Reversing the Evidential Problem of Evil

The evidential argument from evil against God claims the suffering of our experience is far more likely if God does not exist than if God does exist. The naturalist claims this is substantial evidence against the existence of God.

In response, most theists argue either that the suffering of our experience (including apparently gratuitous suffering) is not surprising if God exists or that we are not in a good epistemic position to evaluate the matter. (See my 8 (or so) Responses to the Problem of Evil.)

However, one position often not justified is that naturalism predicts a world with the suffusion of suffering of just the sort we see. Not only is this position not justified, it is false. This, I suggest, is where more theists should focus their attention.

The underlying issue is that naturalists make their prediction about suffering from what I call a superficial or naïve naturalism. Essentially, where they see the world through an everyday “commonsense” lens, that is, through a perspective that only jibes with theism, yet omits God. However, once the metaphysical lens is adjusted — once one begins to peer through a properly naturalistic paradigm — the prediction concerning suffering is drastically altered.

Let me illustrate this point through an example in philosophy of mind.

Many naturalists are epiphenomenalists concerning mental phenomena. An epiphenomena is something itself caused but that causes nothing. For the naturalist, assuming they are committed to source physicalism (which they should be), the mental is fobbed off from the physical and plays no downward causal role. Now, yes. Right. I agree. Epiphenomenalism is about as self-evidently false as any position in philosophy could be, but set that aside. Not important for our purposes today, because it remains difficult — extremely difficult, in fact — to see how a naturalist can avoid epiphenomenalism without taking an even more implausible position (eliminativism, say) that would still not avoid the difficulty I’m about to present.

Here’s the difficulty. If epiphenomenalism is true, the felt aspects of experience make no meaningful difference in what the physical interactions are; they play no crucial role in our “having sex and avoiding bears”. And once this point is appreciated — that is, once we begin making predictions through a properly naturalistic perspective — the felt aspect of suffering becomes seriously surprising indeed. For matters could have gone just as well concerning survival and reproduction had there been no felt suffering attendant to physical processes, far less suffering attendant to physical processes, far more suffering attendant to physical processes, or even bizarre “inverted” scenarios philosophers sometimes entertain, where the physical processes cause us to systematical pursue painful experiences and avoid pleasurable ones.

It is only by assuming that the qualitative dimension plays some important causal role that one can say the suffering of our experience kind-of-sort-of makes sense if naturalism is true, but that assumption is not at home within a naturalistic paradigm. This point becomes obvious once one moves beyond a superficial naturalism and studies the underlying mechanics of how naturalists attempt to explain certain phenomena — for our purposes today, mental phenomena.

Again, someone might say there are options aside from epiphenomenalism for the naturalist, and that’s true. Already admitted. Still, epiphenomenalism really seems like the primary option for the naturalist who wants to say, as any good naturalist should say, that whatever else the qualitative dimension of experience is, it is something “late and local.”

More important, however, is this: Epiphenomenalism isn’t required to run this response; it is just a helpful illustration to present the general difficulty. Even if, for example, one maintained a reductive thesis of mind (type-type or functionalist), the problem of predicting suffering does not vanish for the naturalist. Take reductive functionalism, for example, and note that this is but the general thesis that felt aspects are identical to functions of some sort of other; it does not specify which felt aspects are identical to which functions, exactly. For all we know, the function that gets us to pull our hand away from a sharp object and scream “ouch!” could have been identical to a rather pleasant feeling, like the feeling I get when playing the guitar solo to Autograph’s Turn Up the Radio.

From last weekend’s gig:

That is epistemically (even if not metaphysically) possible. And while the naturalist could wire further specifications into their fundamental theory, their doing so is a classic case of borrowing from the priors, and would decrease the internal likelihood of their theory to the point of total unbelievability. So epiphenomenalism, while useful to initially illustrate the difficultly, is not necessary. No matter how one tries to spell out the matter, it seems naturalism — insofar as it doesn’t drastically alter its core commitments (principle of indifference, source physicalism, etc.) — does not predict the suffering of our experience, but is compatible with an enormous range of distribution for suffering, including no distribution at all. Shoot, when one really thinks about, the odds of our experience the suffering we do seems prohibitively unlikely if naturalism is true, parallel to physical fine-tuning, I think.

The upshot? This means that even if one finds the best theodicy “not great” it might not matter much, because it’s ultimately the ratio that matters. Even if one estimates the likelihood is low that we’ll experience the suffering we do if God exists, it seems far lower if God does not exist. Which suffices to reverse the evidential problem of evil.

- Pat

PS - Worth re-linking: William Vallicella’s post about the generic and specific problems of evil.

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil