Empirical Evidence Against the Evidential Problem of Evil
Вставка
- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- 3:34 Goal of the Paper
5:27 Rowe’s Evidential Problem of Evil
9:15 Rowe’s Defense of Premise 2
21:37 How to Empirically Test the Defense of Premise 2
41:12 Results of the Experiment
52:48 Conclusion of the Experiment
I am joined by Dr. Blake McAllister and Dr. Ian Church, professors of philosophy at Hillsdale College, and co-authors a new paper, "Empirical Challenges Against the Evidential Problem of Evil". The paper is forthcoming in the Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy series.
Linke to paper:
philarchive.or...
----------------------------------------------GIVING-----------------------------------------------
One Time:
You can leave a Super Thanks or give on PayPal
www.paypal.com...
Monthly:
To become a patron, go to / theanalyticchristian
-----------------------------------------MERCHANDISE----------------------------------------
To purchase TAC shirts, mugs, phone cases, and more, go to
www.theanalyti...
---------------------------------------------CONTACT-----------------------------------------------
If my videos have been of service to you, I'd love to hear how you have benefitted from them. You can reach me at
theanalyticchristian@gmail.com
---------------------------------------------WEBSITE--------------------------------------------------
www.theanalyti...
Fascinating! Well done to both guests for explaining things very clearly, and I loved the conversation. Here are some notes I think are especially important (and which explain why I'm very skeptical of the evidential relevance of these findings for intuitions of gratuitous evil):
(1) I appreciated how both guests emphasized the limitations of the research. At points, I think the emphasis should have been stronger; e.g., at 51:30, Blake suggests linking *intuitions* with responses to survey questions that seemingly disagree with Rowe, but this is hasty. [Granted, Blake may just be saying 'someone might argue like this...'] Survey responses are extremely faint indicators of intuitions; it's incredibly difficult to test whether subjects undergo relevant psychological states or events of seemings, and it's even more difficult to test whether they have those seemings directed towards the proposition reporting the existence of gratuitous evil in Rowe's sense of 'gratuitous'. That, then, is my first broad point: as both guests rightly recognize at certain points in the discussion, responses to survey questions aren't very reliable glimpses into folk *intuitions*; they only tell us folk *responses to survey questions*, and such responses often reflect mental states (e.g., beliefs, dispositions to believe, guesses, hunches, suspicions about hat the experimenters are trying to elicit, etc.) different from intuitions as philosophers understand them.
(2) I'm very skeptical that the survey question "this is an example of pointless suffering" elicits the relevant kind of intuition -- relevant, that is, for Rowe's argument and the PoE more generally. For the suffering to be pointless in the sense relevant for Rowe's argument, the suffering has to be not-metaphysically-necessary for the realization of goods that outweigh the badness of that suffering and not-metaphysically-necessary for the prevention of evils equally bad or worse than that suffering. This is a very abstract, theoretical characterization of 'pointless' that ordinary folk almost certainly aren't thinking of, and so the intuitions being elicited by the question probably aren't relevant for Rowe's argument.
(3) Building on (2), note that theism and atheism affect modal space; arguably, theism countenances more metaphysical possibilities than atheism by dint of including an omnipotent, omniscient being. So the 'not-metaphysically-necessary' mentioned in (2)'s characterization of 'pointless suffering' has to be modified in some manner to 'not-metaphysically-necessary on the assumption that modal space is enriched by the abilities of an omnipotent, omniscient being'. Given that this introduces theological concepts into the relevant characterization of 'pointlessness', and given that -- as Ian said -- introducing theological concepts is likely to be a significant confounding factor, it's going to be incredibly difficult to experimentally assess intuitions that are actually relevant for Rowe's argument.
(4) The following is a point Blake rightly proceeds to make near the end of the video, but it bears emphasizing (and also reveals that it was somewhat misleading for the guests to say, all along, that participant responses 'disagree with Rowe'). First, some abbreviations:
Evil Question (EQ): "Some equal or greater evil could have been prevented because of the situation in that story"
Good Question (GQ): "Some equal or greater good could have been accomplished because of the situation in that story"
Suppose a participant strongly agrees with both EQ and GQ. Does this participant thereby "disagree with Rowe", as the guests say? No. Rowe could -- and presumably would! -- agree that some greater good *could possibly* result from the story (and, similarly, that some greater evil *could* have been prevented, which I will hereafter leave implicit). After all, it's at least *possible* that there's (e.g.) some alien species observing the suffering animal and somehow benefitting *massively* from it. The question isn't whether there *could* be a greater good, but whether that instance of suffering is *absolutely metaphysically necessary* for the realization of some greater good. Even if the suffering *in fact* (or *possibly*) brings about some greater good, this is beside Rowe's point. Rowe's point is that -- intuitively -- the suffering isn't *absolutely necessary* to bring about some greater good. And
If it’s so excellent, you should turn your comment into a community post and share the video ;)
Well said. If I were to answer the survey as constructed by the authors, I'd take myself to be responding to a statement something like, "It is likely that no greater good came from the forest fire."
Do you think the authors would be better served by constructing their own vignette which more accurately captures the power dynamics of the scenario Rowe has in mind? One that centers on the idea of the fawn's suffering, that it was utterly preventable, and that it is, to our understanding, pointless.
Just for fun I took a shot at it:
A child swimming in a lake is suddenly swept below the surface of the water when a rope hanging off a nearby ferry catches his ankle. A passenger on the ferry notices that the child is drowning as it pulls him along at high speed but does not intervene, and over the course of several agonizing minutes the child succumbs to his fate. It is later revealed that, the entire time the child was drowning, the passenger had a knife blade resting atop the rope to which the child was attached. At any moment the passenger could have cut the rope and freed the child but chose not to.
