. I do not say that God makes us suffer for our own good. I say that God must create us in a universe in which suffering will foreseeably result—not arbitrarily, but in accordance with laws of nature. If I build aircraft, knowing that some people will die in crashes, I do not make them die. So God creates a mathematically beautiful universe that is a necessary condition of many great values, but an unintended consequence will be the suffering of many sentient beings. God does not make them suffer, though God is responsible for creating the world in which they suffer.
This does entail that there are necessities of nature that God cannot change. But it does not mean, and I do not say, that the processes of nature are outside God's control. It means that if God sets up the universe to be law-governed and free of continual divine interference, God cannot also continually interfere to prevent suffering.
I agree this is a restricted view of omnipotence, but it is a traditional and widely held religious view. It is philosophers who have tried to foist on believers a possibly incoherent notion of absolutely unlimited power. You suppose that there are possible worlds in which God could achieve exactly the same purposes without creatures suffering. I am not as confident about my knowledge of possible worlds as you, but I guess that no purpose could be exactly the same if it was in a possible world markedly different from this one.
In general, many more distinctions need to be made before accusations of incoherence can be thrown around. The ideas of causation, necessity, possibility and God need much more investigation. They are, I think, obscure enough to render knockdown arguments in this area unobtainable.
Yours, Keith Ward
Dear Professor Ward You wrote, "Even a supremely wise creator must forge beings like us in fires that can burn as well as vivify," which I took to be a poetic assertion of the need for beings like us to suffer for some good purpose. By now saying, surprisingly, that you did not mean this, you offer the even less palatable alternative that the creator allows or, since he is not truly omnipotent, accepts that our sufferings can serve no good purpose.
A possible world is any internally consistent world: the concept is not hard to grasp. Even a limited deity such as you hypothesise would have many choices about what kind of world to actualise. Did he choose to actualise one in which natural disasters can bring suffering to innocents, rather than one in which (say) only non-innocents would thus suffer? If so, why?
Or does the limitation on God's potency mean that he could not control which world was actualised in the first place? But if so, why do you call him "the creator"? If he is the creator, he is not like a builder of an aeroplane which everyone hopes will never crash; he is rather like the builder of an aeroplane which is actually designed to crash— this being the necessity of a world with moving tectonic plates, viruses, and all the other vectors of disaster; and for this, therefore, he is responsible.
The way theologians continually reinvent their central concepts to evade challenge, hiding behind redefinitions of causation, necessity, and even the word "God" itself, is characteristic of their profession, but at least in running to form you concede that the traditional concept of deity has to be abandoned. This is what atheists also argue, so you are in good company. You wish however to redefine "God"—but what as? You imply something less ambitious than the traditional version, but instead of specifying what that is, you merely say, "the idea of… God needs much more investigation." Might I suggest that the last 3,000 years have offered us enough material for reflection to allow us at last to dispense with what, in your first letter, you implausibly called "a plausible conjecture"?
Yours, AC Grayling
Dear Dr Grayling I do not concede that the traditional concept of deity has to be abandoned. I referred only to a "traditional philosophers' objection" to a specific definition of omnipotence. An acquaintance with the history of religious thought will show that this definition has always been disputed among believers. There are many philosophically developed ideas of God (my own God: a Guide for the Perplexed outlines some of them). Common to most is the idea of a personal cause of the universe, who is of supreme value. There always have been many ways of construing this.
Finally, there is a big difference between the statements, "The universe is designed to inflict pain" and "The universe is designed to produce intelligent life, but a foreseen, regretted yet inevitable consequence is the existence of pain"; also between "suffering for some good purpose" and "suffering as an unwelcome consequence of the pursuit of a good purpose." A personal cause of the universe might have to accept the latter pair, but never the former.
