Silk Takes A Stab At The 'Problem Of Evil'

António Pedro Marques · 13 Apr 2011, 14:55 · from 2011-April.txt.gz
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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:55:40 +0100
Subject: (urth) Silk Takes A Stab At The 'Problem Of Evil'
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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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