Naturalizing the problem of evil

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 299-313

  Cheney, Jim ^a  

^a Milwaukee College of General Studies Waukesha Campus   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 7044228169     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics199719317     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Personal communication.
2. Allen Carlson, review of Holmes Rolston, III, Philosophy Gone Wild (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1986), in Environmental Ethics 8 (1986): 163-77.
3. Allen Carlson, review of Holmes Rolston, III, Philosophy Gone Wild (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1986), in Environmental Ethics 8 (1986): 163-77.
4. Holmes Rolston, III, "Disvalues in Nature," The Monist 75 (April 1992): 250-78.
5. As Carlson points out, however, Rolston is aware of the relationship between his discussion of disvalues in nature and traditional theodicies. Carlson, Rolston review, p. 169.
6. Frederick Ferré, "Environment and the Problem of Evil," chap. 3 of Corrado Poli and Peter Timmerman, eds., Ethics and Environmental Policies (Padua: Fondazione Lanza, 1993), pp. 54-62.
7. Frederick Ferré, "Theodicy and the Status of Animals," American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (January 1986): 23-34. The bracketed amendment is suggested by Ferré on p. 32.
8. Carlson, Rolston review, p. 169.
9. Rolston, "Disvalues in Nature," p. 270.
10. Carlson, Rolston review, p. 171, quoting Rolston. Again, Rolston's reply is also found in his later work. See Rolston, "Disvalues in Nature," p. 275.
11. Carlson, Rolston review, p. 171, quoting Rolston. Again, Rolston's reply is also found in his later work. See Rolston, "Disvalues in Nature," p. 275.
12. Carlson, Rolston review, pp. 171 and 166, quoting Rolston. Rolston repeats this claim later in Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 232.
13. Carlson, Rolston review, pp. 171 and 166, quoting Rolston. Rolston repeats this claim later in Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 232.
14. Ferré, "Environment and the Problem of Evil," p. 59.
15. Ibid., pp. 59, 61.
16. Ibid., p. 55.
17. Ibid., p. 60.
18. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 232.
19. Ferré, "Environment and the Problem of Evil," p. 61.
20. Ibid., p. 62.
21. Rolston. "Disvalues in Nature," pp. 259-60.
22. In James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. 1, Theology and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
23. Ferré, "Theodicy and the Status of Animals," p. 26, quoting Gustafson.
24. Ferré, "Environment and the Problem of Evil," p. 61.
25. Ferré discusses the transformative potential of the challenge to traditional theodicies posed by contemporary environmental philosophies: "the redrawing of the ethical map to include animals in a morally significant way . . . strains beyond the breaking point the delicate theoretical coherence that had been achieved by the Free Will Defense. On one level this is a serious loss to thinkers who had come to rely on that defense; on another level it is a spur to greater theoretical penetration and to new coherences marking an important advance in theistic theory. Theistic environmentalists find themselves at what Thomas Kuhn calls a crisis situation. The times are ripe for revolution." Ferré, "Theodicy and the Status of Animals," p. 32.
26. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 314-15. It is worth noting that other responses to Job's problem had been developed in the Babylonian wisdom literature, as Ricoeur notes. One response was to regard suffering as "not so much unjust as senseless, and it has the result of making every undertaking senseless. . . . Thus the ethical vision is eaten away right down to the very core of action. In other texts . . . 'wisdom' counsels mute resignation and a most extreme sacrifice of the will to know." Ibid., pp. 315-16.
27. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 314-15. It is worth noting that other responses to Job's problem had been developed in the Babylonian wisdom literature, as Ricoeur notes. One response was to regard suffering as "not so much unjust as senseless, and it has the result of making every undertaking senseless. . . . Thus the ethical vision is eaten away right down to the very core of action. In other texts . . . 'wisdom' counsels mute resignation and a most extreme sacrifice of the will to know." Ibid., pp. 315-16.
28. Ibid., p. 320.
29. Ibid., p. 321.
30. Job 42: 2-6.
31. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 321.
32. Ibid., p. 321. The lesson of Job, for Ricoeur, is the presence of a tragic element in any viable theology, "the opacity of evil and the opacity of the world 'in which such a thing is possible.'" Ibid., p. 326, quoting Max Scheler.