Yours, Keith Ward
Dear Professor Ward You do not concede that the traditional concept of deity needs abandoning; yet you also say in effect that there never has been one, since the definition of his attributes "has always been disputed among believers." I see that equivocation on meanings is useful for your purpose, though I suspect that the disputing has not been done by believers, but by theologians. For when believers recite their version of the creed—every version of which bar the Chalcedonian places "almighty God" at the head—they literally mean a God capable of anything, and therefore capable of preventing innocent suffering if he chose; which, if he exists and is omnipotent in the literal sense, he does not do, and that impugns his morals. Your vaguely drawn alternative deity is not to blame for humanity's sufferings because he is powerless to prevent them, but since this is far from what the body of the faithful believe of him, and furthermore, since diminished potency entails diminished wisdom, benevolence, and the rest of the traditional attributes, it is hard to see why anyone should be impressed by the residue you offer.
Yours, AC Grayling
Dear Dr Grayling,
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed 30,000 inhabitants, and led Voltaire to write a savage indictment of any form of religious belief that thinks God has created the best of all possible worlds. The Indian ocean earthquake has killed over 150,000, and it needs no Voltaire to remind us that God does not always act for the best.
If there is a supreme intelligence that has created this universe, its purposes clearly do not include the preservation of sentient beings from all harm. Yet it remains a plausible conjecture that there is such an intelligence.
Contemporary science, especially physics, sees the universe as a beautiful and elegant structure, so interconnected and finely adjusted that the smallest difference in the gravitational constant or the electromagnetic force would destroy the possibility of a universe like this altogether. The scientific perception of the cosmos is that it is an intelligible, law-like, mathematically complex structure, which produces intelligent moral agents by a process of increasingly integrated complexity from an initial state of extreme simplicity (the big bang).
Contemporary religious thought sees the purpose of creating such a cosmos as the production of finite minds that can enter into loving relationships with one another, take partial responsibility for the world and be fulfilled by knowing the supreme mind of the creator. For most religions, the completion of that purpose is beyond the cosmos itself, which is destined for destruction but remains necessary for the production of complex, evolved carbon-based lifeforms.
Neither science nor religion deny that there are vast destructive forces in nature. Science shows how they are essential to the structure of the cosmos—without the destructive energy of supernovae, carbon would never exist, and without earthquakes the earth would not remain stable. Religion claims that such forces will not defeat the ultimate purpose of creation. Even a supremely wise creator must forge beings like us in fires that can burn as well as vivify, in a cosmos whose powers operate on principles not attuned to the preferences of moral sensibility. But the religious affirmation is that the creator can take beings like us through destruction to final fulfilment in God, and that is a goal more desirable than we can imagine.
Thus a mature religious response to disasters like the Indian ocean earthquake is not to deny the suffering and loss—it is to do everything possible to mitigate them now and in the future. It is to accept the necessity of disaster in any cosmos of which we are part, and to seek and hope for the final flourishing of a goodness whose demands are imperative and whose promises are, at least to many of us, worthy of trust.
Is this the best of possible worlds? It is the only one that could have us in it, and while we are not the best of possible beings, we are perhaps—each one of us—of great intrinsic worth.
The traditional philosophers' criticism is that, if God were omnipotent, surely God could create better laws or a better universe with us in it. I am inclined simply to deny this, and to deny that anyone could know it was true. A perfectly reasonable definition of omnipotence is "having a power greater than any other possible being, and one from which all other possible powers derive." A theist can be philosophically content with a God who is omnipotent in that sense. And that restricted sense of omnipotence is compatible with there being necessities rooted in the divine being that even an omnipotent being cannot override. One set of such necessities is the necessity of earthquakes on planets formed by the operation of general physical laws in an expanding cosmos that generates highly complex molecular structures by natural evolution. If beings of great intrinsic worth, like us, come to exist on such planets, they must be seen as integral parts of the cosmos, subject to its laws and accidents, and not as alien or optional intrusions into nature.
Therefore we are by nature liable to tragic suffering and loss. Despite this loss, if there is a creator God, it is plausible to hope that God can ensure that the worth of finite persons finds adequate realisation—that is, their existence is very worthwhile—beyond this cosmos, and in relation to God. Most major religions are founded on the testimony of those who claim to be reliable and privileged witnesses—the prophets and saints—that this is the promise of a reliable God.
Naturally I cannot hope to demonstrate such claims. But I think it can be seen that there is an adequate religious response to major natural disasters. That response does not deny the tragedy. It sets aside Panglossian views that God will not let his favourites suffer. It sees with a clear eye the amoral beauty and the terrifying power of the natural order, and looks beyond to the compassionate power of a supreme objective Good that offers nothing but itself as our ultimate reward, and that works through the necessities of the cosmos to bring all finite sentient beings towards that ultimate goal. The religious attitude aligns itself with that striving for good and is never defeated by the frequent tragedies of human existence in this cosmos. To borrow a phrase from Iris Murdoch, it proclaims, in a world of pain and loss, the imperishable sovereignty of good.
Keith Ward
Dear Professor Ward While recognising that your euphuistic remarks are intended to encourage believers to retain their faith despite the horrendous and arbitrary suffering inflicted by nature on many innocents, I find it hard to locate an explicit argument in them to the conclusion that any theodicy must offer—that the existence of natural evil is compatible with the idea of a deity whose purposes are somehow good overall.
However, I discern two suggestions in what you say. The first—a traditional one—is that God must cause sentient creatures suffering in order that his (unspecified) purposes for them can ultimately be satisfied. The second—a less traditional one—is that omnipotence should shed its original meaning and be understood in a limited way to allow that God cannot control the forces of nature, implying that he is therefore neither responsible for, nor competent to lessen, the suffering they can cause.
The argument that God's purposes require that his sentient creatures must suffer is standardly met by noting that his power makes available to him any one of an indefinitely large number of possible worlds in which he could achieve exactly the same purposes without making his creatures suffer. When this consideration is opposed to the traditional conception of God as benevolent and omnipotent, it obliges us to accept that he is either not benevolent or not omnipotent. But if he lacks either attribute, he is not the God of traditional theology.
You choose the latter option in your second suggestion. God is not omnipotent in the traditional sense; he cannot control the natural forces that inflict suffering on innocents. This prompts difficult questions for you. How can God, though thus relatively impotent, be able to create the universe? If he nevertheless could create it, why would he do so, given his traditionally attributed foreknowledge by which he could see that it will cause suffering? If he cannot himself will and direct the suffering thus caused, is he not irresponsible, to say the least, in creating such a world? No human father could build an uncontrollably dangerous machine and put his child into it, without being held criminally culpable for the consequences. Why not God?
Perhaps, to limit God's responsibility in this respect, you implicitly mean to limit his foreknowledge too. But by exonerating God from responsibility for natural evil by repudiating the traditional definition of him as omnipotent and omniscient, you owe us an account of what your unrecognisable replacement being is, and why it should be of interest to people who for millennia have thought they were dealing with the traditionally conceived one.
There is anyway a fatal problem with your suggestions. To say both that God makes us suffer natural disasters for our ultimate good, and that the natural disasters that cause such suffering lie outside God's control, is to assert a contradiction: you are saying that God does what he cannot do. This is an incoherent thesis. But that, for theology, is nothing new.
Yours, AC Grayling
Dear Dr Grayling The incoherent thesis is your own invention. I do not say that God makes us suffer for our own good. I say that God must create us in a universe in which suffering will foreseeably result—not arbitrarily, but in accordance with laws of nature. If I build aircraft, knowing that some people will die in crashes, I do not make them die. So God creates a mathematically beautiful universe that is a necessary condition of many great values, but an unintended consequence will be the suffering of many sentient beings. God does not make them suffer, though God is responsible for creating the world in which they suffer.
This does entail that there are necessities of nature that God cannot change. But it does not mean, and I do not say, that the processes of nature are outside God's control. It means that if God sets up the universe to be law-governed and free of continual divine interference, God cannot also continually interfere to prevent suffering.