On a scale of 1 to 7, how strongly do you agree with the statement, “Some equal or greater
good was likely accomplished because of the passenger's actions in the story.”?
I worry that I've afforded my ferry passenger more power than God on some Christian conceptions, but I'm curious how you'd amend my vignette or if you have one of your own.
Great post, enjoyed the read.
Agree at face value the fawn suffers a gratuitous evil. However, life is not so simple nor are the components that contribute to the fawn’s death so simple as fire leads to burned fawn that suffers for hours before dying. If one looks deeply at the causes of many natural disasters and what contributes to them, and thus leads to greater suffering than might be a necessary outcome of said fire, we often come down to human choice or free will. Take the prevalence of recent western forest fires in the US and all the acres burned and undoubtedly the animals that suffered from these fires. And what do we find as reasons for these fires? One main reason widely acknowledged is lack of human maintenance of forests-allowing excessive accumulation of dead and dried flora in the forest floor leading to widespread fires. We didn’t tend the garden so to speak, knowing this could be a possible outcome. Also, the argument fails to acknowledge the good that comes out of periodic forest fires as built into nature itself, with or without God. Fire burns away the accumulation of dead flora to make way for new growth of flora that in turn feeds the fauna. This happens on the African plains to allow for new growth of grass prior to the migration of animals in order to feed them. Also predators then eat the meat of animals that die in the fire and contribute to the richness of the soil necessary for healthy fauna or the grass in this case.
The same is true of most things in nature that can kill humans and other animals. There are bio-ecological reasons for hurricanes and volcano eruptions and everything else in nature to maintain life on the planet, all of which one can research about. But once again, the severity and suffering resulting from these natural disasters and the magnitude of the impact are often worsened by human choice…let’s take hurricanes as another example. If you choose to build a house and live close to a beach, you increase your risk of suffering loss of property and potentially life, should a hurricane hit and you choose not to evacuate. Or you choose not to build the house to withstand a higher category of hurricane to save money in the short term. Or perhaps the local government or Army Core of Engineers kicks the can down the road and doesn’t decide to spend the money to reinforce the levies in New Orleans and you get a Katrina hurricane and the magnitude of suffering from that to which the city has still not fully recovered. Again human choice first to build a city on a low lying flood plain/below sea level and then failure to maintain and upgrade the levies. I could list many examples and they all involve a human component of choice. Nature is nature whether one believes in God or not and the degree to which nature results in suffering is almost always increased by poor human choices-free will.
As to the child suffering from cancer example or any human for that matter, I don’t want any child to suffer from any illness.
Unfortunately, many cancers, not all, are again the result of human choice-lung cancer in smokers, liver cancer in alcoholism, poisons and contaminants/additives in our food, air and water that lead to cancer-human choice to pollute to save money and make more profit.
Unfortunately, most disease has a big human choice component to it.
Without choice humans would be merely instinctual animals. Given choice we often make poor choices.
As pointed out in the video, Rowe's original paper was ambiguous with regard to pointless suffering. It's one thing to say that it appears or seems that there is pointless suffering, but it's quite another thing to grant that it doesn't seem that a particular case of suffering has a greater good. As Wykstra argued, granting the former is like allowing your (football) opponent to get 99 yards down the field!
Amazing video. I think that, when recreating the experiment, they should change the statements the participants have to agree or disagree on. Instead of saying that the evil *could* lead to a greater good or avoid a greater evil, it should say that the evil was the best/'least bad' way of obtaining a greater good or avoiding a greater evil. That is, to frame the statements in terms of neccesity rather than mere possibility. Weather the evil in question *could* have good consequences isn't really relevant.
Hopefully, they continue with this projects and make more studies on the topic.
Cool stuff! I would love to see more on the statistical analyses and study sample. I think there are some issues with MTurk’s representativeness, but I found this to be a really encouraging corrective to how too many philosophers (mis)treat population level data and inferences.
Anecdotes and intuitions can be valuable to some ends, but these results lend credibility to the counter that anecdotes and intuitive have very limited explanatory scope and usually see not generalizable.
Are results printed out anywhere?
Yes all the data and statistical analyses are in the published paper. I’ve linked it in the description of the video.
I would assume women would agree more with Rowe because they are generally more empathetic than men so seeing a cute picture of an animal and picturing it suffering is more likely to put their intuition in the forefront
Most Indians are Hindu and therefore believe in reincarnation so no surprise that they would disagree with Rowe
Preventing worse evil or providing greater good? If you ponder on this more carefully you will realise how Rowe's argument can be used as a seed of a much stronger argument. Unjust suffering of innocent people is simply unjust and unacceptable which means that Rowe's argument is totally inappropriate way of reasoning about this huge problem (by putting it in words such as "preventing worse evil or providing greater good") because there is no possible justification for allowing ujust suffering of an innocent child, as simple as that... No greater good and/or no worse evil can be (accepted as an) excuse for allowing horrible suffering of an innocent child, that is the point... If you think deeply on this problem you will discover and recognize this sad and actually quite obvious truth... So, Rowe was much more right than he was even aware of it.... Only he missed the point by using wrong (weak) method that doesn't allow you to easily notice the real and obvious horror of gratuitous evil which is the core and an essence of this utterly failed project a.k.a. this "beautiful" world of ours...