Monthly Archives: December 2013

Omnipotence and Human Freedom

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Prayson Daniel writes about Christian author C. S. Lewis’s attempt to deal with the problem of evil here and here.  Lewis, who suffered tragic loss at an early age, became an atheist when young, but later converted to Christianity.  Lewis directly addressed the challenge of the atheists’ argument — why would an omnipotent and benevolent God allow evil to exist? — in his books The Problem of Pain and Mere Christianity.

Central to Lewis’s argument is the notion that the freedom to do good or evil is essential to being human.  If human beings were always compelled to do good, they would not be free, and thus would be unable to attain genuine happiness.

One way to illustrate the necessity of freedom is to imagine a world in which human beings were unable to commit evil — no violence, no stealing, no lying, no cheating, no betrayal.  At first, such a world might appear to be a paradise.  But the price would be this: essentially we would all be nothing but robots.  Without the ability to commit evil, doing good would have no meaning.  We would do good simply because we were programmed or compelled to do nothing but good.  There would be no choices because there would be no alternatives.  Love and altruism would have no meaning because it wouldn’t be freely chosen.

Let us imagine a slightly different world, a world in which freedom is allowed, but God always intervenes to reward the good and punish the guilty.  No good people ever suffer.  Earthquakes, fires, disease, and other natural disasters injure and kill only those who are guilty of evil.  Those who do good are rewarded with good health, riches, and happiness.  This world seems only slightly better than the world in which we are robots.  In this second world, we are mere zoo animals or pets.  We would be trained by our master to expect treats when we behave and punishment when we misbehave.  Again, doing good would have no meaning in this world — we would simply be advancing our self-interest, under constant, inescapable surveillance and threat of punishment.  In some ways, life in this world would be almost as regimented and monotonous as in the world in which we are compelled to do good.

For these reasons, I find the “free will” argument for the existence of evil largely persuasive when it comes to explaining the existence of evil committed by human beings.  I can even see God as having so much respect for our freedom that he would stand aside even in the face of an enormous crime such as genocide.

However, I think that the free will argument is less persuasive when it comes to accounting for evils committed against human beings by natural forces — earthquakes, fires, floods, disease, etc.  Natural forces don’t have free will in the same sense that human beings do, so why doesn’t God intervene when natural forces threaten life?  Granted, it would be asking too much to expect that natural disasters happen only to the guilty.  But the evils resulting from natural forces seem to be too frequent, too immense, and too random to be attributed to the necessity of freedom.  Why does freedom require the occasional suffering and death of even small children?  It’s hard to believe that small children have even had enough time to live in order to exercise their free will in a meaningful way.

Overall, the scale of divine indifference in cases of natural disaster is too great for me to think that it is part of a larger gift of free will.  For this reason, I am inclined to think that there are limits on God’s power to make a perfect world, even if the freedom accorded to human beings is indeed a gift of God.

Miracles

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “miracle” as “a marvelous event occurring within human experience, which cannot have been brought about by any human power or by the operation of any natural agency, and must therefore be ascribed to the special intervention of the Deity or some supernatural being.”  (OED, 1989)  This meaning reflects how the word “miracle” has been commonly used in the English language for hundreds of years.

Since a miracle, by definition, involves a suspension of physical laws in nature by some supernatural entity, the question of whether miracles take place, or have ever taken place, is an important one.  Most adherents of religion — any religion — are inclined to believe in miracles; skeptics argue that there is no evidence to support the existence of miracles.

I believe skeptics are correct that the evidence for a supernatural agency occasionally suspending the normal processes and laws of nature is very weak or nonexistent.  Scientists have been studying nature for hundreds of years; when an observed event does not appear to follow physical laws, it usually turns out that the law is imperfectly understood and needs to be modified, or there is some other physical law that needs to be taken into account.  Scientists have not found evidence of a supernatural being behind observational anomalies.  This is not to say that everything in the universe is deterministic and can be reduced to physical laws.  Most scientists agree that there is room for indeterminacy in the universe, with elements of freedom and chance.  But this indeterminacy does not seem to correspond to what people have claimed as miracles.

