Physicalists Should Have a Problem with the Problem of Suffering

What if the very worldview many atheists champion—physicalism—undermines their strongest argument against God: the problem of suffering?

From the editor of JAT: This guest post comes from Dr. Enric F. Gel. Interested in contributing to the Journal of Absolute Truth? Click here for details.

1. Introduction

Many atheists appeal to pain or suffering as extremely strong evidence against the existence of God. Many atheists also want to be physicalists, or else find physicalism as the most compelling form of naturalism. Here is a funny occurrence worth exploring: I think these two attitudes are in tension amongst themselves. That is, if one wants to be a physicalist, he should not use the problem of suffering as an argument for atheism—and vice versa, if one is an atheist because of the problem of suffering, he should probably not be a physicalist.

Let’s start setting the stage. From a commonsense point of view, that suffering might be considered, at least prima facie, as evidence against God is pretty easy to see.[1] On its face, suffering seems clearly bad—it is the kind of experience we strive to avoid as much as possible. We don’t wake up in the morning thinking: “Hmmm, I did not suffer very much yesterday, I hope I get tons of suffering today!”. Likewise, if we love someone, we usually don’t want them to suffer, and if for some reason they must, we seek to alleviate their suffering all we can. Because of this, we might expect that an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good, and loving creator (aka. God) will not give rise to a world with suffering, or at least not a world with so much horrendous and seemingly pointless suffering as the one we inhabit. Thus, finding ourselves in such a world, we might consider this as pretty strong evidence against the hypothesis that such a God exists.

What is physicalism? “Physicalism” is the new and fancy word for “materialism” and for our purposes can be defined as the theory that everything is physical, or else dependent on the physical. And what is “the physical”? Discussion abounds, but we can settle with the following: an entity or property is physical if and only if it is the kind of entity or property physics (the science) informs us that exists—entities like fields, particles, atoms, molecules, and properties like mass, charge, force, speed, momentum. Ideally, physicalism should be understood by reference to the holy grail of future completed physics, given the certainty that current physics has still much to discover. But if physicalism is to have any content as a philosophical theory for the present, current physics must have at least the contours of reality right—in other words, the picture of the world the physicalist obtains from it can’t be that far off from the truth.[2]

Now, in a sense, it is obvious why a physicalist would be an atheist. If God is the paradigm example of a non-physical being and your worldview says that only physical stuff exists (or at most, that any non-physical stuff strongly supervenes on the physical), then your worldview excludes the existence of God from the get-go. But this is to be an atheist because of one’s physicalism. And it is at least possible to be an atheist because you think physicalism is true, and not find suffering to be compelling evidence against the existence of God. So, let’s explore that possibility.

2. Meet Smith

To drive the point home, imagine an agnostic, Smith, who becomes convinced that physicalism is correct about the human mind.[3] We could say Smith is now a restricted physicalist—he thinks physicalism gets at least us right. Smith now considers, from his newly acquired vantage point, whether he should become a full-blown physicalist. If he could finally abandon his agnosticism and discard God’s existence, that would indeed be the direction to go. But he is not sure yet. After all, for all he knows, maybe physicalism is right about human beings, but there still exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good non-physical mind that created the world and us with it. Smith hears many people appeal to suffering as evidence against the existence of God, and thus, he starts considering that. Should he take suffering as an argument against theism?

Well, that is going to depend on what Smith now thinks suffering is, and that in turn depends on the kind of physicalist Smith has become. Let’s go to the extreme and assume Smith became an eliminativist. In a nutshell, eliminativists claim that all our mental concepts are garbage— that terms like “happy”, “feeling”, “pleasure”, “thirst”, etc. are at best useful fictions with no real referent in the world. In plain words, mind simply does not exist. The neurophysiology of the brain is all that there is.

