Author: Ophelia Benson

Because the question is, what good is sympathy and alleviating suffering if there is no suffering? What is the point of them? There is no point. They’re not needed. They’re not even virtues. The notion is absurd. Suppose a friend bounces up to you, full of bliss and happiness, to tell you some good news. Is it a good thing to clutch her hand damply and say how sorry you are? Is it a good thing to push her down and force morphine down her throat? No. Your sympathy and alleviation aren’t needed or wanted. (Sympathy in the sense of fellow-feeling is probably welcome, but that’s not what Swinburne means here.) And if your friend is never suffering and in pain, they never will be. They’re not needed unless we are in fact suffering and in pain; so why would they be good in and of themselves? They wouldn’t. But Swinburne seems to be assuming they would. Why? Why does he assume that? Other than, of course, sheer desperation to come up with some reason that pain and illness are good things.

And why on earth would it be a good thing that suffering ‘provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering’? Why is that opportunity good or desirable if suffering doesn’t exist? It isn’t. Society could go off and think about other things, ponder other choices, seize different opporunities to choose what to invest in. So why does Swinburne say it that way, as if it’s somehow inherently good for society to have an opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for suffering? Why does he think so back to front? ‘It is good for society to choose whether or not to spend money on cures for suffering, therefore, it is good that people should suffer.’ If he thinks that’s right, does he think war is good because it gives military surgeons lots of practice? If he thinks that, does he then think that the more injuries there are, the better? If he thinks that, then is he depressed on days when the newspapers are slightly less full of injuries? Is he pleased when there are earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes? Surely the logic of his peculiar argument entails that he must be. If suffering is good so that people can be sympathetic and society can make budget decisions, then the more of it there is, the better, right? Because the more suffering there is, the more chances to be sympathetic there are, so it must be a case of the more the better. So we’re all being negligent and cruel if we fail to hurt each other at every opportunity? Is that right?

Rhetoric in play in this review of Breaking the Spell.

Thus we read: “If theists would be so kind as to make a short list of all the concepts of God they renounce as balderdash before proceeding further, we atheists would know just which topics were still on the table, but, out of a mixture of caution, loyalty, and unwillingness to offend anyone ‘on their side,’ theists typically decline to do this.” Perhaps so, but then is Dennett prepared to perform a comparable triage for the favorite topics of his fellow atheists? Where do “we atheists” stand, for example, with regard to fellow atheist Howard Stern? We theists would like to know, if Dennett would be so kind, though we fear that out of a mixture of caution, loyalty and unwillingness to offend, he may pass over America’s most influential single atheist in silence.

But that’s a bad analogy, because atheists don’t posit anything qua atheists. There is no atheist equivalent of a concept of God. We can’t make a list of our concepts of non-belief in God (much less of our concepts of noGod, because we don’t believe in noGod, we just don’t believe in God, which is quite different) because there’s nothing to list. I don’t play squash; I can’t round up a lot of (or all?) non-squashplayers and compile a list of the ways we don’t play squash, can I. It would take too long, and wouldn’t tell us anything. Furthermore, Miles has done a very brazen slide there, from theists’ views of concepts of God to atheists’ opinions of – Howard Stern? In what way is that a ‘comparable triage’? It isn’t, obviously; it’s ludicrous. That ridiculous suggestion would be ‘comparable triage’ to asking theists where they stand, for example, with regard to James Dobson or Pat Robertson. That, as I am sure you will appreciate, is a quite different thing from asking theists to make a short list of all the concepts of God they renounce as balderdash. There ought to be a journalistic law against sloppy non-analogous analogies. There ought to be a strict rule, enforceable by a trip to northern Manitoba, against using the word ‘comparable’ to refer to something very different. Journalists ought to be accurate and careful; they have a responsibility and a duty to be those things; that includes book reviewers.

