Nice post. I agree with your key points: 1) I don't really need to investigate every miracle claim like it's my full-time job and I'm a true crime podcaster. If some priest really flew while performing mass many years ago, what would that even mean to me? What capricious kind of God is that, and what relationship could I have with him? 2) A lot of the problems of God allowing bad things to happen go away if you simply drop the requirement for classical theism. So do it.
"Imagine a doctor who had the full power to cure and eradicate childhood cancer, but chose instead to heal a few children here and there, while allowing the vast majority to die."
Does this doctor also have the power to take care of children in the afterlife?
Usually, we think living doctors cannot do anything to dead children, which is why we think it is required for those doctors to heal as many children as they can.
If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then choosing to heal a few children here and there instead of curing and eradicating childhood cancer in this earthly life is considered a supererogatory action. Miracles are seen as supererogatory. God isn't required to heal any children at all in this life since He will take care of them in the afterlife. Miracles are seen as gifts, expressions of grace.
So say a doctor is able to cure anyone, and she will cure everyone at some point. To make this clear to everyone, she cures a few people who are suffering with horrible diseases right away. But most people with awful diseases, she just lets them suffer horrible agonies for months and years, and then gets around to curing them. It's just fine that she does this because she will cure everyone in the end.
I don't think that sits with me very well in terms of her being a good person. If she can cure everyone, she should do it in every case as quickly as she can manage it. Now maybe, as Eric suggests, she can't manage to cure everyone right away. She is overwhelmed and doesn't have the resources to do it. But when she can get to it, she does. So God's power being limited is one thing, but God just choosing to let people suffer horribly because God can cure them later, at God's leisure or when God feels like it, that is hard to square with goodness.
Let's add to this doctor the ability to see the future. She knows that everyone she cures will freely give retroactive consent to the pain and agony they have suffered when they were experiencing the disease. And she has the power to ensure that at some point everyone will live peacefully and happily ever after.
Contrast this to a parent of the child with an awful disease. Although the parent lack the foreknowledge of this horrible agony, the parent knew that if they didn't choose to procreate, then this horrible agony wouldn't have happened. The parent also knew that they had no guarantee that their child would freely give retroactive consent to being born in the first place, no guarantee that their child would live peacefully and happily ever after. While the parent's power is limited, the parent could have chosen to refrain from procreation.
Humans have limited power and knowledge. If they choose to have children, they guarantee that if those children live long enough, those children will suffer apparently pointless evils without the guarantee of an eternal happy afterlife or the guarantee of those children freely giving retroactive consent to be born. And yet many of us like to think that procreation is morally permissible.
On the other hand, God is omnipotent and omniscient. God not only knows that His children will suffer apparently pointless evils in this earthly life but also that they will experience an eternal happy afterlife, freely giving retroactive consent to all the suffering they have ever experienced.
So God could deliberately multiply the suffering of a person until she dies, and then make her enjoy a greater bliss throughout eternity than she would have had her suffering not been multiplied, and she would say, in the end, that it was worth it. Would you consider such a God good?
One could answer that by saying that God doesn't multiply the suffering of people, God just allows suffering to happen that naturally happens. But first of all, if God is omnipotent, then to say anything happens naturally is not to say God doesn't control it since God has all power. But besides that, by not doing something to relieve suffering when you can IS multiplying that person's suffering. For example, let's say a doctor performing an operation says, "Anesthesia is not needed. I know the operation will cure the problem and after it's all over the patient will be so glad to be cured. The pain she feels during the operation is beside the point and doesn't last that long when compared to the years of being cured. A doctor who can relieve someone's suffering when he could but doesn't because he knows that the suffering will fade into the past once a patient is cured is someone who would lose his license to practice medicine pretty quickly.
Somewhat related questions: Do you think some people will end it in eternal conscious torment? They are not likely to agree that their suffering on earth was just fine. And what about animal suffering? Do you think animals will get blissful afterlives, and if not, is their suffering now justified in God's eyes?
