by Simon Smith
I was recently telling James T.
Beauregard, of the Starship Chicken Parmenides, about a new project. It’s a
return to familiar territory for me: high transcendence, Chalcedonian formulae,
and the meaning of salvation. Thanks to Daria Tomiltseva of the Ural Federal
University, this time I’ll be going in, not just with Farrer and the usual
crowd, but with Giorgio Agamben too. Dr T. kindly sent me The Signature of All Things after she and I met at a conference in
Tallinn last year.
Informed of my
plans, Jim, as is his wont, replied with observations thereupon, one of which was
that, since Salvation was my theme, I should probably give some thought to the
Problem of Evil.
I shan’t be
doing that, for two reasons. First, it’s beyond the scope of my investigation.
I merely want to know whether we can make sense of Salvation when the Saviour
is homoousia with God above and
before all worlds. (Spoiler: not with substance metaphysics – a load of old
toot anyway – but apply a theory of signatures and maybe.) Second: been there, bought
the prepuce.[1]
I have, you
see, already published something on so-called Natural Evil, in Appraisal.[2] It
followed on from work I’d done for my book, which is available from Amazon
and Vernon
Press. Go on, you know you want to.
My article was
meant to be the first of two, with the second focusing on the Evil that men and
women seem so keen on doing. In this
first one, however, my aims were threefold:
Aim One
Epicurus’ old, unanswered
questions, traditionally conceived, are a function of philosophical realism. They
result from the inability of realists to distinguish anthropomorphic projection
from literal description. (David Hume probably should have noticed this and
saved us all a lot of trouble.) This, despite the fact that the Problem of Evil
isn’t even really a problem in its own right at all. As Farrer points out, it’s
actually ‘a special development of the classical argument from our world to
God.’[3]
This ‘special
development’ is our most fundamental theistical move, our first cosmological
intuition. Contrary to popular philosophical opinion, that is, the believer does not begin with questions like ‘why
is there anything at all?’ Still less do they start with ‘does God exist?’
I once got
into a huge row about this; it almost came to blows. Another philosopher (ha!) insisted
that the question theists are most interested in concerns the existence of God.
I challenged him to find a single church, mosque, or synagogue where that gets
asked. Then I pointed out that only philosophers were dumb enough to imagine
that religious faith is actually some kind of metaphysical experiment. Then I
threw a chair at him.
Well, he really got up my pipe.
And it was only a Work in
Progress seminar.
And, anyway, I missed him. More
or less.
Nevertheless, the basic metaphysical
move is to not to ask, ‘why is there
anything at all?’ but ‘why are things the
way they are?’ the implication being, they might be, and perhaps ought to
be, rather better.
Anyone who has
read and grown out of realism will know that realists are adept at getting
their unchanged undies in a Gordian knot over things like this. They cheerfully
declare that evil is a mind-independently real property of a mind-independently
real world, which, by the way, is apparently made of mind-independently real ‘chalk
escarpments, oxygen, Scottish lochs’ and the like.[4] (I’m
thinking, as a glance at the footnotes will indicate, specifically of Peter
Byrne, but he’s quite typical of this crowd.) The somewhat bizarre lesson seems
to be that chalk escarpments, oxygen, Scottish lochs, and all the other
physical furniture of the world are mind-independently evil.
I can’t
remember the last time I saw, or even heard of a Scottish Loch kicking a puppy,
or pushing an old lady in front of a bus, or systematically undermining the
civil rights of gay people, or being racist, or advocating sexual assault, or
keeping children in cages, or saying ‘begs the question’ when they mean ‘raises the question’. Honestly, I can’t.
Is that because
Scottish lochs are just very, very good at hiding their crimes? Obviously! Who
do they think they’re kidding, just lying there, in Scotland, all big and cold
and wet? You can bet the Deep State is in on this, covering up for them. Oh, I
am on to you, Scottish lochs, I am on to you!
But let’s say,
for the sake of argument, that we take our meds. Then, the proposition that the
mind-independently real furniture which constitutes the mind-independently real
world is mind-independently evil sounds a lot like anthropomorphic projection.
Unless the Scottish lochs are
being possessed by some evil force!
Medication time!
Aim Two
Get away from the kind of
swivel-eyed mentalism which sees malevolent bodies of water all around us, and anthropomorphic
confusion remains at the heart of the matter. When we look at Creation and
complain about the poor workmanship, we make the mistake of assuming that the
universe is, to borrow Farrer’s somewhat antiquated phrase, the product of ‘manlike
planning.’[5]
Mind you, six
days. You can hardly blame people for being suspicious. What kind of contractor
does anything in six days? It’s got ‘bodge job’ written all over it. No wonder
we got the light two days before the sun came up.
We suppose the
world was made just for us by someone just like us. Perhaps, like Monty’s golfers, we grumble because we
haven’t received ‘that amount of luck which a human being has a right to expect;’[6] or, at
the farther end of the scale, perhaps we’re on the sharp end of an erupting
volcano or massive earthquake. Either way, it really makes no sense and does no
good to wonder why God allows such things to happen. There are, I imagine, more
urgent and practical issues to consider.
This also goes
for blaming the Devil, as American televangelist and top-quality arsehole, Pat
Robertson, did in 2010 when a devastating earthquake struck Haiti.
Besides, everyone knows that
natural disasters are caused by homosexuals.
That’s a joke, obviously. Homosexuals
cause floods, not earthquakes.
Earthquakes are caused by
tectonic plates. Homosexual ones.
Come on people! What do you think
the ‘T’ in LGBTQ stands for?!
