Authors: John Norman
There are a number of problems with the concept of a divine entity, of course. There are particular problemsâaside from questions of empirical meaningfulness, and such, which, arguably, involve category confusions, implicitly claiming that the nonquantitative cannot exist, despite a presumed familiarity with consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, understanding and other such dataâwith the properties often assigned to such an entity, which assignments the putative entity would seem to tolerate, patiently allowing itself to be the object of bizarre conjectures. In particular, in a tradition or traditions likely to be familiar to the hypothetical reader of these reflections, such an entity is supposed to endure the burdens of being omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent, crosses with which it is laden by theologians for reasons into which it were best not to inquire, as they might intrude into the irrelevancies of clinical theory. (Theology is the science of divinity, one of the few sciences in which the scientists, according to their own reports, do not know what they are talking about and are not likely to find out. But all sciences have their limitations and it would be churlish to disallow some to theology. On the other hand, the project in hand requires recognition that theology, as yet, justifiably or not, lacks the established results, and certainly the prestige, of more recent, humbler, upstart sciences, such as physics and chemistry. This is not to deny that the death tolls associated with theology are impressive, if not auspicious. Whereas theology has managed to devastate cities and poison populations, generally while no one noticed, there is little doubt that its work in such areas is less spectacular, and less efficiently accomplished, than that resulting from certain applications of physics and chemistry, applications devoted to the same purposes. The experiments of saints and the controls of the stake may all be very well in their way, from one point of view or another, but they seem paltry when compared with the hard data garnered from the efforts of white rats seeking cheese or, more impressively, the potentialities of host-hunting killer viruses manufactured in laboratories, not to mention explosive devices capable of altering the axis of the earth, if not booting it out of its orbit altogether. The upshot of these remarks is to call attention to the limitations of theology, because that is important to our project.)
Some theologians, despite the alleged inscrutability of their subject matter, and its supposed defiance of all reason, for which claim there seems some justification, inform us, as we have earlier noted, that the divine entity is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent. No one really understands what these words mean in terms of experience, but it is not hard to come up with synonyms, and these will satisfy most folks. To be omnipotent means that one is able to do anything, at least for most practical purposes. Normally it is granted that even a divine entity cannot violate the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle, for example. For example, not even it could both exist and not exist, or, more trivially, sit in its own lap, make a door it can't walk through, produce a stone it can't lift, and such. These restrictions, of course, seem to presuppose it has only one lap, and such. If one had six laps, it seems one might sit in one or more of them. Similarly, it seems that such an entity, if it put its mind to it, could certainly make a door it couldn't walk through and a stone it could not lift, at least at a given time. It would only be necessary to limit its own strength for a certain time in a certain way, and certainly that would be no impossible trick for such an entity. In such a case, however, it would be wise for the entity to reserve to itself the capacity to will its own temporarily suspended or discarded omnipotence back into existence, after having confounded its critics. It would be harder to both exist and not exist, at least in the same way at the same time in the same place, and in the same respect, and so on. Or to be red and green all over in the same sense, at the same time, in the same place, in the same respect, and so on. No fair switching back and forth, even at the speed of light, which it could presumably exceed without breaking a sweat, perhaps to the disappointment of some physicists but doubtless to the elation, or certainly satisfaction, of a large number of science-fiction writers. But even if the entity cannot twiddle with, nor snap, the laws of logic, what is left over is still pretty hefty. For example, it could create branching universes by the billion each microsecond, and such, and that will do.
Omniscience is the ability to know everything, and presumably also the literal exercising of that ability, the literal knowing of everything. For example, if one had the ability to know everything, but did not bother to know anything, one would not be much better off than many college students, or one who just plain didn't know anything at all. It would not do the sparrow much good if someone could know about its crash but didn't bother knowing about it. This leaves it an open question as to why the sparrow was allowed to crash in the first place, which brings us to the next alleged property of such an entity, that of being all-benevolent.
It is pretty hard to be all-benevolent, rather like being all-just and all-merciful. Not easy. Here we have Bill and George in the desert and one glass of water. That glass of water means life for one. It cannot be shared equally because there is enough water only for one, and, if it were distributed equally, both would die. Who gets the water? Does an all-benevolent water dispenser flip a coin, or what? And what are Bill and George doing out there in the desert, dying of thirst, in an all-benevolent universe, so to speak, or at least one under the control of an all-benevolent entity? One supposes it is their fault, somehow. I suppose it had better be. But one would still have problems, one supposes, with such things as innocent victims, terminally diseased babies, for example, and such things as earthquakes, floods, erupting volcanoes, epidemics, droughts, famines, and such.
