A Frightening Love: Replies to Bishop and Mintoff

I greatly thank John Bishop and Joe Mintoff for their insightful and stimulating comments. I will deal with them separately.

John Bishop

Bishop makes several important points. Unfortunately I have space to deal only with two.

• 1. Bishop takes issue with my development of Ivan Karamazov’s famous protest against theodicy, a development I conduct in terms of the central Christian image of parental love. My position is that no loving parents would find it thinkable to agree to send their children to Auschwitz just for the sake of a greater good (as opposed, say, to avoiding a catastrophe). Not even if that greater good was an eternal bliss in which the children were included and in the light of which they gave their retrospective consent to the deal. Thus, by its own standard, Christianity must eschew greater good theodicy.

  Bishop’s positive criticism of my argument is that ‘God is not human, counting as a loving parent only by analogy’ (Bishop 2013). But the mere existence of some disanalogy between God and loving human parents shows little by itself. The point is worrying only if the two terms are disanalogous in the respect I am concerned with. Bishop offers no argument to show they are. I say: if the analogy does not hold in that respect (loving parents being unable to inflict horrendous evil on their children purely for greater goods) then nothing of importance remains in it.

• 2. A Frightening Love (AFL) argues that traditional theodicy is a failure, but that the believer can nevertheless escape the problem of evil once it is realised that the so-called ‘intellectual’ problem of academic discussion is a distortion of the genuine ‘existential’ problem. The former is a contrived problem framed in terms of an impartialist morality that distorts the nature of God (making him more the ideal observer of moral theory than Christianity’s loving father). The latter is a problem framed in terms of love, and the rival claims on us of God and the victims of evil. The book argues that there is no universal solution to the existential problem, one binding on all rational beings. I do claim that the possibility of a personal solution is available, but it is not one that everyone must accept on pain of irrationality. This possibility requires repudiating certain anthropomorphic understandings of God. Bishop shares this repudiation, but thinks I go too far in denying that creation is usefully thought of as a causal relation. He worries that the problem of evil will return. The following embroiders his words, but I take it he envisages an argument like this. If the existence of the world is a manifestation or instantiation (rather than a causal product) of the goodness that is Love Itself – God – then just as on the causal view the question can be pressed why a loving agent God would create (cause the existence of) a world with serious evils, so too on my view the question can be pressed how the goodness of Love Itself can be instantiated as serious evils? I broached this in AFL, but my discussion was not adequate. I am grateful to John Bishop and Sophia for the opportunity to clarify my position.

I now draw heavily on the work of the late English Dominican and Thomist Herbert McCabe. The following understanding of God is ground out from McCabe through my personal lens, and readers should consult his writings for the pristine version (McCabe 1987 chapter 1, 2010 chapters 3–5). For McCabe, God does not explain how the universe comes to have this property or that, be like this or like that (be fine-tuned, or have a beginning, or even be contingent). Rather God is the answer to what he calls ‘the ultimate question’: why does the universe exist at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? Or perhaps most simply, whence existence? God is the source of existence itself, or in Thomist jargon, of esse, ‘being’. Unlike myself, McCabe does not wholly eschew causal language in talking about God’s creating the world. But in whatever sense God is the answer to the ultimate question, it is clear it is not in anything like the sense of efficient (or teleological) causation. That is explanation within the created world of how things come to exist in the particular ways they exist, like this or like that, in this way or in that – not explanation of existence itself. An upshot of this understanding of God is McCabe’s radical solution to the problem of evil. For him, the problem is a non-starter, a conceptual muddle born of applying to God, the Creator – and thus applying outside creation – causal concepts that have application only within creation. Causes inside creation explain why a thing exists like this or like that. They are causes that sustain inferences from the nature of the effect to the nature of the cause: the effect is like this, because the cause is like that. But in the case of God’s creation of the world, because God gives to things simply their esse, their being, their existing at all, rather than in this way or in that way, we cannot draw inferences about God from the fact that the world is like this or like that, has so much of this in it and not enough of that. A fortiori, no conclusions can be drawn about God from the fact that there is so much evil. Vale, the problem of evil.

McCabe’s solution to the problem of evil is startling, even brilliant. I think he may well succeed in disposing of the traditional anthropomorphic form of the problem of evil and indeed of any form relying on a view of creation as a causal phenomenon. Does it do the same for Bishop’s attempt to reassert the problem against my view of creation as the manifestation, the disclosure – to use the Heidegerrian term Bishop usefully suggests – of Love itself? I think it might. The crux is that Love itself – God – is manifested in creation as the world existing at all, not as it existing in this way or in that. So, just as the world being like this or like that does not licence inferences to the causal God, so too its being like this or like that does not disclose to us anything about Love itself. Only it existing at all does that. This does not compromise God’s status as Creator. The world would not exist without him.