However, I would like to make the case that the way we think about miracles is all wrong, that our current conception of what counts as a miracle is based on a mistaken prejudice in favor of events that we are unaccustomed to.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “miracle” is derived from the Latin word “miraculum,” which is an “object of wonder.” (OED 1989)  A Latin dictionary similarly defines “miraculum” as “a wonderful, strange, or marvelous thing, a wonder, marvel, miracle.” (Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary, 1958)  There is nothing in the original Latin conception of miraculum that requires a belief in the suspension of physical laws.  Miraculum is simply about wonder.

Wonder as an activity is an intellectual exercise, but it is also an emotional disposition.  We wonder about the improbable nature of our existence, we wonder about the vastness of the universe, we wonder about the enormous complexity and diversity of life.  From wonder often comes other emotional dispositions: astonishment, puzzlement, joy, and gratitude.

The problem is that in our humdrum, everyday lives, it is easy to lose wonder.  We become accustomed to existence through repeated exposure to the same events happening over and over, and we no longer wonder.  The satirical newspaper The Onion expresses this disposition well: “Miracle Of Birth Occurs For 83 Billionth Time,” reads one headline.

Is it really the case, though, that a wondrous event ceases to be wondrous because it occurs frequently, regularly, and appears to be guided by causal laws?  The birth of a human being begins with blueprints provided by an egg cell and sperm cell; over the course of nine months, over 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and other elements gradually come together in the right place at the right time to form the extremely intricate arrangement known as a human being.  If anything is a miraculum, or wonder, it is this event.  But because it happens so often, we stop noticing.  Stories about crying statues, or people seeing the heart of Jesus in a communion wafer, or the face of Jesus in a sock get our attention and are hailed as miracles because these alleged events are unusual.  But if you think about it, these so-called miracles are pretty insignificant in comparison to human birth.  And if crying statues were a frequent event, people would gradually become accustomed to it; after a while, they would stop caring, and start looking around for something new to wonder about it.

What a paradox.  We are surrounded by genuine miracles every day, but we don’t notice them.  So we grasp at the most trivial coincidences and hoaxes in order to restore our sense of wonder, when what we should be doing is not taking so many wonders for granted.

Misunderstanding Manicheanism

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A lot of religions and philosophies are misunderstood to varying degrees, but if I had to pick one religion or philosophy as being the most misunderstood it would be Manicheanism.  First propounded by the prophet Mani (or Manes) in Persia in the third century C.E., this religion viewed the universe as consisting of a battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.  God was good, but was not all-powerful, which is why there was evil in the world.  Human beings and other material things were a mixture of the forces of light and forces of darkness; the task of human beings was to separate the light from the dark by shunning evil and doing good deeds.

In modern day America, the term “Manichean” is used disparagingly, as a way of attacking those who see political or social conflict as being wars of good vs. evil.  A Manichean view, it is argued or implied, depicts the self as purely good, opponents as demonic, and compromise as virtually impossible.  A recent example of this is a column by George Will about the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.  Will describes Iran as being “frightening in its motives (measured by its rhetoric) and barbaric in its behavior,” and quotes author Kenneth Pollack, who notes that Manicheanism was a Persian (Iranian) religion that “conceived of the world as being divided into good and evil.”  Of course, Manicheanism no longer has a significant presence in modern-day Iran, but you get the point — those Persians have always been simple-minded fanatics.

Let’s correct this major misconception right now: Manicheanism does NOT identify any particular tribe, group, religion, or nation as being purely good or purely evil.  Manicheanism sees good and evil as cosmological forces that are mixed in varying degrees in the material things we see all around us.  Humanity, in this view, consists of forces of light (good) mixed with darkness ; the task of humanity is to seek and release this inner light, not to label other human beings as evil and do battle with them.