It is difficult for me to see how procreation is morally permissible in the light of eternal conscious torment. Parents are not only risking that their children will suffer on earth but also risking that their children will suffer forever in the afterlife!
I do believe that animals will experience eternal happiness and will freely give retroactive consent to their suffering. Why not?
Universalism helps with the problem of suffering. Eternal conscious torment only makes that problem worse. It is the power of universalism and foreknowledge of retroactive consent that separates God from humans.
If the pain a patient feels during an operation isn't too bad, and if she consents to that pain, to the lack of anesthesia, then I don't see why the doctor would lose his license to practice medicine.
In my view, theism + universalism is falsifiable. Theism is disproved if human procreation becomes rationally unacceptable and morally impermissible in this earthly life. If human procreation cannot be morally justified, then so too divine creation cannot be. If theism is true, then God will prevent such a scenario from happening.
I think you meant to say - correct me if I'm wrong - in your view theism + eternal conscious torment is falsifiable. I sure agree with you there. I think I see better now where you're coming from, and I can see why someone would hold your views. I still prefer a non-omni God approach, but my preferences don't mean anything in the big scheme of things except that I prefer them!
To clarify, I think theism + eternal conscious torment is falsified (false) while theism + universalism is falsifiable (true but empirically disprovable just like how evolution is true but also empirically disprovable - just think about the Precambrian rabbits.)
The problem with a popular version of skeptical theism is that it appears unfalsifiable (we can suffer as much as possible and God is somehow still perfectly good). And Antony Flew has a brilliant version of the Parable of the Invisible Gardener to illustrate the dangers of unfalsifiable beliefs when there are falsifiable alternatives.
I am influenced by Jason Marsh's paper: Procreative Ethics and the Problem of Evil. From the abstract: "Many people think that the amount of evil and suffering we observe provides important and perhaps decisive evidence against the claim that a loving God created our world. Yet almost nobody worries about the ethics of human procreation. Can these attitudes be consistently maintained? This chapter argues that the most obvious attempts to justify a positive answer fail."
Philip Goff is another person who prefers a non-omni God approach. And that is why I suspect he is not confident about universalism. Maybe God doesn't have the power to provide an afterlife to anybody. If human procreation is permissible without the need for universalism in the light of human's limitations, then divine creation is permissible without the need for universalism in the light of God's limitations. But if God is instead all-powerful, then universalism is needed and expected.
This doesn't hold given parents aren't omnipotent. If my child is suffering greatly but I do nothing to alleviate it because I know they'll be fine in a week, or even a few hours, I'm a flat out bad parent.
But grace still raises the question of fairness, why some people get it and others don't. If it's a good thing to get, and it's unevenly distributed, then "He wasn't required to do it" doesn't address the objection.
I agree with some interpretation of the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard in the Gospel of Matthew.
Suppose you and I work for the same boss with the same salary ($200 per day). One day, our boss gives you $600 and me $300. I could be envious that you have received double of what I have received. Or I could be overjoyed instead that I have received $100 more than I deserve. And I should be satisfied even if I had received just the standard $200. Because our boss wasn't required to give me any more money that day.
I work as a teacher. Here's a scenario that seems parallel to the parable: Multiple students come to me asking if they can do extra credit in my class, but I say no. Then one student asks me, and I say yes. To the complaining students who didn't get extra credit, I could say, I gave you a grade according to the policies stated in the syllabus, I never said I wouldn't give anyone extra credit. But I think the students wouldn't be satisfied by that, and neither would my boss, because part of my job as a teacher is to be just, and giving students rewards arbitrarily isn't just.
EDIT: By the way, reviewing the Parable I see that it isn't really how you described. Everyone in that parable gets paid the same, even though they worked different hours. In your scenario (and in the miracle scenario) some people really do get more than others!
If grades should reflect mastery of the contents of the course, then it makes sense that people should have equal opportunities to demonstrate that mastery. I imagine that if you as a teacher are giving extra credit to students, you are not giving it to them for free. Rather you are giving them opportunities to earn extra credit.
