INTRODUCTION
A simplistic albeit accurate representation of another argument for naturalism that Draper makes can be outlined as follows (see article below for detailed version):
(C) O* is antecedently much more probable on the assumption that HI is true than on the assumption that theism is true.
(1) Given “the biological role played by both pain and pleasure in goal-directed organic systems,” independent of the effect of theistic stories on P(O/theism), C is true.
(2) Theistic stories do not significantly raise P(O/theism)
*O includes three facts: (1) moral agents experiencing pain and pleasure that is biologically useful, (2) nonmoral agents experiencing pain and pleasure that is biologically useful, and (3) sentient beings experiencing pain or pleasure that is biologically gratuitous. See the article below for Draper's detailed argument:
A simplistic albeit accurate representation of another argument for naturalism that Draper makes can be outlined as follows (see article below for detailed version):
(C) O* is antecedently much more probable on the assumption that HI is true than on the assumption that theism is true.
(1) Given “the biological role played by both pain and pleasure in goal-directed organic systems,” independent of the effect of theistic stories on P(O/theism), C is true.
(2) Theistic stories do not significantly raise P(O/theism)
*O includes three facts: (1) moral agents experiencing pain and pleasure that is biologically useful, (2) nonmoral agents experiencing pain and pleasure that is biologically useful, and (3) sentient beings experiencing pain or pleasure that is biologically gratuitous. See the article below for Draper's detailed argument:
| pain_and_pleasure.pdf |
ASSESSMENT OF DRAPER’S ARGUMENT
Two previous blog entries (Evolution is Antecedently More Probable On Naturalism and Flourishing and Languishing of Sentient Life) already contain the material necessary to undercut an auxiliary hypothesis Draper needs to be true in order to secure the soundness of this argument in general. Specifically, Draper assumes that because God is omnipotent He can fine-tune moral and non-moral agents to experience pain and pleasure only when it is morally necessary. In the blog entries alluded to above, I give two arguments that would undercut Draper’s auxiliary hypothesis which are:
(1) The laws of nature are metaphysically necessary because scientific essentialism is plausibly true, and
(2) Evolution was metaphysically necessary as a means to create biological creatures because they have a historical essence.
The first argument would entail that the laws governing psycho-logical counterfactuals are necessarily true (which is consistent with indeterminism) and thus, truths about pain and pleasure have to be what they are with respect to moral and nonmoral agents. Hence O1 and O2 would be rendered unsurprising on theism. The nature of these laws would seem to constrain the requirements for achieving ecosystem stability, amongst nonmoral agents at least, which implies that O2 and O3 are unsurprising on theism.
The second argument is less clear, but can be explained as follows:
“In his book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, biologist Richard Dawkins grapples with the question of why pain has to be so very painful. He describes the alternative as a simple, mental rising of a "red flag". To argue why that red flag might be insufficient, Dawkins explains that drives must compete with each other within living beings. The most fit creature would be the one whose pains are well balanced. Those pains which mean certain death when ignored will become the most powerfully felt. The relative intensities of pain, then, may resemble the relative importance of that risk to our ancestors (lack of food, too much cold, or serious injuries are felt as agony, whereas minor damage is felt as mere discomfort). The behaviour of long-lived creatures is shaped by painful experiences acting on learning mechanisms. A wide range of emotions enhances the capability to respond to a complex environment. A wide range of emotions includes a high degree (intensity and duration) of pain. Under these premises the capability to feel a high degree of pain is superior with regard to biological fitness. Cultural evolution so far prolongs the lifetime of humans. It also adds to the complexity of the environment and increases the need for adaptation so that learning mechanisms become more important. Humans with a higher sensitivity are better equipped to master the challenges of adaptation. As a consequence the survival value of sensitivity increases. Higher sensitivity implies the capability to experience a higher level of suffering...The capability to feel pleasure increases as well, but pain cannot be compensated by pleasure across individuals.[1]”
Given this second argument, I think O1-O3 are rendered unsurprising on theism.