[T]hough Dennett pays lip service to the need for Darwinian theorists of religion to acquaint themselves with actual religion as patiently as Darwin acquainted himself with actual animal breeding, in practice he rarely does so. He defines religion, for example, in a parochially Western way as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” A religion without gods, he adds, is “like a vertebrate without a backbone.” But this is a definition that does not begin to cope with Buddhism…

That’s a mistake (or piece of rhetoric) we see a lot, and it’s pretty irritating. A ‘parochially Western way’? That definition (obviously) includes Islam, which is hardly exclusively ‘Western’, in fact is often used (mistakenly) as an antonym of ‘Western’. That’s stupid, for a lot of reasons (mixing of kinds; ‘Western’ influence on Islam; presence of Islam in the West; etc), but pretending Dennett’s definition is purely ‘Western’ is equally stupid, especially since it includes Hinduism and other ‘Eastern’ religions as well as Islam, so the fact that it doesn’t deal with Buddhism is hardly enough to make it ‘parochially Western’.

Miles may have valid points, but those two items are enough to make me suspect everything he says.

Richard Swinburne is interesting. I’ve said so before. So has Mark Fournier at Tachyphrenia. And now it’s time to say it some more. Because the things Swinburne says here are truly revolting, and yet they are, of course, what you get if you try to reconcile the omnipotent omnibenevolent God with the existence and abundance of suffering in the world – just what Darwin couldn’t manage to reconcile himself to. There’s an irony of sorts in the fact that it’s Swinburne’s view that is considered by many – by surprisingly many – to be the ‘devout’ and ‘holy’ and therefore (why? why therefore?) ‘good’ one, and Darwin’s that is considered the impious and wicked one. The approval of the deliberate causing and continuance of pain and suffering to billions of sentient beings is considered good, and the disapproval and rejection of that is considered wicked. That’s interesting, and it is, if you ask me, a sign of something badly corrupt at the heart of the whole swindle.

Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability.

Good? Good explanations? Good in what sense?

Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.

Well why stop there? It also provides pharmaceutical companies with the opportunity to develop pain medications, and nurses with the opportunity to apologize for the fact that the pain can’t be alleviated, and vicars and priests with the opportunity to pray that it will be alleviated, and God with the opportunity to refuse to alleviate it, and the funeral people with the opportunity to dispose of the corpse after the victim has committed suicide. Lots and lots of opportunities. Good. So – we should all act accordingly? We should all rush outside with our carving knives and soldering irons and distribute injuries generously around the neighborhood so that there will be further abundance of such opportunities? Suffering is a good thing because it creates these good opportunities so there should be lots more of it so we should all bend every nerve to create more of it?

No. We don’t actually think that’s the case. So why does Swinburne get to claim that it is the case, and that that’s a ‘good’ explanation? Why doesn’t everybody for miles around just tell him ‘That’s disgusting’ until he’s so embarrassed he stops saying it?

That’s a real question. I find it baffling.

Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.

Oh, godalmighty. That is such crap, and such transparent crap – so carefully arranged to get the conclusion he wants (God is okay really even though it seems to be an awful shit) with that last little escape hatch – for other people, illness not so useful. Give me a break. Swinburne looks at the world: sees that some people get ill and suffer, others don’t; needs to make this harmonize with ‘a good God’; explains that suffering is good for some people and not for others; job done.

An analogy will show that what I have written is not an ad hoc hypothesis postulated to save theism from disconfirmation.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Oh, that’s a good one. He’s not only interesting, he’s also a comedian. A sadistic comedian, but a comedian.

Darwin wrote to Asa Gray in 1860: “With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.–I am bewildered.–I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me …. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.”

In a letter to Gray later in 1860 he added: “One word more on “designed laws” & “undesigned results.” I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it, I do this designedly.–An innocent & good man stands under tree & is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (& I really shd like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most person do believe this; I can’t & don’t.–If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow shd snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man & the gnat are in same predicament.–If the death of neither man or gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production shd be necessarily designed. Yet, as I said before, I cannot persuade myself that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all from blind, brute force.”

I’ve just discovered, in looking for that first letter, that Cambridge makes what looks like all of Darwin’s letters through 1859 available online. That’s very nice of them. The project’s homepage is here.