A response in human terms

There is, of course, very little to be said in support of the Grand Inquisitor. He is not meant to be an admirable character, for all his claims to be the one who is acting out of a

20 This point is echoed in Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State: ‘To console us, God, ever just, ever good, hands over the earth to the government of the Napoleon Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands of Austria, and of the Alexanders of all the Russias.’Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, chapter one, available at:

<http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/> [accessed 16/09/2014].

21 Vaclav Cerny, cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, p. 867.

22 Edward Wasiolek, cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, p. 793.

genuine love for humanity. The obvious parallels to be drawn between the picture that he presents and the eventual development of Bolshevism are enough to steer us away from sympathising too strongly with his views. And yet, it remains the case that, seeing things once more from Ivan’s point of view, and recognising Ivan’s poema of the Grand Inquisitor as a hyperbolic expression of that point of view, there is a case to be answered here. Christ does refuse to turn stones into bread, and yet people starve. Christ does refuse to confirm his existence through miracle, and yet people suffer the silence of divine hiddenness.²³ Christ does refuse to take dominion of the kingdoms of the world, and tyrants rise up to fill the void.

That these might strike us as prima facie problematic is not to say that we must agree with the Grand Inquisitor’s solutions. What Ivan’s poema illustrates is the tension present in the distinctively Christian response to the problem of evil.

Let us take as read the contention that theodical stories lack humanity, and God, insofar as those stories are in any way accurate, inherits that charge of inhumanity. Let us also assume that Christ is the counter-point to this accusation; Christ is what provides God with a human response, a human face, to our sufferings. What ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ serves to demonstrate is that even Christ behaves inhumanly when He refuses the temptation to cure the ills of the world. In leaving man to his own devices, Christ ‘didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him—Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter’.²⁴ The conclusion of recognising this tension need not become repugnant; we need not commit ourselves to the Grand Inquisitor’s solution. The underlying tension remains. Christ the Son is no less vulnerable to the accusations of moral anti-theodicy than God the Father is.

With one notable exception: Ivan’s poema ends as follows:

When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all His answer.²⁵

This is the distinctively human response that Christ the Son can offer, that God the Father and theodicy cannot. In this response there is no ‘justification’, there is no counter-argument to the Grand Inquisitor’s accusations, there is no sanctioning of the unsanctionable. I need not

23 See John L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993).

24 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 175.

25 Ibid., p. 178.

reiterate the distinctively Gaita-esque requirements of this moral ‘response’ as being embodied, personal, constructed as much of tone as of content. It is a response that occurs in the ‘Realm of Meaning’, which is why it can hope to meet Ivan’s challenge on its own terms.

(Dostoevsky has the chapter conclude with Alyosha ‘plagiarising’ Christ’s response.)²⁶ It is a response in human terms. For some, this is an adequate response; for others, it is not. And it is likely that this is all that can be said on the matter. Not, I stress, because the two options represent contrasting evaluative claims regarding the status of horrendous evils; I do not wish to fall into a pessimism regarding the prospects of moral philosophy, and both of these options should agree in their superficial evaluative claims regarding the unconscionable evils of the world. Instead, I say that it is likely that this is all that can be said on the matter because what is left to say can likely only be shown, and this belongs to the partly mysterious and certainly irreducible realms of meaning that are constitutive of a fully formed form of life. This is not an opposition that can be reduced to rational argument, or rational appraisal.

‘Reason or rationality cannot cope with the senselessness of such suffering, and Zosima will respond to it only with a leap of faith in God’s ultimate goodness and mercy.’²⁷

So echoing once again Wittgenstein’s notion that what cannot be said can be shown, though there is little to say between these two options, Dostoevsky hopes to show ‘that a pure, ideal Christian is not an abstract matter but one graphically real, possible, standing before our eyes’.²⁸ For this, he relies upon his character of Zosima, yet he was pessimistic about the likelihood of success: ‘The reply [to Ivan], after all, is [...] only an indirect one [...]

an artistic picture. [...] There are a few of the monk’s precepts in response to which people will absolutely yell that they’re absurd in the everyday sense, but in another, inner sense I think they [Zosima’s precepts] are right.’²⁹ Zosima’s ‘indirect, artistic picture’ is as well typified in Christ’s response to the Grand Inquisitor as in any other depiction.