UNDERSTATED EVIDENCE WITHIN O1, O2 and O3 THAT FAVORS THEISM AND OUTWEIGHS ANY EVIDENTIAL FORCE O1, O2, and TWO OF THE THREE FACETS of O3 MAY ANTECEDENTLY CONFER ONTO NATURALISM OVER THEISM
a. As Daniel Howard Snyder has argued, “…to infer…that we have reason to expect that nonmoral agents would not experience biologically useful pain at all is completely unfounded…[but] we might rightly expect that God would permit nonmoral agents to experience somewhat less biologically useful pain than moral agents...To draw that inference requires sufficient reason to expect that God has no other morally justifying reasons to permit biologically useful pain, reasons that would justify His permitting nonmoral agents to suffer biologically useful pain. Draper gives us no good reason to expect that; I doubt there is one."[2]
Not only is there no good reason to doubt there isn't one, I have given several reasons to think there in fact are morally justifying reasons for God to permit biologically useful pain in nonmoral agents (see Evolution is Antecedently More Probable on Naturalism and Flourishing and Languishing of Sentient Life). Even given this, we should still expect nonmoral agents to experience somewhat less pain and pleasure, or at least, pain and pleasure that doesn't involve morally significant suffering on theism. Unsurprisingly for theist, this is what we find. Of the 8.7 million different species that have existed on Earth, more than 99.9999 percent of them lacked the capacity for any one of the five levels of self-awareness that have been identified. This means that if they suffered at all, they didn’t suffer to the extent humans do. Even those that are self-aware probably aren’t as self-aware as humans and that implies they suffer somewhat less than humans. The fact that nonmoral agents suffer somewhat less and/or not all in many cases reported by O2 and O3, actually supports theism over naturalism!
b. I have already dealt with Draper's claim that animals should be happier than they are on theism (part of his O3) at length in my post (Flourishing and Languishing of Sentient Life). There I gave good reasons to think that non-hedonistic happiness is an inadequate theory of well-being which implies that sentient beings who are not a subject of life cannot be happy or miserable. It is rather nonsensical actually. That response works for nonmoral agents, but what about moral agents? Draper is certainly correct that moral agents undergo suffering, but I do not think it is correct to claim as he does that many more moral agents are far from happy. This leads into a second area of understated evidence that favors theism over naturalism with respect to Draper's O3. We would expect self-aware beings with a right to continued existence to have enough positive emotion, engagement, relationships, opportunities for meaning and accomplishment in life to make it worth living. Indeed, in general, human life is on balance worth living. If this were not the case, then the following would be true:
1-We would have a moral obligation to no longer have children.
2-Humans parents would be responsible for any and all suffering their children undergo.
3-We should be witnessing mass suicides.
4-We should expect the happiest people alive today to live in the most developed and well-off countries.
The problem is that none of these things are true. The fact that life is worthwhile for human beings then is evidence favoring theism over naturalism.
c. Draper wrongly assumes that on theism, pain and pleasure having a fundamentally moral explanation rules out their also having a fundamentally biological explanation. However, “I can think of no good reason to expect that, on theism, pain and pleasure will not, at bottom, be explicable both in terms of some moral purpose and in terms of some biological explanation. Indeed, if pain and pleasure played two fundamental roles in the lives of sentient beings, that would indicate efficiency on the part of our designer, if it indicated anything.[3]” Thanks to the work of Patricia Churchland, there is strong empirical evidence that this is exactly the case, “Brains navigate the causal world by recognizing and categorizing events they need to care about, given how the animal makes a living—what berries taste good, where juicy termites can be found, how fish can be caught. The hypothesis on offer is that navigation of the social world mostly depends on the same neural mechanisms—motivation and drive, reward and prediction, perception and memory, impulse control and decision-making…Our moral behavior, while more complex than the social behavior of other animals, is similar in that it represents our attempt to manage well in the existing social ecology.[4]”
Because pain and pleasure play these two fundamental roles, and we would expect this on theism, but not on HI, or naturalism, this serves as strong understated evidence favoring theism in the case of O1, O2, and O3.
A Facet of O3 that Antecedently Supports Naturalism Over Theism
Draper argues that on theism, we have reason to expect to discover a close connection between certain moral goods (e.g. justice and virtue) and biologically gratuitous pain and pleasure, but [in some cases at least; my addition] we discover no such connection. So for example, human suffering is not distributed according to merit, innocent children have been tortured to death, rapists get pleasure from raping, natural disasters befall moral agents nondiscriminatively, the pain from cancer, and the like. I agree wholeheartedly with Draper that antecedently, these facts support naturalism over theism. There are considerations that could be added to bolster theism and weaken the evidential weight these facts confer on naturalism (e.g. that natural selection would be blind to SOME of God’s morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil, that pain and pleasure of this sort will be rightly connected to justice and virtue in the next life, that pain and pleasure of this sort allow for certain valuable connections between God and humans, and humans and other humans that couldn’t be established without these sorts of evils, that moral sainthood requires the possibility of pain and pleasure of this sort, the free process theodicy), but in the end, these considerations do not completely cancel out the weight this evidence confers onto naturalism.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Many naturalists assume that if there is no strict logical contradiction when they imagine or conceive of some state of affairs, then an omnipotent God can actualize it. However, a proper definition of omnipotence rules out broadly logical impossible, or metaphysically impossible states of affairs as well (this concept of possibility is what Plantinga used to solve the logical problem of evil). This implies that if either one, or both of the arguments above is plausible, then they would raise the probability of O1, O2, and O3 on theism to be as high as the probability of O1-O3 on HI (or naturalism). However, there are aspects of pain and pleasure in relationship to moral agents that support naturalism over theism.