The attempt to assign these three remarkable attributes to a divine entity, which attribution it has never invited, as far as I know, omnipotence, omniscience, and all-benevolence, clearly precipitates what is called the Problem of Evil. Briefly, on the supposition that evil exists, how could it exist, if the divine entity is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent? It is hard to put all those things together. Suppose that it is omnipotent. Then it must either not know about the evil or not be interested in doing anything about it, in which case it is either not omniscient or not all-benevolent. On the other hand, suppose it is omniscient. Then it must not be able to do anything about it or not care to do anything about it, in which case it is either not omnipotent or, again, not all-benevolent. On the other hand, if it is both omnipotent and omniscient, i.e., it can do something about the evil and knows about it, but it doesn't do anything about it, then it seems it would not be all-benevolent.
There are several “solutions” to the “Problem of Evil.” Some eight, or so, are relatively familiar. It would be tedious to list them, and it is easy enough, if you are really interested in this sort of thing, which I hope you are not, to look them up. They have little in common except an apparent inability to solve the problem, compared to which squaring the circle or, for the more athletically inclined, sitting in one's own lap, is child's play. The best, in my view, is the “Test-of-Faith Solution,” which, in effect, says that the miserable state of the world, with all its widely spread torment and tragedy, is designed as a test of your faith, which makes you pretty important, though you might understandably prefer that your faith was not tested at the expense of all these other folks, ripped-to-pieces animals, general destruction and such, and if you can really manage to believe that all the evils, horrors, ugliness, misery, hunger, pain, sickness, torment, and tragedy, and such in the world are compatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-benevolent divine entity, then you really have faith, and I would think that that would be true. It is not clear that it would be moral to pass that test, but, if one could pass it, somehow, then one would certainly have faith, and a good deal of it. That is clear. Indeed, if one can believe that, then one is a world-class believer; one could believe anything. To be sure, this approach seems, among other things, to reflect a great deal of discredit on the hypothesized divine entity, compared to which cannibals, head- hunters and serial killers would seem fit candidates for canonization. At the very least, the hypothesized entity would seem to be morally problematic. Faith is supposedly a virtue, rather than a substitute for thought. Virtues, it seems, do not come cheap. This virtue, for example, morally and rationally, is very expensive.
One way of solving the Problem of Evil, or, better, of evading, or eluding it, doing an end run about it, so to speak, though it smacks a bit of Macedonian boorishness, is to suppose that there is no divine entity, a solution which any decent, broad-minded divine entity would surely not begrudge a conscientious, hard-working skeptic. After all, if it exists, then it exists, and it should know this very well, and thus, assuming it is mentally normal, and reasonably stable, its ontic confidence should not be shaken. And, accordingly, it would not be likely to get righteous and huffy about the matter, and if it doesn't exist, then there is even less of a problem.
But let us speculate that there might be such an entity, a divine entity of sorts. That might be neat. It would surely be very interesting. What might it be like? Pretty clearly it can bear little, or would be likely to bear little, resemblance to the incoherent speculative artifacts of unionized theologians; presumably it would answer little, if at all, to those paid-for-by-the-yard forlorn abstractions, and dogmas, and spiritual landscapes, reticulated, measured, and cut, endlessly rolling off the theological assembly lines, packaged products, familiar and predictable, destined for the markets of need and desire.
It would be quite different.
What it would be like? Of course, we do not know.
But one can always wonder.
Anthropomorphism is supposedly an error, but that has never been proven.
Doubtless the god of parakeets has feathers, and the god of cats has fur and whiskers.
It has always seemed unlikely to me that the divine entity is a raccoon, but then I am not a raccoon.
I should be much surprised if the divine entity were a raccoon, but then the raccoon might be quite surprised if it turned out that the divine entity was a man, or something like a man.
Let us begin at home, so to speak. We know that consciousness exists; that is where we live. We know the experiential world exists. That is undeniable. That is the data; what is the interpretation of the data? There have been many interpretations of the data, about what the nature of reality is in itself apart from the experiential world, if there is a reality apart from that world; about that which is responsible for, or causes, or produces, or manifests, the experiential world, and so on. There have been many interpretations. For generations, the hotels of philosophy and science have been heavily booked.