Miracles as grace are not things we work toward to earn.
Well, then we'll tweak the scenario to make it more like grace. After the final exam, five students come to me asking me to raise their grade. I say no to four of them, then say yes to the fifth. When the four complain, I say, "I'm not obligated to explain my grading decisions. You all got what you signed up for, a valuable education and a grade according to the syllabus. Anything beyond that is supererogatory." Should they be satisfied with my answer?
I think a valuable education will minimize overstating a student's mastery of the course since a student should study hard to earn their grade. You can add supererogatory actions into the academic scenario, but the case remains that the student's grade should reflect how good they are at the subject as a product of their work.
A stronger counterexample I believe comes from the boss-worker relationships. Suppose the women get paid $150 a day while the men get paid $200 a day for the same work. The boss is sexist, right? But would it be any better if the women and the men both agreed to get paid $150 a day, and the boss pays the men $50 more as a supererogatory action?
Great piece! I am a Christian theist who believes in miracles and personally think these things are quite perplexing. My own grandmother had a vision of Jesus appearing to her when she was a child—that experience fundamentally changed her life, but it was quite unusual and never happened for her again or for anyone else in our family. I’m very interested in your idea that the sum of the data, assuming miracle reports have some credence, is that God would have to be limited. I think that has to be right. Though it could be a sort of limitationk because of the way the Creator ordered the universe such that other beings have actual semi-autonomous power.
Brian Cutter’s Omission Theodicy (specifically the archon abandonment version), Craig Keener’s work on miracles and Greg Boyd’s cosmic warfare framework all taken together would support this idea that God is indeed limited from engaging in “special divine action” most of the time. Keener does a great job deconstructing the idea that special divine action either occurs or fails to occur at random. He interviews a few people well known as divinely gifted healers in their own communities, who, when traveling in Western cultures, find that their prayers for healing suddenly have absolutely no effect whatsoever. They go back home, and bam, the switch is flipped back on. Craig Keeners work is the most academically rigorous miracles work I’m aware of, and this part about geography playing a role was very intriguing. Combining that data with a Greg Boyd style quasi-dualism, it could be said that unseen spiritual evil has actual territorial power to effectively thwart special divine action. If theism is true, animal suffering, inconsistency of miracles, religious violence all suggest quite definitely that this deity is actually limited in power, at least, that’s the current modus operandi.
Great post. The parental analogy is also apt given God is often called "Father" in Abrahamic religions. Would a "good Father" help Tim score the winning TD in his high school football game but not a 5 year old girl dying from Ebola? To just posit "mystery" is a cop out if we're staying with the NeoPlatonic all powerful all knowing deity of classical theism (which isn't even really in the Bible but assumptions made by later theologians), which I concur needs to be abandoned. And they're multiple God conceptions that enables that; it doesn't have to be atheism.
And that's not to mention that once >90% of miracles are critically examined (most aren't), it becomes clear there are pretty probable either naturalistic explanations, or outright fraud occurring.
The open and relational theology idea goes something like this. God, as you say, simply doesn't have the power to miraculously cure people or animals (or prevent suffering). But God knows the suffering is happening, suffers with us, and tries to lure or draw us and everything we're made with and everything interacting with us toward a wonderful outcome (immediate outcome and long term outcome). But we are good at resisting. and not just us in our full humanness, but all of our parts and everything we interact with. Nonetheless, God tries in every case of suffering to draw it toward cure. Very occasionally, everything at every level just lines up right and a quick and complete cure happens, but it's rare. But God never stops luring and drawing everything toward flourishing for all, short and long term, and it will take a very long term before every being is drawn into a flourishing state. If and when that time comes, maybe God can draw all of us who used to exist into being resurrected and we can all live in the joy of God's community in which way less suffering happens.
