(urth) Silk Takes A Stab At The 'Problem Of Evil'

Wed Apr 13 09:07:50 PDT 2011

I would say rather that God, as the first cause of all things, is the
cause of evil as well as good, and while men are good at identifying
little-e evil (the bad things that happen) we are not always good at
identifying big-E Evil (the form of Evil, from which all little-e
evils are instances), but regardless, all evil/Evil is ultimately part
of God's plan.  This sounds a lot like the unknown purposes theodicy,
with bits of the soul-making thrown around.  It's a fairly standard
type of theodicy:  bad stuff happens but God is God and has some
reason for it all.

Well, the only way we could be talking about 'God' in any meaningful sense
(perfectly powerful and perfectly good as you later mention) is to carefully
qualify this notion of God as 'cause of evil'.  He can't *morally* be
e/Evil's cause without ceasing to be a 'holy' (morally perfect and just)
God.  So he must be the 'cause' of evil indirectly through creating freewill
creatures with the potential to 'twist away' from him (and Evil is thereby
conceived of as 'parasitic' in the Augustinian/Lutheran/Lewisian sense).
 There is certainly a 'soul-making' theme in Silk's theodicy, but I wonder
if 'loving purpose' would more accurately characterise his argument than
'unknown purpose' (going from Silk's actual words: 'His fear—he is afraid
for our sake, not his own—is that we may come to love other things more than
we love him... evil directs us back to the Outsider... because he is
better... Reach out to him').

[For convenience to any following along:
http://silkandhornheresy.blogspot.com/2011/04/silk-takes-stab-at-problem-of-evil.html
]

what God desires, is,
and God would not, as perfectly good, desire that which
he could not do.

Hm - 'what God desires, is' - well, not the Hebrew God in any case.  The
Bible is full of God talking about his desires for his world and how most of
the world, including his own chosen people, are living *against*,
*contrary*to what he desires.  This is where talk of more than one
sort of 'desire' or
'wish' within God comes in I guess.  And where concepts like divine
'self-limitation' come in also (so that the notion of his perfect power is
preserved even in a world where not all he wishes always comes to pass - not
whilst history unfolds anyway).  And I really think all that fits with your
initial comment about God letting the world 'flow organically' better than
what your describing here.  It's thorny, I admit, but I suspect Wolfe (and
characters like Silk) would want to let divine dynamism force us into
inexplicable mystery rather than strict logical tidiness bring us to accept
a rather austerely static notion of deity.  (And of course, mystics and
fideists and what have you will always helpfully remind us that at least
some important measure of mystery in the face of divinity is hugely rational
- we'd surely be inventing the god we could contain with our intellects!)

It's funny, I (a low-church Protestant) lean toward your Orthodox friend's
views rather than your Protestant friend's.  I'm guessing the latter is
rather Reformed/Calvinist?  I'm more classically Arminian myself (though I
like to call myself 'Calminian' as I want to stay close to the Calvinist
tradition of 'theocentricity' - and Reformed thinkers continue to be helpful
to me), so that might partly explain it.  As I say, I can't figure out where
Wolfe (or his characters) might be on this sort of spectrum.

I have yet to (myself) come up with a satisfactory definition of evil
that is not question-begging or reduced to some sort of naturalist
handwaving that "it's evil because it is evil."

I appreciate your frankness there.  It's hard enough to define (real) evil
from a theistic perspective - I just find it nigh on impossible from a
naturalistic basis.

So to answer whether we might freely desire a result
set in stone and that be "enough" for free will supposes that "will"
equates to our desires, which is itself a loaded proposition:  might
we not act contrary to our desires, or at some last moment before we
take a volitional action, do we always desire to engage in that
action?

I think I'm with you 100% on that formulation of the question.  This is the
kind of thing I see explored in Wolfe's characters - choices made contrary
to desires, etc. - that mitigates against some statements that are
potentially determinist/compatibilist.  (Although I know there are
sophisticated formulations of compatibilism that try to account for this
seeming 'choice against desire' - a deeper desire, etc.  But I'm not
convinced this accounts for what really looks and feels like libertarian
choice-making.)