I agree this is a restricted view of omnipotence, but it is a traditional and widely held religious view. It is philosophers who have tried to foist on believers a possibly incoherent notion of absolutely unlimited power. You suppose that there are possible worlds in which God could achieve exactly the same purposes without creatures suffering. I am not as confident about my knowledge of possible worlds as you, but I guess that no purpose could be exactly the same if it was in a possible world markedly different from this one.
In general, many more distinctions need to be made before accusations of incoherence can be thrown around. The ideas of causation, necessity, possibility and God need much more investigation. They are, I think, obscure enough to render knockdown arguments in this area unobtainable.
Yours, Keith Ward
Dear Professor Ward You wrote, "Even a supremely wise creator must forge beings like us in fires that can burn as well as vivify," which I took to be a poetic assertion of the need for beings like us to suffer for some good purpose. By now saying, surprisingly, that you did not mean this, you offer the even less palatable alternative that the creator allows or, since he is not truly omnipotent, accepts that our sufferings can serve no good purpose.
A possible world is any internally consistent world: the concept is not hard to grasp. Even a limited deity such as you hypothesise would have many choices about what kind of world to actualise. Did he choose to actualise one in which natural disasters can bring suffering to innocents, rather than one in which (say) only non-innocents would thus suffer? If so, why?
Or does the limitation on God's potency mean that he could not control which world was actualised in the first place? But if so, why do you call him "the creator"? If he is the creator, he is not like a builder of an aeroplane which everyone hopes will never crash; he is rather like the builder of an aeroplane which is actually designed to crash— this being the necessity of a world with moving tectonic plates, viruses, and all the other vectors of disaster; and for this, therefore, he is responsible.
The way theologians continually reinvent their central concepts to evade challenge, hiding behind redefinitions of causation, necessity, and even the word "God" itself, is characteristic of their profession, but at least in running to form you concede that the traditional concept of deity has to be abandoned. This is what atheists also argue, so you are in good company. You wish however to redefine "God"—but what as? You imply something less ambitious than the traditional version, but instead of specifying what that is, you merely say, "the idea of… God needs much more investigation." Might I suggest that the last 3,000 years have offered us enough material for reflection to allow us at last to dispense with what, in your first letter, you implausibly called "a plausible conjecture"?
Yours, AC Grayling
Dear Dr Grayling I do not concede that the traditional concept of deity has to be abandoned. I referred only to a "traditional philosophers' objection" to a specific definition of omnipotence. An acquaintance with the history of religious thought will show that this definition has always been disputed among believers. There are many philosophically developed ideas of God (my own God: a Guide for the Perplexed outlines some of them). Common to most is the idea of a personal cause of the universe, who is of supreme value. There always have been many ways of construing this.
Finally, there is a big difference between the statements, "The universe is designed to inflict pain" and "The universe is designed to produce intelligent life, but a foreseen, regretted yet inevitable consequence is the existence of pain"; also between "suffering for some good purpose" and "suffering as an unwelcome consequence of the pursuit of a good purpose." A personal cause of the universe might have to accept the latter pair, but never the former.
Yours, Keith Ward
Dear Professor Ward You do not concede that the traditional concept of deity needs abandoning; yet you also say in effect that there never has been one, since the definition of his attributes "has always been disputed among believers." I see that equivocation on meanings is useful for your purpose, though I suspect that the disputing has not been done by believers, but by theologians. For when believers recite their version of the creed—every version of which bar the Chalcedonian places "almighty God" at the head—they literally mean a God capable of anything, and therefore capable of preventing innocent suffering if he chose; which, if he exists and is omnipotent in the literal sense, he does not do, and that impugns his morals. Your vaguely drawn alternative deity is not to blame for humanity's sufferings because he is powerless to prevent them, but since this is far from what the body of the faithful believe of him, and furthermore, since diminished potency entails diminished wisdom, benevolence, and the rest of the traditional attributes, it is hard to see why anyone should be impressed by the residue you offer.
Yours, AC Grayling