Nice post. I agree with your key points: 1) I don't really need to investigate every miracle claim like it's my full-time job and I'm a true crime podcaster. If some priest really flew while performing mass many years ago, what would that even mean to me? What capricious kind of God is that, and what relationship could I have with him? 2) A lot of the problems of God allowing bad things to happen go away if you simply drop the requirement for classical theism. So do it.
"Imagine a doctor who had the full power to cure and eradicate childhood cancer, but chose instead to heal a few children here and there, while allowing the vast majority to die."
Does this doctor also have the power to take care of children in the afterlife?
Usually, we think living doctors cannot do anything to dead children, which is why we think it is required for those doctors to heal as many children as they can.
If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then choosing to heal a few children here and there instead of curing and eradicating childhood cancer in this earthly life is considered a supererogatory action. Miracles are seen as supererogatory. God isn't required to heal any children at all in this life since He will take care of them in the afterlife. Miracles are seen as gifts, expressions of grace.
So say a doctor is able to cure anyone, and she will cure everyone at some point. To make this clear to everyone, she cures a few people who are suffering with horrible diseases right away. But most people with awful diseases, she just lets them suffer horrible agonies for months and years, and then gets around to curing them. It's just fine that she does this because she will cure everyone in the end.
I don't think that sits with me very well in terms of her being a good person. If she can cure everyone, she should do it in every case as quickly as she can manage it. Now maybe, as Eric suggests, she can't manage to cure everyone right away. She is overwhelmed and doesn't have the resources to do it. But when she can get to it, she does. So God's power being limited is one thing, but God just choosing to let people suffer horribly because God can cure them later, at God's leisure or when God feels like it, that is hard to square with goodness.
Let's add to this doctor the ability to see the future. She knows that everyone she cures will freely give retroactive consent to the pain and agony they have suffered when they were experiencing the disease. And she has the power to ensure that at some point everyone will live peacefully and happily ever after.
Contrast this to a parent of the child with an awful disease. Although the parent lack the foreknowledge of this horrible agony, the parent knew that if they didn't choose to procreate, then this horrible agony wouldn't have happened. The parent also knew that they had no guarantee that their child would freely give retroactive consent to being born in the first place, no guarantee that their child would live peacefully and happily ever after. While the parent's power is limited, the parent could have chosen to refrain from procreation.
Humans have limited power and knowledge. If they choose to have children, they guarantee that if those children live long enough, those children will suffer apparently pointless evils without the guarantee of an eternal happy afterlife or the guarantee of those children freely giving retroactive consent to be born. And yet many of us like to think that procreation is morally permissible.
On the other hand, God is omnipotent and omniscient. God not only knows that His children will suffer apparently pointless evils in this earthly life but also that they will experience an eternal happy afterlife, freely giving retroactive consent to all the suffering they have ever experienced.
So God could deliberately multiply the suffering of a person until she dies, and then make her enjoy a greater bliss throughout eternity than she would have had her suffering not been multiplied, and she would say, in the end, that it was worth it. Would you consider such a God good?
One could answer that by saying that God doesn't multiply the suffering of people, God just allows suffering to happen that naturally happens. But first of all, if God is omnipotent, then to say anything happens naturally is not to say God doesn't control it since God has all power. But besides that, by not doing something to relieve suffering when you can IS multiplying that person's suffering. For example, let's say a doctor performing an operation says, "Anesthesia is not needed. I know the operation will cure the problem and after it's all over the patient will be so glad to be cured. The pain she feels during the operation is beside the point and doesn't last that long when compared to the years of being cured. A doctor who can relieve someone's suffering when he could but doesn't because he knows that the suffering will fade into the past once a patient is cured is someone who would lose his license to practice medicine pretty quickly.
Somewhat related questions: Do you think some people will end it in eternal conscious torment? They are not likely to agree that their suffering on earth was just fine. And what about animal suffering? Do you think animals will get blissful afterlives, and if not, is their suffering now justified in God's eyes?
It is difficult for me to see how procreation is morally permissible in the light of eternal conscious torment. Parents are not only risking that their children will suffer on earth but also risking that their children will suffer forever in the afterlife!
