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The Problem of Animal Pain: Trent Dougherty
The Problem of Animal Pain: Trent Dougherty
Series Editors: Yujin Nagasawa, University of Birmingham, UK, PALGRAVE FRONTIERS IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and Erik J.Wielenberg, DePauw University, USA
The Problem
the theology of animals.
Trent Dougherty
A Theodicy for All Creatures Great and Small
ISBN 978-0-230-36848-4
90101
9 780230 368484
Cover image: ‘The Animals Entering Noah’s Ark’ oil on canvas
painting by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione called Il Grechetto
© ArtPix / Alamy
Trent Dougherty
Titles include:
Zain Ali
FAITH, PHILOSOPHY AND THE REFLECTIVE MUSLIM
István Aranyosi
GOD, MIND AND LOGICAL SPACE:
A Revisionary Approach to Divinity
Trent Dougherty
THE PROBLEM OF ANIMAL PAIN:
A Theodicy for All Creatures Great and Small
Benedikt Paul Göcke
A THEORY OF THE ABSOLUTE
Yujin Nagasawa (editor)
SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Aaron Rizzieri
PRAGMATIC ENCROACHMENT, RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND PRACTICE
Aaron Smith
THINKING ABOUT RELIGION:
Extending the Cognitive Science of Religion
Eric Charles Steinhart
YOUR DIGITAL AFTERLIVES:
Computational Theories of Life after Death
Forthcoming titles:
Michael Sudduth
A PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE OF EMPIRICAL ARGUMENTS FOR LIFE AFTER
DEATH
Trent Dougherty
Baylor University, USA
© Trent Dougherty 2014
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
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Acknowledgments xi
vii
viii Contents
Bibliography 183
Index 195
Series Editors’ Preface
x
Acknowledgments
xi
xii Acknowledgments
of my career, and it is obvious to see the ways he’s influenced me. Alvin
Plantinga also gave me very helpful feedback on portions of the MS.
Some of my ideas that led me to the literature on pain and emotions
started with conversations with Linda Zagzebski. Almost every idea I’ve
ever had has been discussed with either Alex Pruss or Jon Kvanvig, and it
is impossible to footnote all the places where their influence is at work.
My stay at Notre Dame would have been impossible without the
generous support of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion and its
director Byron Johnson, and the tireless advocacy of my chair, Mike
Beaty. The proofs were completed while at the University if St. Andrew’s
and I thank the Faculty of Philosophy for an office at the beautiful and
aptly-named Edgecliffe and for St. Mary’s Divinity School for an office
in their historic 16th century offices.
I have been thinking about these matters since childhood and quite
seriously since college. I was reinvigorated to this inquiry by a class I
have taught at Baylor University since the Fall of 2010 on the thought
of C.S. Lewis as well as an independent study with Lyndsay McReynolds
and Josh Jeffrey (whose term paper was on certain problems with Lewis’s
view of animal resurrection with which I have yet to find a satisfac-
tory solution). I benefited from the paper and discussion of Collin Huse
who did a similar independent study with me. My superb colleague Bob
Roberts was an invaluable help in conversation and in his excellent work
on emotions. His influence on this work is inestimable and is too perva-
sive to footnote adequately, even though it may appear I have failed to
take his excellent advice in places. Kate Zeigerer (DVM, Tufts, Animal
Care Specialist/Veterinary Medical Officer, USDA) was a constant source
of encouragement, enthusiasm, and information throughout. Her influ-
ence is also pervasive on this book (though government regulations
require me to say that she never acted in any official capacity as advisor
to the book).
I received wonderful feedback from all of the students who read
the penultimate draft of the manuscript for a graduate seminar: Nick
Colgrove, Brandon Dahm, Blake McAllister, Dan Padgett, Rebecca
Phillips, and Allison Thornton. Each one made a valuable contribution
to the book. Nick must be singled out, however, for having the extreme
misfortune of being my RA during the final stages of the book. It is not
mere acknowledgments boilerplate to say the whole thing may have
fallen apart at the end if not for his and his wife Bethany’s support.
Chris Tweedt was my previous RA and also worked extensively on the
manuscript.
Acknowledgments xiii
In this chapter, I provide some background that will aid the reader in
following the argument of this book. This book is philosophical, yet
very personal. I will state here some of the personal and professional
background for the writing of the book (§1.1) as well as some of the
epistemological assumptions (§1.2). I describe a core notion of the book:
“expanded ‘bare’ theism” (§1.3, §1.4), the main hypothesis under scru-
tiny in this book.