I like eliminativists. I think they see clearly that mind does not fit at all into a physicalist framework, and they take the only logical conclusion: mind must not be real, it must be some kind of illusion.[4] Why think this? Because the mind, if it exists, has a subjective dimension, a first-person point of view, that can’t be easily reduced or derived from anything objective (third-persony) that science discovers. Science can tell you what your brain does—what neurons are firing, what chemical reactions take place, what brain areas interact, etc.—but it can’t tell you what it is like to be you, subjectively speaking. Nor is that something you can derive or deduce by objectively studying a brain. As Thomas Nagel famously put it,[5] you could in principle get a complete physical description of everything that happens inside a bat and you’d still not be a millimeter closer to understanding what it is like to be a bat, to perceive the world from its unique subjective point of view. So, reasons the eliminativist, if only what physics can tell me is real, and physics tells me nothing about this “mental” stuff people are so hang up about, then people must be systematically deluded about it. There must not be any subjective experience whatsoever, full stop.

For sure, eliminativism is as crazy as philosophy gets, but that is neither here nor there. What we are trying to find out is whether eliminativist Smith should use suffering as evidence against the existence of God. And given what we just said, how could he? Suffering (or pain) is a mental concept; it refers to a subjective experience with an intrinsic qualitative character. But Smith has embraced eliminativism, and he now thinks no mental processes, states or properties are real. Thus, Smith can’t appeal to suffering to justify atheism—indeed, he does not believe suffering exists!

Compare it with the following. Suppose I was an atheist and also a natural disaster denier (crazier conspiracy theories are out there, trust me). I don’t believe in hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes… you name it! They can fake anything these days. Would it make sense for me to turn around and say, “By the way, I’m an atheist because there are too many natural disasters, and a perfectly good God would not allow them”? No, I already denied those exist! Even if I thought a perfectly good God would not allow any natural disaster to happen, I would be denying the existential a posteriori premise that they do happen, so I’d have no argument here.

Eliminativist Smith appears to be in the same boat. Even if he thought God would not allow suffering, he does not think suffering exists, so there’s no argument from suffering that could rationally make him embrace atheism. Thus, it seems being an eliminativist is incompatible with appealing to suffering as evidence against God. Indeed, there is no suffering anywhere to appeal to! There hasn’t been, and there will never be.

You may be thinking “But wait! The problem of suffering is supposed to be an internal critique to theism.” Hold that thought, I will address it later on. For now, we are interested in what Smith, the physicalist, should think about this from his own epistemic position. And it seems clear that if Smith thinks nobody has ever suffered, it makes no sense for him to appeal to suffering as evidence against the existence of God.

3. Giving Physicalism a Second Chance

But eliminativists are the crazy physicalists (or so I’m told by other physicalists). Let’s turn, then, to a more “respectable” view within physicalism—identity theory. Identity theorists acknowledge the existence of the mental but identify it with processes or states of the brain. Pain, for instance, just is C-fibers firing, and that’s all. This way, we avoid postulating nonphysical (code word for “spooky”) stuff, and any mental state or process is simply reduced to a physical happening in the brain. Everything remains as physical as physics tells us it is.

Now, in my experience, many people use the identity theory label in a confusing manner. This allows for an important ambiguity to remain unnoticed, and hence, unexamined. What we must ask to bring it to light is the following. Mental states just are brain states, fine. But do these brain states have a mental dimension that is irreducible to their physical properties? If the answer is yes, then what we call pain might just be the physical process of C-fibers firing, but still have a qualitative, intrinsic what it is like that can only be apprehended from the inside, and that is hence irreducible to its objective, outward, third-person physical dimension. This is actually a kind of dual aspect theory or property dualism—we don’t have two distinct things or substances (mind and brain, for instance), but we do have two distinct kinds of properties, physical and mental, as two irreducible aspects of the same one thing.[6]

