problem of evil

>>>>> "jeremy" == Jeremy Shipley <[email protected]> writes:

  jeremy> rule is cited.&nbsp; Kendall cites the <BR>holocaust in
  jeremy> response.&nbsp; This raises a sound criticism of this kind
  jeremy> of theodical<BR>approach (I remember having read this
  jeremy> articulated formally as an undergrad).<BR>The problem is
  jeremy> that even if the argument succeeds in showing that there are
  jeremy> <BR>some necessary evils (necessary for a greater good), it
  jeremy> doesn't show that there <BR>is necessarily this much
  jeremy> evil.&nbsp; 

Yes, yes.

But I was trying to also suggest *more* than that; namely, that a
horror of this *kind* (i.e., in a sense that makes it unconvertible
to, say, a killer earthquake that kills 6M Los Angelenos in one week)
for me, at least existentially, breaks the whole mode of arguing about
balanced goods and harms.

That is, it puts claims of some good balancing or covering this much
harm out of my reach; but it also puts your perfectly on point
counterclaims of "why *this* much?" out of reach too.

Now, maybe this is merely a psychological point (or, worse: merely a
point about *my* psychology), in which case not much more needs to be
said about it.

However, this pattern of argument was one of the spurs for a different
mode of resolving the problem of evil. Earlier when I said you could
resolve it by relinquishing or qualifying omnipotence talk in order to
preserve omnibeneficence talk, that's almost entirely, in the Western
Christian tradition, a modern, that is, contemporary phenomenon
(post-WWII). (There are precursors, though, and some of them
important.)

Dorothee Soelle, an important German liberation theologian, published
a very influential book on the suffering of God. There is evil in the
world, she said, because God is not all-powerful; God is, however,
all-empathetic, i.e., God suffers when we suffer. (Hers is a very
political, Marxist orientation, so the methaphysics is more or less
unvoiced.)

The post-Holocaust interest in this kind of response to PoE sort of
re-activated a pre-war set of texts and thinkers, which cluster around
Whitehead's *Process and Reality* (which is a very dense but
interesting book) -- all called 'process metaphysics'. Charles
Hartshorne, a student of Whitehead's, developed a process theism,
sometimes called neoclassical theism, following Whitehead.

My professor, at one time a student of Hartshorne's, Schubert Ogden
has a fairly convincing essay that claims the PoE doesn't really arise
except under classical, as opposed to neoclassical or process,
theism. (In other words, process theists massively revise *all* talk
of God in such a way, they claim, as to moot the PoE. The revisions
weren't made in response to the PoE, however, but, rather, out of
dissatisfaction -- which is again quite old -- with the whole Greek
metaphysic that Hellenizing Christianity naturally used to say to its
culture what it felt obliged to say.)

Just as every other major Christian doctrine has been thoroughly and
critically revised in the modern period, so too for the doctrine of
God. Ogden's collection of essays, published at the height of the
'death of God' movement in the late 60s (which was *huge* culturally:
Time Magazine regularly talked about theologians; probably the last
time that's happened, except for fundies and right-wing nutters), *The
Reality of God*, is one of the highwater marks.

Process theism replaces the traditional notion of divine perfection
with a more evolutionary notion; God is not maximally perfect, for
that, under process metaphysics, isn't an especially coherent
notion. God is as perfect as its at any time possible to be, but God
continually surpasses God's own perfection. The traditional
omni-properties are replaced with one property, relationality, that
is, God's "infinite capacity to assimilate novelty".

To give a bit of the flavor of how this goes, here's a few tidbits
from Ogden's titular essay, "The Reality of God":

  "...the chief category for finally interpreting anything real can no
  longer be 'substance' or 'being' (as traditionally understood), but
  must be 'process' or 'creative becoming,' construed as that which is
  in principle social and temporal...

  "...God, too, must be conceived as a genuinely temporal and social
  reality, and therefore as radically different from the wholly
  timeless and unrelated Absolute of traditional theism. That is not
  to say that God is to be thought of as only one more instance of
  creative becoming alongside all the others. As we saw...the idea of
  God cannot be thought at all unless that to which it refers is in
  all ways truly supreme, a unique reality qualitatively different
  from everything else...

  <interesting stuff about the analogia entis snipped>

  "...God is now conceived as precisely the unique or in all ways
  perfect instance of creative becoming, and so as the one reality
  which is eminently social and temporal. Instead of being merely the
  barren Absolute, which by definition can be really related to
  nothing, God is in truth related to everything, and that through an
  immediate sympathetic participation of which our own relation to our
  bodies is but an image... [God] is understood to be continually in
  process of self-creation, synthesizing in each new moment of [God's]
  experience the whole of achieved actuality with the plenitude of
  possibility as yet unrealized.

  "This implies...that God is by analogy a living and even growing God
  and that he [it was the mid-60s; Ogden didn't make a feminist turn
  until mid-70s, one of the first male theologians to do so, to his
  credit, I think; feminist theologians who go in for formal god-talk
  are almost entirely process theologians] is related to the universe
  of other beings somewhat as the human self is related to its
  body. And yet, just as surely implied is that God is even in these
  respects the truly eminent or perfect reality, whose
  unsurpassability by others is a matter of principle, not simply
  fact. If God is the *eminently* temporal and changing One, to whose
  time and chagne there can be neither beginning nor end, then he must
  be just as surely the One who is also eternal and
  unchangeable. *That* he is ever-changing is itself the product or
  effect of no change whatever, but is in the strict sense changeless,
  the immutable ground of change as such, both his own and all
  others...Hence, just because God is the *eminently* relative One,
  there is also a sense in which he is strictly absolute. His being
  related to all others is itself relative to nothing, but is the
  absolute ground of any and all real relationships, whether his own
  or those of his creatures.

In the light of this metaphysic and theology proper, the doctrine of
personal immortality evaporates (and nearly all other core Christian
doctrines are radically revised or evaporate too); all that is left is
the idea that everything that ever exists, including human persons,
becomes a part of God's existence in the course of God being related
to the whole of reality.

All of which makes very many theological defenders of traditional
theism almost incalculably grumpy, which is often reason enough to
spout it at conferences and in seminars. Sometimes it's enough that a
new way of speaking *pisses off* the right people!

If you go in for god-talk in any kind of formal way, it's pretty
cutting edge stuff (as these things go).

Kendall