I do believe that animals will experience eternal happiness and will freely give retroactive consent to their suffering. Why not?
Universalism helps with the problem of suffering. Eternal conscious torment only makes that problem worse. It is the power of universalism and foreknowledge of retroactive consent that separates God from humans.
If the pain a patient feels during an operation isn't too bad, and if she consents to that pain, to the lack of anesthesia, then I don't see why the doctor would lose his license to practice medicine.
In my view, theism + universalism is falsifiable. Theism is disproved if human procreation becomes rationally unacceptable and morally impermissible in this earthly life. If human procreation cannot be morally justified, then so too divine creation cannot be. If theism is true, then God will prevent such a scenario from happening.
I think you meant to say - correct me if I'm wrong - in your view theism + eternal conscious torment is falsifiable. I sure agree with you there. I think I see better now where you're coming from, and I can see why someone would hold your views. I still prefer a non-omni God approach, but my preferences don't mean anything in the big scheme of things except that I prefer them!
To clarify, I think theism + eternal conscious torment is falsified (false) while theism + universalism is falsifiable (true but empirically disprovable just like how evolution is true but also empirically disprovable - just think about the Precambrian rabbits.)
The problem with a popular version of skeptical theism is that it appears unfalsifiable (we can suffer as much as possible and God is somehow still perfectly good). And Antony Flew has a brilliant version of the Parable of the Invisible Gardener to illustrate the dangers of unfalsifiable beliefs when there are falsifiable alternatives.
I am influenced by Jason Marsh's paper: Procreative Ethics and the Problem of Evil. From the abstract: "Many people think that the amount of evil and suffering we observe provides important and perhaps decisive evidence against the claim that a loving God created our world. Yet almost nobody worries about the ethics of human procreation. Can these attitudes be consistently maintained? This chapter argues that the most obvious attempts to justify a positive answer fail."
Philip Goff is another person who prefers a non-omni God approach. And that is why I suspect he is not confident about universalism. Maybe God doesn't have the power to provide an afterlife to anybody. If human procreation is permissible without the need for universalism in the light of human's limitations, then divine creation is permissible without the need for universalism in the light of God's limitations. But if God is instead all-powerful, then universalism is needed and expected.
This doesn't hold given parents aren't omnipotent. If my child is suffering greatly but I do nothing to alleviate it because I know they'll be fine in a week, or even a few hours, I'm a flat out bad parent.
But grace still raises the question of fairness, why some people get it and others don't. If it's a good thing to get, and it's unevenly distributed, then "He wasn't required to do it" doesn't address the objection.
I agree with some interpretation of the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard in the Gospel of Matthew.
Suppose you and I work for the same boss with the same salary ($200 per day). One day, our boss gives you $600 and me $300. I could be envious that you have received double of what I have received. Or I could be overjoyed instead that I have received $100 more than I deserve. And I should be satisfied even if I had received just the standard $200. Because our boss wasn't required to give me any more money that day.
I work as a teacher. Here's a scenario that seems parallel to the parable: Multiple students come to me asking if they can do extra credit in my class, but I say no. Then one student asks me, and I say yes. To the complaining students who didn't get extra credit, I could say, I gave you a grade according to the policies stated in the syllabus, I never said I wouldn't give anyone extra credit. But I think the students wouldn't be satisfied by that, and neither would my boss, because part of my job as a teacher is to be just, and giving students rewards arbitrarily isn't just.
EDIT: By the way, reviewing the Parable I see that it isn't really how you described. Everyone in that parable gets paid the same, even though they worked different hours. In your scenario (and in the miracle scenario) some people really do get more than others!
If grades should reflect mastery of the contents of the course, then it makes sense that people should have equal opportunities to demonstrate that mastery. I imagine that if you as a teacher are giving extra credit to students, you are not giving it to them for free. Rather you are giving them opportunities to earn extra credit.
Miracles as grace are not things we work toward to earn.