An example: we might identify trilateral things with triangular things. There are no two things (trilaterals and triangulars), but only one thing which is both trilateral and triangular. But still, we don’t identify trilaterality with triangularity—these are two distinct properties of the same one thing, which is at both times trilateral and triangular. Likewise, I might see a cup and touch a cup, but this does not mean that there are two cups, a visible cup and a tangible cup. There is only one cup. Still, seeing and touching are not the same, nor are identical the properties by which the cup can be seen and those by which the cup can be touched. Last example—it is one and the same coin which has two sides, but neither side is identical to the other. Property dualism claims something similar about the relationship between mind and brain. The mind just is the brain, but the brain instantiates two distinct and irreducible kinds of properties, physical and mental. There is everything I can physically ascertain about the process of C-fibers firing, and additionally there is a subjective side to all of that, the private first-person experience of what it is like to be in pain. Thus, in this view, pain, which is identical to C-fibers firing, will have both a physical dimension and a nonphysical mental dimension.

Personally, I don’t consider this position worthy of the name “identity theory”. We might be identifying or reducing mental states and processes to brain states and processes, yes, but we are still leaving them with an intrinsically mental dimension that is not reduced to or identified with anything physical. We will consider what should property dualist Smith think about suffering below. But for now, let’s assume Smith sees through the ambiguity and reduces even mental properties to physical properties of the brain. There is no irreducible what it is like to be in pain—what it is like to be in pain simply is one of the physical properties of C-fibers firing (or else a combination thereof).

I am going to be extremely honest with you—I do not understand this view. Better said, I don’t think it is intelligible. It makes no sense to me to say that pain exists but is exhausted by a physical and objective characterization of the process of C-fibers firing. That just appears like eliminativism in disguise. But it does not matter what I think; we are preoccupied with what identity theory Smith now thinks. And identity theory Smith thinks that a complete physical description of the process of C-fibers firing gives us everything there is to know, ontologically, about pain. Certainly, unlike eliminativists, identity theory Smith believes that pain and suffering exist (or so he says). But should he believe that, if God existed, he would not allow there to be pain and suffering, so construed?

I don’t see why. What is it about the process of C-fibers firing that should be so repulsive to an all-powerful, perfectly good God? What is it that physics supposedly has discovered about the true nature of pain that makes it so incongruent with perfect goodness? To my mind, Smith should believe pain to be as compatible with the existence of God as any other old physical process happening in the universe. After all, there is nothing intrinsically bad about C-fibers firing. And what we might have initially thought was intrinsically bad about pain (its subjective felt dimension), identity theory Smith now believes is actually exhausted by what physics can tell us about this process. And given a complete physical description of everything that happens in our body when C-fibers fire, why should God not create beings with C-fibers that fire in the presence of certain stimuli? I don’t see why identity theory Smith should think there is a problem of C-fibers firing, or that there is too much C-fibers firing in the world for God to allow.

Compare with the following. Suppose some crazy person thought water was evidence against the existence of God because it exhibited a property, substantial continuity, which was somehow disagreeable to perfect goodness (don’t ask why, please don’t). Chemistry comes along and teaches us that, actually, water is H2O—water gets reduced to (identified with) a certain configuration of H2O molecules. Now, to me, this amounts to an elimination of substantial continuity as a property of water. Water is not really a continuous substance, as it appeared to be to us, because any configuration of H2O molecules is mostly empty space. But suppose our crazy person reasons thus: “Amazing! Who would have thought? I guess substantial continuity was just identical to mostly empty space all along!”. Should this person still think that water was evidence against the existence of God? It seems not, because that property of water that they thought was disagreeable to perfect goodness has been radically reconceived, to a point where maybe it’s no longer in tension with the existence of God (and if it is, it can’t be because of how such a property appeared to them before chemistry came along).

Take a different (and perhaps clearer) example. Suppose crazy person number 2 ends up believing pain is actually identical to pleasure, full stop. It’s not that pleasure gets reduced to pain, though, but the other way around—pain gets reduced to pleasure. Should someone like this still think that pain is evidence against the existence of God? Again, it seems not, or at least not unless he should also think pleasure to be evidence against the existence of God (and I know of nobody who has proposed such a thing).