Interestingly, though this may be hard to grasp, all these interpretations exceed the data. We live at home; we stay there; we may have to stay there. We tell ourselves stories about other places. We think certain thoughts, and we do certain things, within our experiential world, at home. And then, within our experiential world, it is always where we are, we find ball-point pens, and drip-dry shirts, and jet engines. We might tell ourselves other stories, and obtain the same artifacts. The same data is compatible with an infinite number of interpretations. The same conclusion follows from an infinite number of premise-sets. In theory there could be an infinite number of pragmatically equivalent sciences. There are many ways to tell stories.
Sometimes we sleep and the world of our experience changes, and, for all we can tell at the time, that is the real world.
We awaken. We find our body, our brain, in the experiential world, just as we did in the dream. It is not all that much different. To be sure, the experiential world is much more coherent than the dream world. Maybe it is a coherent dream, or, better, something like that. If the experiential world, and its component, the dream world, were both similarly coherent, we could not tell them apart. We would have two worlds, each equally real, as far as we could tell.
We live at home. We live within the circuit of our experience, within the narrow compass of our own sensations. We are always there. We believe that others exist. Our evidence for this claim is our own sense data. That is all we will ever know of the others, or they of us. Or we of ourselves. A stream of sentience between unknown banks, a thread of consciousness, fragile, in a fabric of mystery.
Suppose that a divine entity were not a remote, invisible, alien thing, twirling worlds, possibly lurking in black holes, sometimes peering out, or sleeping behind the night, sometimes awakening to switch on stars, like light bulbs, then extinguishing them, turning them off, or watching them burn out, or making and playing with universes, amusing itself with cosmic toys, producing species and realities, and then discarding them; or suppose that a divine entity had not designed itself to be the answer to a theologian's prayers, or the child's whimpering in the night, frightened, and alone; suppose it were not alert to the distress of the sparrow, nor to the puzzlement of the grasshopper, its legs twisted off by the small boy; suppose it did not choose to astonish logic with omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence; suppose it were very different.
Suppose this divine entity could not comprehend its own nature, no more than we can comprehend ours.
Suppose it is the prisoner of its own nature. It has very little control of what it seems to be or where it seems to find itself. It seems to awaken, yowling, screaming, protesting, fighting against light and air, longing for warmth, ignorance, shelter, security, and darkness. The worlds to which its nature condemns it, it spins inevitably, and of necessity, from its own being, and they do not exist outside of it, for there is no outside. It is reality and the sense of itself, sensing itself in the night and stars, and in milk and warm arms, not knowing this. It seems to live a certain form of existence or life. It seems to have been born, and to live, and to suffer, and to know some joy, and then to die, seeming to lapse once more into the primordial darkness, the mystery, perhaps protesting at its egress from its dream, or reality, as it cried out in protest at its beginning; only then, later, with the first stirring of awareness, it awakens again, and begins anew, with no memory of the past, perhaps as an animal, or a blade of grass, again spinning its world about itself, so many different worlds, each again out of its own nature, each in turn, each inevitable, each necessary, unbeknownst to itself. It is the unwitting victim of the cosmic irony, the divine joke, the jest reality plays upon itself, that reality which is, at one and the same time, unconscious, sadistic, innocent, predictable prankster and eternal victim. And so the wheel turns, and the worlds of experience, in their linear fashion, come and go, regenerated, destroyed, and regenerated anew, consecutively, one at a time, always single, always alone. As a human, when it wears that mask, when its ungovernable secret nature and being imposes that
persona
upon it, it seems to find itself with other humans, and with animals, and pain and hope, and governments and nations, and histories and societies, and machines and flowers, and galaxies. It begins again and again, condemned throughout eternity to suffer death and dying, wonder and tragedy, hope and illusion, never knowing itself, never understanding itself. It never understands, for the truth is hidden; and that is perhaps just as well, for such a truth might be too terrible to understand, for such a pathetic, limited god, so frail and, in its way, so finite, or seemingly so, to its own thinking, too terrifying to accept, too threatening even to suspect. Poor little suffering god, so cosmic and ignorant, so mighty and so naive, poor little divine entity, dying again and again, and yet, unknown to itself, unable to die, always a stranger to itself. It is the suffering god, conceiving of itself as trivial, as meaningless, which, in a sense it is, for that is all that it will ever know of itself, the simple, suffering little god, living crucified on the cross of its own being, knowing only the pain, and never the nature of the cross.