Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy by Michael Huemer

Author:Michael Huemer [Huemer, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-02T22:00:00+00:00

10.4. Theodicies and Defenses

A theodicy is an attempt to explain why a perfect God would allow bad things to exist. There are many theodicies, some much better than others. We start with some terrible ones.

10.4.1. How Do We Know What God Values?

If you talk about the problem of evil in a class, you’re pretty much guaranteed to hear at least one student say something like this: “How do we know what God considers good or bad? Maybe what is ‘bad’ to us is good to God.”

In order for this suggestion to succeed as a theodicy, it would have to be that everything that happens that we consider bad God considers good. It would have to be, e.g., that God found the Holocaust delightful, that He likes childhood cancer, torture, war, and so on. (It can’t be that he just values suffering, though, because then we’d have no answer to why he sometimes allows us to not be suffering.) This is just a thoroughly implausible and unmotivated suggestion.

Now, it may seem that philosophers pretend to doubt the obvious all the time (see, e.g., chapters 6–7) and therefore that this absurd suggestion should be right up our alley. I guess that’s what students think. Here’s what they’re missing: We don’t just pick any absurd thing and say it for no reason. When we’re going to say some ridiculous thing, we give an argument for it, starting from premises that seem at least somewhat plausible. The “how do we know what God values?” theodicy doesn’t do that – it just arbitrarily suggests something absurd, with no explanation or justification. Don’t do that. There’s no point to that.

By the way, another problem with this theodicy is that it tries to defend theism with a suggestion that no theist would accept. Theists in general have some strong views about what is good and bad, and, in my experience, none of them think that literally everything that happens is good. No theist thinks, for example, that sin is good, that all murders are good, etc. So they can’t respond to the problem of evil by saying that what humans consider bad is really good.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.