Something similar, I contend, should happen to identity theory Smith. What he now believes about pain and suffering—the truth about pain and suffering that he thinks science has uncovered—does not appear to be at all something a perfectly good God would not create or allow. It only appears so when relapsing into a folk understanding about the mental, that to Smith’s mind (or should I say, brain processes?) neuroscience has made moot.

4. Last option

So, what about property dualist Smith? Can he appeal to suffering as evidence against the existence of God? Recall that property dualist Smith believes mind and brain are the same thing, but that this one thing instantiates two irreducibly distinct kinds of properties, mental and physical. On the one side, there is all that figures in a physical and objective description of C-fibers firing, and on the other side, there is a felt subjective dimension to all of that—what it is like to be in pain, from a first-person perspective. Property dualism is, hence, nonreductive: the essential character of the mental, its subjective qualitative dimension, is not reducible to the physical properties, states, or processes of the brain. It is, instead, something additional that accompanies them in a lawlike manner.

Before moving on, we should ask a further question. Are these irreducible mental properties causally efficacious? The commonsense answer is a stounding yes. Indeed, we constantly appeal to our mental lives to explain our behavior. I took an aspirin because my head ached. I was up late last night because I remembered I hadn’t finished my homework. I had to lay down for a while because I got dizzy after understanding Hegel and holding the completion of absolute idealism in my mind’s eye. And so on.

If these commonsense explanations are correct, the mental must be causally efficacious—mental properties must be able to affect bodily motion, somehow. I must be able to move around in virtue of the content of my mental life. But I don’t think this is an open avenue for the physicalist property dualist. Accepting nonphysical properties into your worldview already doesn’t seem very physicalist. But claiming that such nonphysical properties can have physical effects in the world… that would be physicalism in name only![7]

So, it seems Smith’s only remaining physicalist option is a view someone with poor marketing skills labeled “epiphenomenalism”—the idea that the mental is entirely (and mysteriously) produced by physical processes in the brain but lacks the power to produce anything of its own. Mind (or the subjective dimension of mind) is always just an effect of prior things, and never a cause of anything that comes after. Thus, any purported case of mental causation is just an illusion.[8]

Now, could epiphenomenalist Smith appeal to suffering to justify a belief in atheism? In a sense, it might seem that yes, he can. Epiphenomenalism retains the felt subjective aspect of pain as folkly understood, and that is precisely what seems bad and in conflict with perfect goodness. On top of it, if pain is epiphenomenal, it serves no functional role at all. It is not as if feeling pain could be deemed useful because it will make the organism avoid dangerous behavior or strive for virtue and character building—pain (as a mental, nonphysical property) cannot make anything, it is entirely superfluous. Living organisms do what they do in virtue of the neurophysiological properties of their brain processes, not in virtue of their subjective experiences. Their first-person mental life is like an insanely long movie that plays in the theatre of their heads, while their bodies move around mechanically, in a way completely independent of what the organism in question feels, perceives, imagines, thinks, and desires. Hence, why on Earth would a perfectly good being allow its creatures to have completely useless painful experiences, let alone so many and horrendous of them? That is at least a strategy epiphenomenalist Smith could try to pursue.

But a deeper look reveals that, actually, Smith cannot appeal to suffering to justify atheism, and again, precisely because of what suffering becomes once he adopts this physicalist picture of it. For, ff suffering is entirely epiphenomenal, it cannot produce anything. But if it cannot produce anything, then it cannot produce any belief in atheism either. And if suffering cannot enter into the process that leads to a belief in atheism, then one cannot be an atheist because of suffering. Smith might end up becoming an atheist and believing he is an atheist because suffering is strong evidence against the existence of God, but his own physicalist theory condemns this entire story as a hopeless illusion. Smith believes what he believes not because of having experienced suffering or because of reasons having to do with suffering—he believes what he believes because his brain is in a certain physical state that correlates with believing that, end of story. Neurons firing lead to this belief, not suffering in any form.

