When I have previously shared the thoughts I discussed in the two preceding blog posts, I have often got answers that can be paraphrased "but what about the Jews?" Judaism was a lively part of the east-Mediterranean thought world in which Epicurus wrote. Indeed, his lifetime coincides with the period of the creation of the great translation of their sacred literature into Greek (the Septuagint). That chronological fact comes to mind because, as I have mentioned, it is not clear on the face of it WHO Epicurus was arguing with. If he did make something like the statement Hume attributes to him, and a lot of AD 21st century memes pick up on then, as I suggested last week, he may have had Stoicism in mind. If so, he may not have understood it well. This draws the riposte: why could Epicurus not have had the monotheism of the Jews in mind? It would be good to have some context of when and why he said it -- if he wrote this in a lost text entitled "Why thos...
Posts
So we return today to the notorious Epicurus "quote," which many treat as a definitive development of the "problem of evil" for theisms. Here again is Lactantius' account, the earliest source known to us. "That argument also of Epicurus is done away. God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does He not remove them?" I think it is possible the whole thing is a mistake: Lactantius (whose image I have provided here) may simply have been gullible about some untrustwo...
I am thinking of Poisedon, pictured here, in connection with a famous quote of Epicurus, often set forward by atheists in our day as an example of a problem that (in their view) afflicts theists. The quote offers a trilemma, a menu of three unpalatable possibilities. David Hume weighed in, quoting a classic author: "Epicurus' old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? The he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" There is no surviving text of Epicurus saying some Greek equivalent of this. The near-contemporary biographers like Diogenes Laertius did not quote him saying it. Where did Hume get it? He was presumably summarizing the words from a Christian writer, circa 300 AD, named Lactantius. Lactantius was actually an advisor to Constantine, so he was there as Christianity became THE official religion. Apparently the new o...
I'm thinking today, for no good reason, about the "free will solution" to the problem of evil in theology. Practitioners of theodicy who rely on the free will solution maintain that evil must be attributed to the independent actions of human beings, supposed to have been endowed by God with freedom of the will. This by itself would not solve the problem. It only works as a solution if it can be shown that God has a Good Reason to allow human beings to be independent of His will. Then one can conclude that it is for a greater good that He allows us to allow evil into the world. This point was insisted upon by J.L. Mackie in what a much debated publication on this subject, his EVIL AND OMNIPOTENCE (1955). Theists, as Mackie understands them, must treat free will as a “third order good.” I'm not going to argue the underlying issues today. I have done that here before. I will confine this post, rather, to simply outlining those three orders of good. ...
If a believer in God is going to have a theodicy, that is, a measured effort to “justify the ways of God to man,” he is going to have to go in one of three directions. There are only three. The problem is this. If God is all-powerful, then He can bring an end to evil. If God is ideally benevolent, then He wants to bring an end to evil. So: why is there evil? Three answers: you can choose to remain silent and regard the question as an unanswerable mystery (which Job learns to do at the end of the OT book bearing his name). Or you can define “all-powerful” in a way that solves the problem. Or you can define “benevolent” in a way that solves the problem. The problem is created by two constraints: that of power and that of goodness. Although no theodical authors would put it this way, some of them define “power” down and others define “goodness” down, loosening the one constraint or the other. In the late 17th century, Leibniz famously defined "power" down. ...
Some words from Immanuel Kant. He certainly isn't an oracle of this site, but as regular readers will recall I sometimes bring him in to liven things up, especially in his capacity as a philosopher of religion. This is from his commentary on the Book of Job: "Job speaks as he thinks, and with the courage which he, as well as every human being in his position, can well afford; his friends, on the contrary, speak as if they were being secretly listened to by the mighty one, over whose cause they are passing judgment, and as if gaining his favor through their judgment were closer to their heart than the truth. Their malice in pretending to assert things into which they yet must admit they have no insight, and in simulating a conviction which they in fact do not have, contrasts with Job's frankness -- so far removed from false flattery as to border almost on impudence -- much to his advantage." This confirms a point I made once before in this blog. If theology ...
One of the points that Lovejoy makes in the book of that title I mentioned last week is the importance, in the Neo-Platonist conceptions and in the later development of the "chain of being" metaphor, of what he calls the principle of plenitude. This is the underlying notion that everything that can exist must exist, that creation would not be possible at all were it to leave gaps. The value of this idea for a certain type of theodicy is clear enough. This caused theological difficulties when these ideas were absorbed into Christianity. I'll quote a bit of what Lovejoy has to say about those difficulties: "For that conception, when taken over into Christianity, had to be accommodated to very different principles, drawn from other sources, which forbade its literal interpretation; to carry it through to what seemed to be its necessary implications was to be sure of falling into one theological pitfall or another." The big pitfalls were: determinism on t...