For my own part, I do not think that the problem of freedom of the
will can be answered; how could we ever possibly determine whether our
own actions were free or determined, let alone those of others whose
psychology is closed to us.  We are constrained to act as if our
choices are our own, regardless of whether we are autonomous or merely
the pawns of divinity.

Yes.  But I still take that constraint as a huge hint toward the fact that
we really are free in some significant sense (ultimately, from my Christian
perspective, as imago Dei beings).  Also: 'autonomous or merely pawns of
divinity' - either a false dichotomy or causal reductionism or both.  The
Christian view wasy we're *dependent* beings (not autonomous) in *
relationship* to the divinity.  There is real responsibility and real limits
to that freedom.  We are neither autonomous nor mere pawns.  Again, this is
the mystery I see throughout Wolfe's writing.  Something common to all
fiction really.  Wolfe's fellow Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor, deserves
to be quoted in this regard:

'Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do?  I think that
it usually does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills
conflicting in one man.  Freedom cannot be conceived simply.  It is a
mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to
deepen.' (From her 'Author's Note' to her novel *Wise Blood*.)

It's worth noting too that Silk's God is revelatory, self-disclosing, and
this makes ALL the difference.  If God speaks to us, then we have an
authoritative (though not exhaustively so for our finite minds) voice on
these and all other matters he chooses to speak to us about (for our good,
on the Christian view, not merely our information or bafflement) - though of
course, that voice has to be humbly, wisely interpreted - as you can see in
Silk's own musings.

-DOJP

Good talking with you, Lane!