All this said, I emphasise that the problem of evil McCabe’s argument perhaps resolves (whether in casual vein or otherwise) is the academic, intellectual problem. But the demise of that problem still leaves us with the existential one: see Gleeson 2012 for McCabe and the existential problem.¹

Joe Mintoff

Mintoff says that considerations of truth ‘need not exclude existential appeals to conscience’ (Mintoff 2013), a statement I applaud. But this turns out not to mean what I mean by it, as Mintoff realises. He says later that ‘answers [to the problem of evil] can also be appraised by “existential” concepts—if, … these concepts have implications about the reliability of processes motivating one’s beliefs’ (Mintoff 2013, original emphasis). He explicitly demurs from my claim that existential appraisal is essential (as opposed to possible) and says that ‘logical appraisal should generally have priority over existential appraisal’, the latter being relevant only when ‘sentimental thinking on a question diminishes the possibility that one’s answers are true’ (Mintoff 2013).

The dominant idea here is that existential considerations like sentimentality are only causally relevant to truth and falsity, to understanding and misunderstanding. That is the force of phrases like ‘implications about the reliability of processes motivating one’s beliefs’ and ‘diminishes the possibility that one’s answers are true’. Much like being drunk, sentimentality may cause us to go right or wrong, but it is not itself a term of cognitive appraisal: it is not one of the criteria in virtue of which our thinking counts as going right or going wrong. That is reserved for (I can only assume) the ‘thin’ resources of objectifying thought.

Moreover, Mintoff seems to assume that these thin resources can tell us whether or not someone’s thought is sentimental, without having to investigate the question of sentimentality on its own terms. Thus he writes that ‘in most cases, convincing a person that their thinking is sentimental will necessarily involve showing them that their arguments are mistaken’ (Mintoff 2013) and the context makes it clear that ‘the arguments’ are not themselves arguments directly about sentimentality, not existential arguments. Again, I can only assume they are thin arguments.

I fear there is a deep philosophical assumption at work here: existential matters are not matters of truth and falsity, not ‘intellectual’ or ‘cognitive’, or at least are not unless they can somehow be grounded in the thin cognitive resources. Mintoff writes:

… if the belief that they are not required to repudiate their love of God really is in reflective equilibrium for the person we are imagining, and we object that talk of love in this context is sentimental, then they will simply view this as question-begging, since their considered opinion is that it is right for them to continue to accept God's love when faced with suffering children, and they will be aware that if they are right then their thinking will not count as sentimental, at least on that matter. And, indeed, even while they are still marshalling their arguments before reaching reflective equilibrium, they are liable to give short shrift to any objection that their thinking is sentimental (unless, as I say, you provide independent evidence of this fault). (Mintoff 2013, original emphases)

Here again we find the idea that non-existential considerations (‘their considered opinion’) purportedly showing some view of love to be correct will demonstrate that a charge of sentimentality is question-begging and false (‘they will be aware that if they are right then their thinking will not count as sentimental’). That position certainly does mean their consideration of love will give ‘short shrift’ to the charge of sentimentality. It seems the existential can simply be ignored. Just do the thin work, and the existential will take care of itself.

But I don’t see how this can be, because a concept like love is existential through and through, and questions about it are not tractable to the limited resources of the thin criteria. Love is a concept conditioned by the fact that we distinguish its true and false forms – serious and faithful and patient love from teenage infatuation and Hollywood sentimentality. The language of existential appraisal is simply the language we have for those forms of genuine and fake love. If you take those qualifications (positive and negative) away from ‘love’ then you are not left with its factual, cognitive core: you are left with nothing. It is a language of understanding (and misunderstanding). And what goes for love goes for good and evil, and indeed for God (love itself). Unless the existential is granted cognitive status in its own right we will never understand the problem of evil.²

Gleeson, Andrew

2009. ‘“My Kingdom is Not of This World”: Reflections on Archbishop Jensen’s Jesus’, Modern Believing 50(2) April, 51–63.

2012. ‘God and Evil: A View from Swansea’, Philosophical Investigations 35(3–4) July/October, 331–349.

McCabe, Herbert

1987. God Matters, London, Geoffrey Chapman.

2010. God and Evil in the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. Brian Davies, London, Continuum.