Lastly, we saw three items of understated evidence that support theism over naturalism:
1-Because nonmoral agents are not capable of desert, blame, and moral improvement, we would antecedently predict on theism that they should suffer less than moral agents wheres on naturalism (or HI) we would not expect this to be true. Unsurprisingly for the theist, this is exactly what we find.
2-Pain and pleasure fundamentally serve both a moral role and a biological role.
3-Life is worthwhile for human beings.
[1] http://www.socrethics.com/Folder2/Biology.htm
[2] Daniel Howard-Snyder, Theism, the Hypothesis of Indifference, and the Biological Role of Pain and Pleasure (Faith and Philosophy, 1994) 9.
[3] Ibid, 10.
[4] Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) 6-8.
Two previous blog entries (Evolution is Antecedently More Probable On Naturalism and Flourishing and Languishing of Sentient Life) already contain the material necessary to undercut an auxiliary hypothesis Draper needs to be true in order to secure the soundness of this argument in general. Specifically, Draper assumes that because God is omnipotent He can fine-tune moral and non-moral agents to experience pain and pleasure only when it is morally necessary. In the blog entries alluded to above, I give two arguments that would undercut Draper’s auxiliary hypothesis which are:
(1) The laws of nature are metaphysically necessary because scientific essentialism is plausibly true, and
(2) Evolution was metaphysically necessary as a means to create biological creatures because they have a historical essence.
The first argument would entail that the laws governing psycho-logical counterfactuals are necessarily true (which is consistent with indeterminism) and thus, truths about pain and pleasure have to be what they are with respect to moral and nonmoral agents. Hence O1 and O2 would be rendered unsurprising on theism. The nature of these laws would seem to constrain the requirements for achieving ecosystem stability, amongst nonmoral agents at least, which implies that O2 and O3 are unsurprising on theism.
The second argument is less clear, but can be explained as follows:
“In his book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, biologist Richard Dawkins grapples with the question of why pain has to be so very painful. He describes the alternative as a simple, mental rising of a "red flag". To argue why that red flag might be insufficient, Dawkins explains that drives must compete with each other within living beings. The most fit creature would be the one whose pains are well balanced. Those pains which mean certain death when ignored will become the most powerfully felt. The relative intensities of pain, then, may resemble the relative importance of that risk to our ancestors (lack of food, too much cold, or serious injuries are felt as agony, whereas minor damage is felt as mere discomfort). The behaviour of long-lived creatures is shaped by painful experiences acting on learning mechanisms. A wide range of emotions enhances the capability to respond to a complex environment. A wide range of emotions includes a high degree (intensity and duration) of pain. Under these premises the capability to feel a high degree of pain is superior with regard to biological fitness. Cultural evolution so far prolongs the lifetime of humans. It also adds to the complexity of the environment and increases the need for adaptation so that learning mechanisms become more important. Humans with a higher sensitivity are better equipped to master the challenges of adaptation. As a consequence the survival value of sensitivity increases. Higher sensitivity implies the capability to experience a higher level of suffering...The capability to feel pleasure increases as well, but pain cannot be compensated by pleasure across individuals.[1]”
Given this second argument, I think O1-O3 are rendered unsurprising on theism.
UNDERSTATED EVIDENCE WITHIN O1, O2 and O3 THAT FAVORS THEISM AND OUTWEIGHS ANY EVIDENTIAL FORCE O1, O2, and TWO OF THE THREE FACETS of O3 MAY ANTECEDENTLY CONFER ONTO NATURALISM OVER THEISM
a. As Daniel Howard Snyder has argued, “…to infer…that we have reason to expect that nonmoral agents would not experience biologically useful pain at all is completely unfounded…[but] we might rightly expect that God would permit nonmoral agents to experience somewhat less biologically useful pain than moral agents...To draw that inference requires sufficient reason to expect that God has no other morally justifying reasons to permit biologically useful pain, reasons that would justify His permitting nonmoral agents to suffer biologically useful pain. Draper gives us no good reason to expect that; I doubt there is one."[2]
Not only is there no good reason to doubt there isn't one, I have given several reasons to think there in fact are morally justifying reasons for God to permit biologically useful pain in nonmoral agents (see Evolution is Antecedently More Probable on Naturalism and Flourishing and Languishing of Sentient Life). Even given this, we should still expect nonmoral agents to experience somewhat less pain and pleasure, or at least, pain and pleasure that doesn't involve morally significant suffering on theism. Unsurprisingly for theist, this is what we find. Of the 8.7 million different species that have existed on Earth, more than 99.9999 percent of them lacked the capacity for any one of the five levels of self-awareness that have been identified. This means that if they suffered at all, they didn’t suffer to the extent humans do. Even those that are self-aware probably aren’t as self-aware as humans and that implies they suffer somewhat less than humans. The fact that nonmoral agents suffer somewhat less and/or not all in many cases reported by O2 and O3, actually supports theism over naturalism!
