A considerable problem for most
theistic systems is presented by the question of theodicy. God is
usually portrayed as infinitely benevolent person who wishes good for
everyone. Furthermore, he is also thought to be omnipotent or capable
of anything possible. Given these premises, it would seem a necessity
that God would eradicate world of all evil. Yet, the world is clearly
full of evil things, and not just minor evils, like the pain that I
got when my toe hit a stone, but also evil of major proportions, such
as earthquakes and wars. These considerations thus present a
challenge for anyone accepting the existence of omnipotent and
benevolent deity.
Bilfinger considers the problem in the
section of Dilucidationes concerning natural theology, but he had
also dedicated for it earlier a whole treatise, De origine et
permissione mali, praecipue moralis, commentatio philosophica.
While apparently only about this particular question, Bilfinger takes
considerable time defining and explicating all concepts involved in
the problem and thus goes through a significant portion of other
metaphysical issues. Thus, it is no wonder that central concepts for
solving this problem are actually physical or psychological:
causation and letting things happen.
Of the two concepts, causation appears
easier to understand: if A does something that makes B happen, then A
has caused B, that is, if my pressing the trigger leads to the death
of the person, the pressing was the cause of the death and I am thus
to be blamed. Being a cause of something then requires a) that the
cause was active in causing something and b) that without this
activity that which was caused wouldn't have happened.
Letting or allowing things to happen is
then, in a sense, a concept contrasting with the concept of
causation. The crucial difference lies in the clause a), which in
this case would say that the allowing factor was in a sense passive
or did not act in some manner. Furthermore, the clause b) would be
otherwise identical, but instead of activity, the lack of activity is
the crucial element required for the event. Thus, if I don't push a
person away when she is about to be hit by a rock, I could be said to
have allowed the rock to hit the person.
Now, it is clear that the notion of
allowing something to happen is meaningful only from the perspective
of conscious agents, who can be said to have considered whether to
act or not. Thus, we wouldn't say that an immovable stone allowed a
robbery to happen by not dropping onto the head of the robber,
because stones usually don't have any say in how they happen to be
moved.
An intriguing question, especially from
the viewpoint of ethics and justice, is whether allowing something to
happen should have the same status as causation. In one sense,
causation is something more: I am punished by law, if I actively make
bad things happen, but not if I allow them to happen with my own
passivity. Thus, it is no wonder that Bilfinger adopts this
distinction as a partial explanation of the problem of evil. That is,
he argues that we couldn't blame God for all the evil in the world,
because he hasn't really caused it, but merely admitted it within the
world.
Bilfinger's justification might still
not completely satisfy us. After all, we do sometimes reproach people
also for not doing things, especially if they are very powerful and
would have had the capacity to prevent some extreme evil to happen:
politicians who do nothing for things such as pollution and poverty
fall to this category. It appears preposterous to suppose that God
Almighty could get away from all guilt merely by saying that he had
nothing to do with the evil in the world, he just watched it unfold.
Bilfinger thus must also have recourse to
the Leibnizian idea that God has chosen the optimally good of all
possible worlds. Whatever evil there is, it should be just a
necessary ingredient of and condition for ultimate goodness – and
if we could see things from God's viewpoint, we could immediately see
how all the seeming evil falls into a greater pattern of goodness.
What then is the real cause of evil, if
not God? Ultimately, Bilfinger says, it all comes down to the
finiteness or imperfection of the world and its denizens: only God
can be perfect, so all things outside him might possibly lead to some
evil consequences. God cannot be faulted for their imperfections,
because imperfection is in their nature. Instead, God merely gave
these finite substances actuality, which is positive in itself.
A particular source of evil Bilfinger
emphasizes is free will: because humans and other conscious beings
are imperfect, but free to choose their own fates, they might e.g.
make their egoistic desires into maxims guiding their action. Evil
following from perverted use of free will Bilfinger calls moral,
distinguishing it from general metaphysical evil associated with
finity and from physical evil.
The most problematic is Bilfinger's
account of physical evil: if a stone falls on my head and kills me, I
cannot blame the stone, because it had no choice in the matter. Some
responsibility obviously lies with free agents: if I get angry to a
person and drop a stone on him, it is my fault and not stone's. In
these cases physical evil is just a consequence of moral evil, but it
appears that a fair portion of physical evil is not of this kind:
witness, for instance, earth quakes. True, we could suppose that
there is an evil supernatural entity behind all such phenomena, but
this seems overly complicated. Bilfinger himself adopts a different
defense: physical evil that has not been caused by actions of a
morally evil person is probably God's punishment for immoral life.
Although this notion is consistent, I find it rather barbaric that a
God would have to unleash earthquakes and volcanoes for punishing
criminals.
So much for Bilfinger, next time I
shall return to the beginning of the atheism controversy, that is,
Wolff's lectures on Chinese philosophy.
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