As far as I know, I’m not a
geologist (or a homosexualist) but all the clues are there. Wake up and smell
the magma sheeple! The truth is out there, the lies are in your head!
Thinking about it, homosexuality
is a curious thing for God to get upset about. One might have thought that something
like paedophilia might be higher up the naughty list. Oddly, not.
But I digress.
Notwithstanding the idiot ramblings of bigots and realists, creation is exactly
what it appears to be: a physical universe in which physical forces crash and
bang about the place; rhythmic
patterns of energy caring not one jot or tittle for anyone or anything else,
not from choice but because they are spectacularly unequipped to do so. Farrer
called it a ‘free-for-all of elemental forces.’[7] Naturally,
where you have a free-for-all, accidents happen – they happen naturally. Well,
rhythmic patterns of energy will be rhythmic patterns of energy. And that’s the point: accidentality is built into – or ‘built into’, if you
prefer – the universe; it’s what the universe is made of.
None of this,
by the way, necessarily undermines the idea of divine Creation. If one believes
in God, then surely one believes that he or she made the universe to be what it
is: real, not some kind of Hollywood film set. If God created those forces and
everything they constitute, then presumably he or she made them to be
themselves. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Aim Three
Asking ‘what’s the point’ is, of course,
another fairly bootless exercise. The believer is wasting his time because he
must be aware that the ways of God are beyond our ken. The non-believer will
regard the question as meaningless, not because there is no purpose to the universe, as Dawkins et al. suppose, but
because a concatenation of arbitrary connections and random collisions isn’t
the sort of thing that can have a
meaning (dumbasses).
The foregoing
is not just the only sensible way to do this, nor even simply the foundations
for a rapprochement of theistical and naturalistic conceptions of the universe.
It is also an essential element of coherent epistemology.
Otherwise put,
once suppose the world is a product of ‘manlike planning’ and we undermine our
capacity to know anything at all. It means we cannot really know the universe because
all we encounter is a façade. Worse still, it means we cannot really know
ourselves, because we only know ourselves as physical agents in a physical
environment. Who we are is a function of what we do; I know myself as the agent
of this or that activity, as the person who is attempting to bring about this
or that change in his environment. But if my environment isn’t real, if it is
only a film set, then how can I be sure that any consequences which appear to follow from my intended acts
really are the consequences I intended to enact? I wouldn’t know whether any
particular event was caused by me; I wouldn’t even know if the event was real.
As irksome as
this is to anyone interested in knowing about the universe and themselves, it’s
even worse for the religious believer. If we can’t rely on knowledge about the
world or ourselves, then we have no rational or empirical grounds for thinking
God. We’re trapped in Descartes silly scepticism. Well that may be fine for
undergraduates, but you just try using it as an excuse next time you forget
your mother’s birthday. I’m sure she would be more than happy to educate you on
what’s real and what’s not, quite possibly with the back of a wooden spoon.
Those, in sum, are the three
things I was trying to do with my paper on Natural Evil. This was, as I
mentioned above, supposed to be the first of two papers on the subject. The
second was going to tackle the Problem of Moral of Human Evil, i.e. why God
allows human beings to commit evil? By the time I’d covered the naturalness of the
universe, its inherent accidentality, and the necessity of those two things to
our capacity to know things, however, another paper didn’t seem worth the
candle. After all, the point remains the same. Human beings are part of that
real, physical universe. As such, we’re
more than capable of behaving likewise: crashing and banging about the place,
caring not one jot or tittle for anyone or anything else; that’s to say –
transposing merely physical modalities into a personal context – acting
selfishly, thoughtlessly, relying on physical force to get what we want
irrespective of the consequences.
More
importantly, perhaps, we are – and must be, if we are to be more than mere
puppets – free agents, capable of acting freely, within the lineaments of both
human consciousness and a physical world. Yet again, the reality of that active
capacity is epistemically essential. Knowledge is a function of free action.
Without free action, interference with our environment, expressing the will to
bring about change in the service of our needs, desires, and interests, then
we, once again, would know nothing of ourselves or the universe we live in.
Given that, the possibility of evil action is inevitable. The freedom to act
intelligently and constructively entails the freedom to act stupidly and
destructively.
Still, at
least when we do act destructively, we can, as Ex-Pope Benedict has recently
done, blame it on homosexuals.
And that, of
course, is where the Problem of Evil really starts to bite. Asking why God
allows suffering, whether caused by unforgiving nature or unthinking humanity,
is a diversionary tactic. The real question is, why do we allow it?
[1]
I vividly remember my very first philosophy teacher telling me that, during the
middle ages, the craze for religious relicts was such that, at one point, there
were dozens of the things flying about Europe. For obvious reasons, this is one
thing that stuck.
[2]
‘Anthropomorphism and the Evils of Realism’, Appraisal 9:2 (2012): 23-33. This was back when the British
Personalist Forum was still the Society for Post-Critical and Personalist
Studies. The article is actually pretty good, if I do say so myself. If anyone
is interested in having a look, let me know and I’ll send them a copy.
[3]
Farrer, A. Love Almighty and Ills
Unlimited. London & Glasgow: The Fontana Library, 1966, 8.
[4]
Byrne, Peter. God and Realism.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 67.
[5]
Farrer, A. A Science of God? London:
Geoffrey Bles Ltd, 1966, 76. This, by the way, is an excellent and eminently
sensible little book. I highly recommend it for believer and non-believer
alike.
[6]
James, M. R. ‘The Mezzotint’ in Collected
Ghost Stories. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994, 24.
[7]
Farrer, A. A Science of God? London:
Geoffrey Bles Ltd, 1966,91.
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