b. I have already dealt with Draper's claim that animals should be happier than they are on theism (part of his O3) at length in my post (Flourishing and Languishing of Sentient Life). There I gave good reasons to think that non-hedonistic happiness is an inadequate theory of well-being which implies that sentient beings who are not a subject of life cannot be happy or miserable. It is rather nonsensical actually. That response works for nonmoral agents, but what about moral agents? Draper is certainly correct that moral agents undergo suffering, but I do not think it is correct to claim as he does that many more moral agents are far from happy. This leads into a second area of understated evidence that favors theism over naturalism with respect to Draper's O3. We would expect self-aware beings with a right to continued existence to have enough positive emotion, engagement, relationships, opportunities for meaning and accomplishment in life to make it worth living. Indeed, in general, human life is on balance worth living. If this were not the case, then the following would be true:
1-We would have a moral obligation to no longer have children.
2-Humans parents would be responsible for any and all suffering their children undergo.
3-We should be witnessing mass suicides.
4-We should expect the happiest people alive today to live in the most developed and well-off countries.
The problem is that none of these things are true. The fact that life is worthwhile for human beings then is evidence favoring theism over naturalism.
c. Draper wrongly assumes that on theism, pain and pleasure having a fundamentally moral explanation rules out their also having a fundamentally biological explanation. However, “I can think of no good reason to expect that, on theism, pain and pleasure will not, at bottom, be explicable both in terms of some moral purpose and in terms of some biological explanation. Indeed, if pain and pleasure played two fundamental roles in the lives of sentient beings, that would indicate efficiency on the part of our designer, if it indicated anything.[3]” Thanks to the work of Patricia Churchland, there is strong empirical evidence that this is exactly the case, “Brains navigate the causal world by recognizing and categorizing events they need to care about, given how the animal makes a living—what berries taste good, where juicy termites can be found, how fish can be caught. The hypothesis on offer is that navigation of the social world mostly depends on the same neural mechanisms—motivation and drive, reward and prediction, perception and memory, impulse control and decision-making…Our moral behavior, while more complex than the social behavior of other animals, is similar in that it represents our attempt to manage well in the existing social ecology.[4]”
Because pain and pleasure play these two fundamental roles, and we would expect this on theism, but not on HI, or naturalism, this serves as strong understated evidence favoring theism in the case of O1, O2, and O3.
A Facet of O3 that Antecedently Supports Naturalism Over Theism
Draper argues that on theism, we have reason to expect to discover a close connection between certain moral goods (e.g. justice and virtue) and biologically gratuitous pain and pleasure, but [in some cases at least; my addition] we discover no such connection. So for example, human suffering is not distributed according to merit, innocent children have been tortured to death, rapists get pleasure from raping, natural disasters befall moral agents nondiscriminatively, the pain from cancer, and the like. I agree wholeheartedly with Draper that antecedently, these facts support naturalism over theism. There are considerations that could be added to bolster theism and weaken the evidential weight these facts confer on naturalism (e.g. that natural selection would be blind to SOME of God’s morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil, that pain and pleasure of this sort will be rightly connected to justice and virtue in the next life, that pain and pleasure of this sort allow for certain valuable connections between God and humans, and humans and other humans that couldn’t be established without these sorts of evils, that moral sainthood requires the possibility of pain and pleasure of this sort, the free process theodicy), but in the end, these considerations do not completely cancel out the weight this evidence confers onto naturalism.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Many naturalists assume that if there is no strict logical contradiction when they imagine or conceive of some state of affairs, then an omnipotent God can actualize it. However, a proper definition of omnipotence rules out broadly logical impossible, or metaphysically impossible states of affairs as well (this concept of possibility is what Plantinga used to solve the logical problem of evil). This implies that if either one, or both of the arguments above is plausible, then they would raise the probability of O1, O2, and O3 on theism to be as high as the probability of O1-O3 on HI (or naturalism). However, there are aspects of pain and pleasure in relationship to moral agents that support naturalism over theism.
Lastly, we saw three items of understated evidence that support theism over naturalism:
1-Because nonmoral agents are not capable of desert, blame, and moral improvement, we would antecedently predict on theism that they should suffer less than moral agents wheres on naturalism (or HI) we would not expect this to be true. Unsurprisingly for the theist, this is exactly what we find.
2-Pain and pleasure fundamentally serve both a moral role and a biological role.
3-Life is worthwhile for human beings.
[1] http://www.socrethics.com/Folder2/Biology.htm
[2] Daniel Howard-Snyder, Theism, the Hypothesis of Indifference, and the Biological Role of Pain and Pleasure (Faith and Philosophy, 1994) 9.
[3] Ibid, 10.
[4] Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) 6-8.
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