Support for the premises

I will now offer some support for the premises in this dilemma.

10.3.1 Premise 1: Either the ways of the most high are our ways, or they are not Premise 1 is a simple disjunction, and needs no justification, though it may require clarification. I borrow the terminology from Kant (who in turn borrows from Ovid); I do not mean to do anything controversial in my usage, so take the following to be largely obvious.

By ‘the ways’, in this context, I mean simply moral norms, or a form of moral understanding.

By ‘the ways of the most high’, I mean simply the moral norms that apply to God, or the form of moral understanding that God has. By ‘our ways’, I mean the moral norms that apply to us, or the form of moral understanding that we have. So either God shares our set of moral norms, our form of moral understanding (for which the term ‘humanity’ or our ‘common humanity’ can stand as a placeholder), or He does not. This is the meaning of premise 1.

10.3.2 Premise 2: If the ways of the most high are not our ways, then God lacks humanity

In this premise, we explore the option whereby God’s ways (moral norms, form of moral understanding) are not our ways. If this is the case, and God has a radically different form of moral understanding to us, then, since ‘humanity’ is here being used as a placeholder for ‘our ways’, by definition God ‘lacks humanity’. He lacks humanity in that He does not share in our common humanity, our particular form of moral understanding, our particular set of moral norms. He therefore lacks that particular form of moral understanding.

The connection between our form of moral understanding and our ‘humanity’, and the identification of the one with the other, is doing a great deal of work here. In support of this

6 As an aside, which may or may not be interesting, the etymology of the word ‘slogan’ is as an old Gaelic battle cry. From ‘sluagh’, meaning ‘army’, and ‘gairm’, meaning ‘shout’. I reiterate that tone is as important as content in a battle cry.

contention, we could once again offer the moral philosophy of Raimond Gaita. I spent some time in chapter six briefly outlining his moral philosophy, and I will not repeat myself here.

Suffice to say that our moral understanding, and our set of moral norms, are understood to be conditioned by our embodied humanity:

Acknowledgement that our concepts (rather than merely out beliefs) are conditioned by our human ways of living will alter our sense of what we mean in the many ways we use the term

‘human being’. Most philosophers recommend the concept of a person as more suitable than that of a ‘human being’ when talk is of more than the species homo sapiens. The concept of a person is tailor-made to prescind from the living of any particular form of life. Angels are persons, God is a person, perhaps some animals are persons and some machines will be. [...]

I had wondered whether to call this book A Common Humanity or A Common Understanding. The former more accurately conveys what is central to it, even when I am explicitly concerned with the forms of common understanding, because it emphasises the dependence of the latter on the former. None of these forms, but especially not those dependent on the ways we construe the meaning of our lives, is between persons, or rational beings contingently living the life of human beings. They are between human beings whose characteristic embodiment - that we have faces, for example - and whose ways of living give us not only something to think about, but condition the concepts with which we think, including those with which we think, as philosophers must, about how we think.⁷

Although I consider Gaita’s work to be largely correct, and consider his contribution of so strongly identifying our form of moral understanding with our common humanity to be amongst the most important of his contributions generally, it is not necessary to buy into Gaita’s meta-ethical work wholesale in order to accept the truth of premise 2 in my dilemma.

I reiterate that ‘humanity’ can here simply be a placeholder for whatever normative or meta- ethics you wish to work with. The point of premise 2 is only to say that if God has a set of normative or meta- ethics that contrasts or conflicts with our set of normative or meta- ethics, then He lacks our set of normative or meta- ethics! As such, this premise, if not supported by Gaita’s peculiar view of moral philosophy, becomes simply tautologous.

10.3.3 Premise 3: If the ways of the most high are our ways, then God lacks humanity

This premise cannot, unlike the former, be reduced to a tautology. This premise requires justification, but most of this justification has already been given in chapter five,

‘Moral Anti-Theodicy’. Premise 3 claims that if God’s form of moral understanding is the same as ours, then He exhibits a profound lack of ‘humanity’, which in this sense refers to the form of moral responsiveness the absence of which qualifies for the description ‘inhuman’.

7 Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 14-15.

We can refer back to the claims of the moral anti-theodicists in order to clarify quite why this is the case. Every criticism that they levelled at theodicy becomes levelled at God, if we assume that theodicy presents an accurate picture of things. If God really is behaving in the way that theodicy depicts, then He exhibits the kind of moral insensitivity of which theodicy is guilty. If theodicy is rightly accused of not taking suffering sufficiently seriously, and theodicy presents an accurate picture of God’s behaviour, then God is rightly accused of not taking suffering sufficiently seriously. This point is clearly dependent upon the success of the moral-anti-theodical arguments, given in chapter five, but I concluded earlier that those arguments were correct, and I stand by that conclusion.