33. Ibid., p. 321. The lesson of Job, for Ricoeur, is the presence of a tragic element in any viable theology, "the opacity of evil and the opacity of the world 'in which such a thing is possible.'" Ibid., p. 326, quoting Max Scheler.
34. I intend it as no more than a foil. In particular, I do not suppose that my reflections show that the reality of pain and suffering in this world is in fact inconsistent with the claim that an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly benevolent God exists.
35. An interesting emendation to the free will defense offered by John Hick is relevant to our discussion here. Hick argues that a necessary condition of granting genuine freedom of choice to humans is that humans live in a world in which God's existence is not experientially evident, a world in which it is reasonable to conclude that events are governed, not by providence, but by laws of nature and human choice (though, at the same time, a world in which it is at least not unreasonable to believe that God exists). If God's existence were experientially manifest or reasonably inferable from the evidence at hand, the coercive power of such knowledge on our choices, Hick argues, would seriously compromise human freedom: Those who knew that an omnipotent and omniscient God existed and that their eternal salvation or damnation hung in the balance of their choices would not be psychologically able to choose disobedience. For this reason our experience of the world must be such that it is reasonable to conclude that it contains more suffering and evil than a perfectly benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God would permit. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978). This argument has its appeal. If valid, it gives us a God who is constrained (by his own omnipotence!) to not interfere with our freedom, thereby avoiding the exceedingly harsh God that emerges from my students' response to the problem of evil. But an equally problematic portrait of God's relationship to humans seems to emerge from this argument - namely, that of a God who would very much like to eliminate this suffering and evil, who thinks that it would be good to do so, but who is constrained to not interfere, a God whose behavior is much harsher than that of most of his human counterpart fathers, precisely because of his omnipotence, his ability to act so powerfully in the lives of his children. We have here a frustrated God who stands by helplessly, impotent, watching his children suffer intensely, wanting desperately to help, but unable to do so; a God far less able to help his children than earthly fathers.
36. Paul Shepard, in Nature and Madness (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982), argues that tribal cultures recognize this earth matrix and provide rites of passage ensuring that just as the infant passes from the nurturing womb into a nurturing relationship with primary caretakers and, later, the wider human community, so the child passes from these to a sense of embeddedness in a nurturing earth matrix, which nourishes the growing child psychologically and culturally - as it has all along provided physical nourishment - in ways that the earlier relationships cannot achieve by themselves.
37. This is not to say, of course, that we do not want, at the same time, to be children to our parents, that we do not want friends, that we do not want to be treated with moral regard by other humans.
38. The term more-than-human was coined by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996).
39. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 31. See also pp. 197-98.
40. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 31. See also pp. 197-98.
41. Henry David Thoreau, para. 101 of "Economy," in Walden. There is, perhaps, an ambiguity in the original passage when taken out of context. To eliminate the ambiguity, I have removed the comma between calling and to and inserted the words in order.
42. Shepard, Nature and Madness, p. 6.
43. For related discussions on the naturalization of spirituality see Jim Cheney, "The Dusty World: Wildness and Higher Laws in Thoreau's Walden," Ethics and the Environment 1 (Fall 1996): 75-90; and Jim Cheney, "'The Waters of Separation': Myth and Ritual in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6 (Spring 1990): 41-63.
44. For related discussions on the naturalization of spirituality see Jim Cheney, "The Dusty World: Wildness and Higher Laws in Thoreau's Walden," Ethics and the Environment 1 (Fall 1996): 75-90; and Jim Cheney, "'The Waters of Separation': Myth and Ritual in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6 (Spring 1990): 41-63.