5. Conclusion

So, in the end, what have we got? Atheists typically appeal to suffering as extremely strong evidence against the existence of God. Many atheists also want to be physicalists since they find physicalism to be the most compelling form of naturalism. But now we see that the three main brands of physicalism on offer are incompatible with using the problem of suffering as an argument against the existence of God. Eliminativists don’t think pain and suffering exist, and there can’t be a problem of suffering if there is no suffering. Identity theorists reconceive pain in such a radical way that it is no longer clear whether pain-so-conceived is something a perfectly good God would not allow. And finally, epiphenomenalists, by depriving suffering of any causal efficacy, also deprive it of the capacity to rationally figure in an argument against theism.

At this point, and as we advanced previously, the physicalist might claim the problem of suffering is intended as an internal critique of theism. If that is so, internal critiques merit internal responses, and the theist is within their rights to appeal to resources internal to their theory to defuse the problem. Those already exist —they are called theodicies, and whether they work or not is another discussion. But I don’t think this should distract us from what I have argued.

First, because it is at least conceivable that a theist might agree with the physicalist about the nature of pain and suffering. Hence, if the physicalist can say that pain does not exist, or else is just identical with some physical property or combination of properties, or else is epiphenomenal, then it might be also possible for the theist to say any of those things. There are some Christian physicalists after all.[9] This is to say that the folk understanding of suffering—the one behind the force of the problem of suffering—need not be an internal part of theism. Maybe if all other theodicies fail, the theist should simply adopt a physicalist understanding of suffering. (Call this the Physicalist Theodicy!)

But second, and more importantly, it has value in itself to wonder how physicalists should think about God and suffering, from the epistemic vantage point of their own theory—and to make that easier we imagined whether suffering should move an agnostic physicalist towards atheism. If what I have argued is correct, then physicalists should have a problem with the problem of suffering, understood as an argument against theism.

Thus, it appears we are in front of two rationally unmarriable attitudes. If you want to use suffering as evidence against God, you better not be a physicalist. And if you want to be a physicalist, you better not use suffering as evidence against God. And that, if true, is a funny occurrence indeed.

About Dr. Enric F. Gel

Enric F. Gel studied Philosophy at the University of Navarre and got his PhD from the University of Barcelona, with a thesis on the metaphysical foundations of ethics in Aristotle and Aquinas. His interests range from metaphysics to philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion. He has published in Review of Metaphysics, Religious Studies, TheoLogica and Faith and Philosophy. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, where he enjoys Catalan delicacies such as pà amb tomàquet (bread with tomato spread over it, but not tomato sauce, and not tomato slices; it's hard to explain). He is married and father to three beautiful daughters.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0714-5889

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[1] Though see P. Flynn, The Best Argument for God (Manchester, Sophia Institute Press, 2023), ch. 11 for an excellent turning of the tables on how suffering is, actually, evidence for theism. Also, I will be using “pain” and “suffering” interchangeably.

[2] If not, suppose future completed physics explains physical phenomena in terms of the power and reasons of a perfect fundamental being. Then theists would have been the true physicalists all along!

[3] Let’s leave animals out of this. Though, importantly, everything that will be said, if correct, applies equally as well to the problem of animal suffering.

[4] Though, of course, “illusion” is a mental concept, so it must be an illusory illusion. The delusion of an illusory illusion. The deluded delusion of an illusory illusion. You get the point.

[5] See T. Nagel, “What It Is Like To Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review, 1974 (83, 4): 435-450.

[6] An idea even a Scholastic thinker as Aquinas could get behind, with some qualifications. See E. Feser, “Was Aquinas a Property Dualist?,” in Edward Feser (Blogspot), 29 November 2019: <https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/11/was-aquinas-property-dualist.html> [Consulted: 13.01.2025].

[7] This is Jaegwon Kim’s point in “The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1989 (63, 3): 31-47.

^[8] Physicalism is full of illusions!

[9] Philosophy is weird.