If anything, Manicheanism was one of the most cosmopolitan and tolerant religions in history.  Manicheanism aimed to be a universal religion and incorporated elements of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The most dedicated adherents of Manicheanism were required to adopt a life of nonviolence, including vegetarianism.  For their trouble, Manicheans were persecuted and killed by the Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim societies in which they lived.

The Manichean view of human beings as being a mixture of good and evil is really a mainstream view shared by virtually all religions.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn has described this insight well:

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.  In the intoxication of youthful successes I had  felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel.  In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor.  In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.  It was only  when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.  Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and  through all human hearts.  This line shifts.  Inside us, it oscillates with the years.   Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside a human being  (inside every human being).  It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

This is what Manicheanism teaches: the battle between good and evil lies within all humans, not between purely good humans and purely evil humans.

Objectivity is Not Scientific

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It is a common perception that objectivity is a virtue in the pursuit of knowledge, that we need to know things as they really are, independent of our mental conceptions and interpretations.  It is also a common perception that science is the form of knowledge that is the most objective, and that is why scientific knowledge makes the most progress.

Yet the principle of objectivity immediately runs into problems in the most famous scientific theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity.  According to relativity theory, there is no objective way to measure objects in space and time — these measures are always relative to observers depending on what velocity the objects and observers are travelling, and observers often end up with different measures for the same object as a result.  For example, objects travelling at a very high speed will appear to be shorter in length to outside observers that are parallel to the path of the object, a phenomenon known as length contraction.  In addition, time will move more slowly for an observer travelling at high speed than an observer travelling at a low speed.  This phenomenon is illustrated in the “twin paradox” — given a pair of twins, if one sets off in a high speed rocket, while the other stays on earth, the twin on the rocket will have aged more slowly than the twin on earth.  Finally, the sequence of two spatially-separated events, say Event A and Event B, will differ according to the position and velocity of the observer.  Some observers may see Event A occurring before Event B, others may see Event B occurring before Event A, and others will see the two events as simultaneous.  There is no objectively true sequence of events.

The theory of relativity does not say that everything is relative.  The speed of light, for example, is the same for all observers, whether they are moving at a fast speed toward a beam of light or away from a beam of light.  In fact, it was the absolute nature of light speed for all moving observers that led Einstein to conclude that time itself must be different for different observers.  In addition, for any two events that are causally-connected, the events must take place in the same sequence for all observers.  In other words, if Event A causes Event B, Event A must precede Event B for all observers.  So relativity theory sees some phenomena as different for different observers and others as the same for different observers.

Finally, the meaning of relativity in science is not that one person’s opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s.  Observers within the same frame of reference (say, multiple observers travelling together in the same vehicle) should agree on measurements of length and time for an outside object even if observers from other reference frames have different results.  If observers within the same vehicle don’t agree, then something is wrong — perhaps someone is misperceiving, or misinterpreting, or something else is wrong.

Nevertheless, if one accepts the theory of relativity, and this theory has been accepted by scientists for many decades now, one has to accept the fact that there is no objective measure of objects in space and time — it is entirely observer-dependent.  So why do many cling to the notion of objectivity as a principle of knowledge?

Historically, the goal of objectivity was proposed as a way to solve the problem of subjective error.  Individual subjects have imperfect perceptions and interpretations.  What they see and claim is fallible.  The principle of objectivity tries to overcome this problem by proposing that we need to evaluate objects as they are in themselves, in the absence of human mind.  The problem with this principle is that we can’t really step outside of our bodies and minds and evaluate an object.

So how do we overcome the problem of subjective error?  The solution is not to abandon mind, but to supplement it, by communicating with other minds, checking for individual error by seeing if others are getting different results, engaging in dialogue, and attempting to come to a consensus.  Observations and experiments are repeated many times by many different people before conclusions are established.  In this view, knowledge advances by using the combined power of thousands and thousands of minds, past and present.  It is the only way to ameliorate the problem of an incorrect relationship between subject and object and making that relationship better.

In the end, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is essentially and unalterably about the relationship between subjects and objects — you cannot find true knowledge by splitting objects from subjects any more than you can split H2O into its individual atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and expect to find water in the component parts.