10.8 Conclusion

This, then, is my conclusion. The only tolerable response to the problem of evil, in light of all that has been said by the moral anti-theodicists, is a distinctively human response;

a response that says nothing to the justification of evil. This is the only kind of response that

26 ‘Alyosha got up, went to him and softly kissed him on the lips. “That’s plagiarism,” cried Ivan, highly delighted. “You stole that from my poem. Thank you though”.’ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 179.

27 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, p. 789.

28 Ibid., p. 792.

29 Ibid., p. 800.

can evade a charge of inhumanity. Abstract theodical stories will not do; they misunderstand our human form of moral understanding or they lack moral responsiveness. Although Christianity might appear to offer some hope of this ‘distinctively human’ response, as Dostoevsky thought, it too is vulnerable to charges of lacking sufficient moral responsiveness. Although there remains a tension here, given that we are not eager to accept the Grand Inquisitor’s conclusions, we should perhaps not be surprised that this problem ends in tension. There are conflicting moral demands in this instance, and we should have no expectation that the world would be kind enough to ensure that moral demands do not conflict:

Morality is never merely the servant but always the judge of our interests and purposes. Thus, we cannot commandeer it to our purposes, not even when morality and the world are tragically mismatched. We cannot always find a solution (even in principle) to dilemmas which are in part caused by the claims of morality. The most serious cause of conflict within morality and between morality and other values is caused by the fact that our various ways of loving condition our sense that human beings are precious beyond reason and beyond merit.

Some of those loves are in conflict with one another and with morality. Morality is, therefore, in tension with what conditions its most fundamental concept.³⁰

The overarching purpose of this thesis has been to reveal the tension between theistic claims and the claims of human morality. Theists cannot mortgage their moral understanding or moral responsiveness in order to maintain their theistic belief. They do themselves a great disservice by opting for abstract and inhuman solutions to the problem of evil. The only acceptable response to the problem of evil is one that does not diminish the humanity of the victim or the theodicist. It remains an open question whether or not such a response could adequately address the problem of evil.

30 Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, p. 8.

Conclusion

Let us fight, but let us make a distinction. The peculiar property of truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration? There is that which it is necessary to destroy, and there is that which it is simply necessary to elucidate and examine. What a force is kindly and serious examination! Let us not apply a flame where only a light is required.

Victor Hugo¹

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

Mikhail Bakunin²

The purpose of this thesis has been to highlight the chronically underappreciated moral cost of believing in God. I have tried to argue that the problem of evil remains a serious challenge to religious belief, not because it goes any way towards establishing the non-existence of God, but because it highlights the undesirable moral claims that must be committed to if one is to believe in God. In order to believe in the existence of a good, maximally-powerful creator of the universe, you must believe that none of the evils that exist in the world are incompatible with such a being. Derivatively, you must believe that everything is

‘ok’, all things considered. But this, I have argued, is to deny the evils of the world their proper status. Simply put, all things considered, some things are not ‘ok’.

To this end, I have sought to construct a valid argument that highlights these issues.

The first section of this thesis (chapters one, two, and three) established the logically binding nature of the problem of evil. The problem of evil remains such that it must be solved by any theist, even if that resolution is only tacit. And yet, I also argued that the fundamentally evaluative nature of some of the premises within the problem of evil entails that it cannot be used as a basis from which to argue for the non-existence of God. I borrowed from J. L.

Mackie for this point.

1 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. by Isabel F. Hapgood, Kindle edition (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell &

Co., 1887), p. 348.

2 Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, chapter two, available at:

<http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/> [accessed 16/09/2014].