Well, then we'll tweak the scenario to make it more like grace. After the final exam, five students come to me asking me to raise their grade. I say no to four of them, then say yes to the fifth. When the four complain, I say, "I'm not obligated to explain my grading decisions. You all got what you signed up for, a valuable education and a grade according to the syllabus. Anything beyond that is supererogatory." Should they be satisfied with my answer?
I think a valuable education will minimize overstating a student's mastery of the course since a student should study hard to earn their grade. You can add supererogatory actions into the academic scenario, but the case remains that the student's grade should reflect how good they are at the subject as a product of their work.
A stronger counterexample I believe comes from the boss-worker relationships. Suppose the women get paid $150 a day while the men get paid $200 a day for the same work. The boss is sexist, right? But would it be any better if the women and the men both agreed to get paid $150 a day, and the boss pays the men $50 more as a supererogatory action?
https://www.plblaw.com/challenging-gender-discrimination-in-bonus-structures/
[Bonuses are often used to reward employees for performance, but when they are distributed unfairly, they can reinforce workplace inequality.]
Great piece! I am a Christian theist who believes in miracles and personally think these things are quite perplexing. My own grandmother had a vision of Jesus appearing to her when she was a child—that experience fundamentally changed her life, but it was quite unusual and never happened for her again or for anyone else in our family. I’m very interested in your idea that the sum of the data, assuming miracle reports have some credence, is that God would have to be limited. I think that has to be right. Though it could be a sort of limitationk because of the way the Creator ordered the universe such that other beings have actual semi-autonomous power.
Brian Cutter’s Omission Theodicy (specifically the archon abandonment version), Craig Keener’s work on miracles and Greg Boyd’s cosmic warfare framework all taken together would support this idea that God is indeed limited from engaging in “special divine action” most of the time. Keener does a great job deconstructing the idea that special divine action either occurs or fails to occur at random. He interviews a few people well known as divinely gifted healers in their own communities, who, when traveling in Western cultures, find that their prayers for healing suddenly have absolutely no effect whatsoever. They go back home, and bam, the switch is flipped back on. Craig Keeners work is the most academically rigorous miracles work I’m aware of, and this part about geography playing a role was very intriguing. Combining that data with a Greg Boyd style quasi-dualism, it could be said that unseen spiritual evil has actual territorial power to effectively thwart special divine action. If theism is true, animal suffering, inconsistency of miracles, religious violence all suggest quite definitely that this deity is actually limited in power, at least, that’s the current modus operandi.
Great post. The parental analogy is also apt given God is often called "Father" in Abrahamic religions. Would a "good Father" help Tim score the winning TD in his high school football game but not a 5 year old girl dying from Ebola? To just posit "mystery" is a cop out if we're staying with the NeoPlatonic all powerful all knowing deity of classical theism (which isn't even really in the Bible but assumptions made by later theologians), which I concur needs to be abandoned. And they're multiple God conceptions that enables that; it doesn't have to be atheism.
And that's not to mention that once >90% of miracles are critically examined (most aren't), it becomes clear there are pretty probable either naturalistic explanations, or outright fraud occurring.
Great stuff! Love your thinking.
The open and relational theology idea goes something like this. God, as you say, simply doesn't have the power to miraculously cure people or animals (or prevent suffering). But God knows the suffering is happening, suffers with us, and tries to lure or draw us and everything we're made with and everything interacting with us toward a wonderful outcome (immediate outcome and long term outcome). But we are good at resisting. and not just us in our full humanness, but all of our parts and everything we interact with. Nonetheless, God tries in every case of suffering to draw it toward cure. Very occasionally, everything at every level just lines up right and a quick and complete cure happens, but it's rare. But God never stops luring and drawing everything toward flourishing for all, short and long term, and it will take a very long term before every being is drawn into a flourishing state. If and when that time comes, maybe God can draw all of us who used to exist into being resurrected and we can all live in the joy of God's community in which way less suffering happens.