2011/4/13 António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

> Well, Lane, I must say I've seldom if ever seen such a well-wrought
> presentation of these questions, the more coming from a non-believer (we may
> discuss that if anyone wishes to). It's so good I'm fully quoting it below
> fully aware of the sacrifice of electricity.
>
> Lane Haygood wrote (13-04-2011 15:01):
>
>  Ok, Lane, right, so Silk's conception of God (the Outsider) is not
>>> 'occasionalist' (i.e. God *directly* causes all things), but the fact
>>> that
>>> God 'permits' evil and forces it to serve his purposes 'however
>>> unwillingly'
>>> seems to fit in with Aquinas' scheme of primary and secondary causation.
>>>  Evil is personified by Silk as *hating* God, yet it is 'harnessed' by
>>> God
>>> so that it 'serves' him by pointing us who get hurt by evil back to God
>>> for
>>> our true love and goodness and purpose.
>>>
>>
>> I would say rather that God, as the first cause of all things, is the
>> cause of evil as well as good, and while men are good at identifying
>> little-e evil (the bad things that happen) we are not always good at
>> identifying big-E Evil (the form of Evil, from which all little-e
>> evils are instances), but regardless, all evil/Evil is ultimately part
>> of God's plan.  This sounds a lot like the unknown purposes theodicy,
>> with bits of the soul-making thrown around.  It's a fairly standard
>> type of theodicy:  bad stuff happens but God is God and has some
>> reason for it all.
>>
>>  I think I agree with you that he's arguing that the Outsider allows his
>>> creation to 'flow organically', but I just want to point out that Silk is
>>> still conceiving of a God very much 'in control' in that his 'permissive
>>> will' is orchestrating (if you like) all things towards his desired ends
>>> (which, though many are unknown as you point out, yet Silk takes a major
>>> known end to be that of love between creature and Creator).
>>>
>>
>>
>> Sure. I didn't mean to make Silk out to be a deist.  For Silk's God
>> (and presumably, Wolfe's) desire and control are the same thing;
>> remember, for the problem of evil to have any gravity at all God must
>> be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good.  Thus, what God
>> desires, is, and God would not, as perfectly good, desire that which
>> he could not do.
>>
>> The problem of evil is an interesting logical exercise, but I have
>> never been ultimately convinced of its efficacy (even as a
>> non-believer).  It, like the ontological argument, comes laden with
>> value presuppositions that are rarely made explicit, and it is filled
>> with nonsensical logical wrangling such as whether God needs to be
>> able to do the impossible (create a round square, for example) to be
>> perfectly powerful.  I have an Orthodox friend who swears up and down
>> that perfect power need only encompass God's actions within the sphere
>> of what is possible (e.g., it is not a hit against God's perfect
>> potency to say that God cannot make a round square, because
>> omnipotence is limited to the set of all possible actions), but a
>> Protestant acquaintance that thinks that God can do the impossible
>> because no limits of human logic apply to God.  To make matters worse,
>> I have yet to (myself) come up with a satisfactory definition of evil
>> that is not question-begging or reduced to some sort of naturalist
>> handwaving that "it's evil because it is evil."  Certainly I can point
>> to actions that I think are evil (child abuse, for example) but I
>> wonder if I am focusing on the end result without any reference to the
>> motivation or mindset.  What about a parent that spanks their child
>> too hard?  The parent's motive is discipline, not injury, which ought
>> to make a difference, even though the end result is the same.
>>
>>> Dan'l, I vaguely recall that too.  It'd be good if we cold find the exact
>>> quote.  I want to qualify that thought with the notion that those
>>> freewill
>>> creatures are still somehow genuinely significant in their choices, that
>>> our
>>> part in 'what is going to happen anyway' (or 'consenting to be governed
>>> by a
>>> King' as David Stockhoff said) really 'makes a difference' somehow.
>>>  However, I'm not sure whether that's Silk's or Wolfe's view.  Wolfe has
>>> kept me guessing on this.  Sometimes he sounds pretty hard determinist
>>> (especially, as I seem to recall, in certain passages of tBotNS).  Yet
>>> the
>>> dramas he plays out sound more libertarian.  I know a compatibilist would
>>> say that's just how things look but it's all causally determined even if
>>> our
>>> 'choices' are 'real' based on our desires (which are determined by all
>>> that
>>> comes before us).  Is there any room for any kind of libertarian freewill
>>> in
>>> Wolfe?
>>>
>>
>> The problem of free will is another tough nut because it comes laden
>> with lots of often-unanalyzed presuppositions, such as whether God's
>> foreknowledge entails determination of the result.  The same
>> aforementioned friends have divergent views, with one taking the
>> position that God does not need to know everything in order to be
>> omniscient, if, for example, the thing to be known (the result of a
>> coin flip) is a matter of probability rather than certainty.  Just
>> because, for example, I do not know the result of a coin toss you
>> wouldn't say that I am unknowledgable about coin tosses, the physics
>> involved, or probability calculations.  Even if I told you that given
>> my hand strength, the weight of the coin, and atmospheric conditions
>> the likelihood was greater that I would toss a heads, and I tossed a
>> tails, you would simply say, "well, he knew the probabilities."  The
>> other friend, predictably, takes the view that if God knows a thing,
>> because God is atemporal and perceives all events in time
>> simultaneously, God has perfect recollective knowledge of the result
>> of that coin toss.  Friend 1 often rejoins that this just makes God
>> the perfect historian rather than an intellective being capable of
>> free thought on his own.
>>
>> For my own part, being that time is an integral part of my cognition
>> of the world around me, I cannot imagine what an atemporal being would
>> think... and yet my own views on philosophy say that a transcendent
>> being such as God must be unlimited in both space and time, and would
>> not be saddled with the same cognitive requirements for
>> intelligibility that I, a limited creature, am.   But because each
>> friend takes different presuppositions as his starting point (one a
>> very continental, Hegelian view of the world, and the other a much
>> more classic Protestant view) they arrive at different answers to
>> these questions.  So to answer whether we might freely desire a result
>> set in stone and that be "enough" for free will supposes that "will"
>> equates to our desires, which is itself a loaded proposition:  might
>> we not act contrary to our desires, or at some last moment before we
>> take a volitional action, do we always desire to engage in that
>> action?
>>
>> For my own part, I do not think that the problem of freedom of the
>> will can be answered; how could we ever possibly determine whether our
>> own actions were free or determined, let alone those of others whose
>> psychology is closed to us.  We are constrained to act as if our
>> choices are our own, regardless of whether we are autonomous or merely
>> the pawns of divinity.
>>
>> LH
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