The Apocalypse

Cat’s Cradle depicts one version of the apocalypse—the the end of the world (at least as we know it). Today, we take up the apocalypse as a topic to discuss in class along with the attendant suffering that apocalypses large and small can cause.

Philosophy Content

The Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil asks: how can a good God exist, given the gratuitous suffering we experience ourselves, and see all around us? The Problem of Evil has arguably been THE central challenge to monotheistic belief throughout history. In today’s session, we tackle the problem through religious, philosophical, and biological lenses.

Philosophy Podcast

Instead of having you complete a reading for today, you’ll view a podcast. The conversation is between two highly influential figures: Bishop Robert Barron (a Catholic) and Alex O’Connor (AKA the Cosmic Skeptic, an atheist). Their conversation is a bit long (around an hour an half), but we won’t be quizzing you on the details, so feel free to view at 1.5x speed, or listen as you work out (or do the dishes or commute to school).

The material is available as a YouTube video (below), on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and anywhere else podcasts live [The juicy bit starts at 56 minutes].

Some other thoughts

Just as a clarifying point, reifying the challenge of gratuitous evil is worth doing:

If there is an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God, how does one account for the brutality of nature? The sciences, especially evolutionary biology, anthropology, and archeology have provided us with an increasingly clearer picture of the history of humanity and life overall on Earth. Rather than pointing you at some indirect articles highlighting the minutia, we can cut right to the meat of the challenge that science has provided.

Imagine this:

Homo sapiens sapiens have only been in existence for, at most, 300,000 years. Conservatively, we could say only 50,000, though this is a stretch. For roughly the first 49,900 years of human existence, life was, on average, short and filled with suffering and tragedy. We were killed off by childbirth (dangerous for both mother and child), starvation, wildfires, disease, predators, bad teeth, infections, etc. How many cases over these tens/hundreds of thousands of years followed a pattern along the lines of:

A small family group of two parents and child were cut off from the rest of their tribe. There’s a drought in the region. The child developed an infection from a minor cut and died a slow lingering death over several days, sharing that suffering with their powerless parents. Within hours of the child dying, the parents and all the other large animal life in the region, including the rest of the tribe was killed by a wildfire caused by a lightening strike.

This is a hypothetical example of something that philosophers describe as “gratuitous” suffering. There are other types of suffering that aren’t necessarily gratuitous. Perhaps the child’s death strengthened the parents’ resolve to raise their future children to be more careful? Who knows? In the example above, however, it is difficult to imagine how the child’s (and the parents’) suffering or lack thereof would impact the future as it’s a causal dead-end (there were no survivors left to learn any lessons). As all the parties involved were consumed by fire shortly after the extensive suffering, what purpose did that suffering serve? How would the universe be different if that suffering never occurred? Why would a loving God capable of stopping it, allow this gratuitous suffering to take place?

One response to circumvent the “dead-end” would highlight the immortal nature of souls. Perhaps the suffering provided some benefit to the spirits of the family in the afterlife?

There’s also the challenge of animal suffering. If we extend our sphere of compassion beyond H. sapiens to non-human animals the challenge is only increased - humans are newcomers. Vertebrate animals have been on the planet for hundreds of millions of years. How many instances of gratuitous suffering have played out in their ranks? Statistically, it would be improbably (to the point of effective impossibility) that there would be no instances of gratuitous suffering among non-human animals over that timeframe. We’ve already mentioned that we’re in the midst of the 6th great extinction. How many non-human animals were in clear causal dead-ends leading up to the prior 5 mass extinctions, yet suffered right up to the end? Was that really necessary?

The problem of evil is, as indicated above, is perhaps the most powerful challenge to traditional theology. We hope that you are excited to argue about this - we would like to see you all challenge yourselves to try and take on the problem from the perspective of both believers and non-believers.

How might someone solve this problem?

Fiction Content

This will be our last week with Cat’s Cradle Please have it finished!