It must be noted that we need not assume, for the sake of my dilemma, that any theodicy does in fact present an accurate picture of things. Should it be the case that no theodicy has yet presented an accurate picture of things, and therefore God avoids all of the moral objectionability that current theodicies are burdened with, to retain the truth of premise 2 requires only that we fall back to the formulation of the problem of evil and definition of theodicy that I stated earlier (in chapters two and seven). To repeat, the meta-formulation of the problem of evil looks like this:

1. There exists a maximally-good, maximally-powerful creator of the universe.

2. A maximally-good, maximally-powerful creator of the universe would not create or permit any pointless or unconscionable evil in its creation.

3. Some pointless or unconscionable evil exists.

And the meta-definition of theodicy is as follows: ‘The invocation of an evaluative claim (or claims) that acts as a defeater for the evaluative claims made within the second or third propositions of the problem of evil.’

Given these definitions, then the combination of God’s existence, the inaccuracy of any theodicy currently given, and God’s sharing of our form of moral understanding, forces a contradiction that confirms God’s lack of ‘humanity’. This is because both of the evaluative claims within the second and third propositions of the meta-formulation of the problem of evil are moral responses which are products of precisely the form of moral understanding that God is said to participate in. And yet, the truth of these claims is inconsistent with the existence of God. Therefore, it cannot be the case both that these evaluative claims are true for God, and that God exists.

The point can be put in different terms as follows: If God exists, then the first proposition in the problem of evil is true. (That much is tautologous.) The second and third propositions within the problem of evil are moral responses which are a product of our human form of moral understanding (which is in turn conditioned by our particular form of moral responsiveness). Therefore, to deny either the second or third proposition within the problem of evil is to reveal oneself to lack moral understanding (‘humanity’ in the peculiar meta-ethical sense of ‘A Common Humanity’) or else to lack moral responsiveness (‘humanity’ in the more ordinary sense of a dictionary definition). We stipulate in premise 2 in my dilemma that God’s ways are our ways, and therefore that He does not lack ‘A Common Humanity’ (remember, this can just be a placeholder for ‘our form of moral understanding’, our set of norms, metaethics, etc.). So now either we must say that God, in existing, and therefore implicitly denying one of the second or third propositions within the problem of evil, either lacks our form of moral understanding or our form of moral responsiveness. If we say that He lacks our form of moral understanding, then we have a contradiction within this premise - God’s ways both are and are not our ways; or, more accurately, ‘if the ways of the most high are our ways, then the ways of the most high are not our ways’ - and therefore one horn of the dilemma loses relevance, since it becomes either trivially true or necessarily false, depending on your view of logic. (Whatever your view of logic, this horn will at the very least not be doing the work that we want it to.) Alternatively, we say that God lacks the form of moral responsiveness identified as ‘humanity’, which confirms the truth of premise 2.

The interaction of God and the problem of evil confirms His lack of sufficient moral responsiveness, our form of moral responsiveness, His lack of ‘humanity’. In essence, the problem of evil contains some evaluative claims - e.g. that unconscionable evil exists - and the inconsistency between these claims and the existence of God shows that God disagrees with these evaluative claims (just as theists and theodicists are forced implicitly to disagree with those claims). These evaluative claims are, as I have argued earlier, a product of an appropriate moral responsiveness within the form of moral understanding that I have labelled (along with Raimond Gaita) ‘A Common Humanity’. To disagree with these ‘irreducible moral realities’ is to occupy a different form of moral understanding (an option that is ruled out by premise 2), or else display a lack of moral responsiveness. Premise 2 must operate with the latter of those options, and therefore if God’s ways are our ways, then He lacks appropriate moral responsiveness, He lacks ‘humanity’.

Clearly, this conclusion - ‘God lacks moral responsiveness’ - has an air of a contradiction about it when we consider that God is maximally-good. And the same would apply to the alternative - ‘God lacks moral understanding’ - were that alternative not caveated with ‘God lacks our form of moral understanding’. We can learn from that lesson in this case also, and caveat ‘God lacks moral responsiveness’ - which is the meaning of this sense of

‘God lacks humanity’ - with ‘God lacks our form of moral responsiveness’. This now sheds the air of contradiction, yet preserves the underlying point.