The second section (chapters four, five, six, and seven) established the morally objectionable nature of many theodical responses to the problem of evil. I discussed some inconsistencies within the ethical underpinnings of some common theistic responses to the problem of evil, and discussed the work of the moral anti-theodicists. I supported some of the key premises within the arguments of the moral anti-theodicists via appeal to the moral philosophy of Raimond Gaita, and to Ludwig Wittgenstein. I concluded that at least some of the criticisms of the moral anti-theodicists are correct and, therefore, that theodicy is morally objectionable. I then combined the claims of section one with the claims of section two, and concluded that theism inherits the moral objectionability of theodicy. To the extent that theodicy is morally objectionable, theism is morally objectionable.

Section three (chapters eight, nine, and ten) argued for the plausibility of a form of atheism constructed not of belief in the non-existence of God, but of a noncognitive negative moral appraisal of God or belief in God. I discussed a likely example of this form of atheism, in the form of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, and concluded that this was a viable and robust form of atheism. My final chapter distilled the claims of this thesis into a slogan: God lacks humanity. The problem of evil reveals that belief in a maximally-good God is fundamentally at odds with the evaluative claims that are a product of our common humanity. To believe in God is to deny certain evaluative claims that are constitutive of our essentially human ethical understanding; it is to fail to respond to the evils of the world in human terms. Even Christ - surely God’s greatest hope of responding in human terms - cannot fully evade this challenge;

even Christ can be accused of lacking humanity.

What we are left with, if any of what I have said here is plausible, is a distinctively moral objection to theistic belief. All I mean by this is that the problem of evil provides a basis from which to object to theistic belief on moral grounds, and we have good reason to so object. It does not necessarily recommend any action or accusation. ‘The claims of morality [...] do not express themselves only in what ought to or must be done.’³ At most, I might suppose that, in light of my argument, atheists might be more inclined to react to certain theistic views with raised eyebrows, and theists might be more inclined to express such views with a heavier heart. Perhaps at the very least I might suppose that, contrary to what can seem sometimes to be the prevailing consensus, theists should not be assumed to possess the moral high-ground.

3 Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edition, Kindle edition (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 243.

For such distinctively moral arguments have often been sent the other way, with lack of belief in God (atheism) standing accused of making some undesirable moral claims. It is often said that if one does not believe in God, then one cannot believe in morality.⁴ This is taken to be undesirable, with the conclusion being, if not the confirmed existence of God, at least some pressure to believe in God for the sake of practical purposes. Though that argument is weak enough in itself, the argument presented in this thesis ought to place some pressure back in the opposite direction, and show that belief in God is not a morally easy option. You do not get that belief for free; there is some moral cost involved with theism, just as some people are inclined to think that there might be with atheism. As some might be inclined to say that to not believe in God entails that you cannot believe in morality, so I would retort that to believe in God entails that you cannot understand morality.

This should not be interpreted as a charge to claim the moral high-ground. I have tried to be very careful in establishing the legitimate moral-philosophical foundations for such a claim. I have drawn heavily on Raimond Gaita’s work for this throughout, and will continue to do so:

Moral understanding requires that those who would claim to have it should be serious respondents to morality’s demands. Someone who cannot be responsive to morality’s demands is one for whom morality has no reality. The ‘reality’ of moral value is inseparable from the reality of it as a claim on us, and serious responsiveness to that claim is internal to the recognition of its reality.⁵

Whatever else may be said of the predominant theistic responses to the problem of evil, that they display an eminent lack of serious moral responsiveness ought by now to be clear and uncontroversial. To the extent that theists continue to rely upon those theodical responses, they will be vulnerable to accusations of lacking moral understanding.

So should we side with Bakunin, or with Hugo? For my part, I hope that what I have said in this thesis will be taken to side with Hugo. I do not consider my thesis, if correct, as a call for the morally-motivated abolition of theism, but perhaps as an admonition. It is a chiding, a scalding, a call for theists to buck up their moral ideas. It is a call to seriousness:

‘Come now, think about what you are saying!’⁶

4 I say ‘often’, because any version of the moral argument for God’s existence relies upon this claim, and that argument is often offered.

5 Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil, p. 59.

6 Ibid., p. 301.

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