1.1 Background
1
2 The Problem of Animal Pain
dare to write. That’s not what it was, of course, but it was close enough for
me to believe I had just the right project. I do not deny for a moment that
many of the ideas I will put forward in this book will strike the average
reader as a bit far-fetched. However, I wish to mitigate that in at least two
ways. First, I will try to situate those ideas in a context in which they won’t
seem so strange after all.1 I will even try to affect a gestalt in which what at
first seemed crazy now seems obvious when looked at from the right angle.
This context will include neglected ideas from the Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion, especially in the Eastern Church. Documenting these sources would
be a monumental task, but my thinking on these matters has been most
deeply influenced by Eastern Orthodox thought. Some of these ancient
and Eastern ideas will be somewhat familiar to readers of this book, such
as the “soul-making” theodicy pioneered by Saint Irenaeus, the 2nd
century Bishop of Lyons who led his church during the persecutions of
Marcus Aurelius. Thus sometimes the soul-making theodicy is called the
“Irenaean Theodicy.” Irenaeus’ ideas were promoted most prominently in
the 20th century by John Hick’s (1966) watershed Evil and the God of Love.
Other ideas, such as deification/theosis and the redemption of animals
and, indeed, creation as a whole, are less well-known. Some ideas that are
a standard part of Eastern Christianity are long-forgotten or neglected in
the West. I hope to recover those ideas and present them in a compelling
way and to extend them in ways that, though truly radical, are also in a
way quite natural. I only wish I could do full justice to this tradition by
documenting the hundreds of sources that influenced me. A volume on
the history of these ideas would be easy to produce and quite beneficial.
Their inclusion in this volume, however, was not an option.
As Hick points out, the Irenaean picture is very different from the
Augustinian one. Though Augustine may have considered the Fall a
“felix culpa” it still didn’t play anything like the role attributed to it by
Irenaeus. For Irenaeus, the struggle is the point of creation, or, rather,
the first stage of creation. (The idea that we should expect creation to
proceed in stages is of immeasurable importance.) One could be forgiven
for thinking that the ideal creation according to Augustine consists in
stasis after initial perfection. For Irenaeus, nothing could be further from
the truth. We need trials and tribulations to become what God wants us
to be. What we become at the end of tribulation is what we were meant
to be all along: Saints and Martyrs.
1
In this regard my project is somewhat like that of Eleonore Stump’s use of
Aquinas in her masterful Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of
Suffering (2010), only I am going further back and farther east than 13th century
Europe.
The Plan of This Book 3
2
And they did not exactly know what they were getting into!
3
Stephen Webb raises the problem of animal pain in Webb (1998), in a section
of Chapter 2 and raises the question of animal afterlife in a section of Chapter 7.
Jerry Walls mentions the problem and raises relevant questions in Walls (2002:
64); and gives a hint and a hope on p. 91.
4 The Problem of Animal Pain
from the frontier. All I can do is send back a report and hope others
get interested and move in to explore the territory further (as indeed
some of the people mentioned in the Acknowledgements are doing even
now). One of the most exciting things I discovered is that many people
are doing research relevant to the problem I treat. It’s just that there is
not a strong network connecting them.4 I hope this book contributes to
greater networking among these individuals in general and especially
between analytic philosophers on the one hand and applied ethicists,
theologians, and scientists on the other. I think all three of the latter can
benefit greatly from the tools of the analytic philosopher, and I think
analytic philosophers can learn much about what matters and how to
look at the big picture from them.
Of course, I didn’t start with a wholly untilled field. Just a few years
ago, Mike Murray, sitting not very far from where I sit now in the Notre
Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion, perhaps in the same office,
perhaps in the same chair,5 wrote Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (2008).
Most of the ideas for the present book were formed well before that book
was written, and I have quite a different take on the issue and quite a
different aim and style in this book. However, he is due much credit
for his pioneering work on this subject for analytic philosophers. Both
because I am tilling parts of the same field (some of which overlap parts
he plowed, others farther out in the field) and because the literature on
this topic is quite small, I will be interacting with Murray quite a bit,
both positively and negatively.
The greatest difference between my project and Murray’s is that
Murray dismisses the possibility of a soul-making theodicy for animals
with almost no consideration (125). I expect he is not alone in this.
But why might this be? Are there really conclusive reasons against this
possibility? Is there some set of necessary conditions for a soul-making
theodicy to apply, which are clearly not met? One might be forgiven for
thinking so. I will do my best to decrease the reader’s tendency to think
so. My central project is to develop a new species of more radical soul-
making theodicy I call the “saint-making” theodicy, since it focuses not
just on the (very important) second-order moral virtues and character
4
Though I have great hope for the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics, whose
director, Andrew Linzey, has just been appointed the first ever Professor of Animal
Theology. For more details, see Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (2013). I was not
able to read as much of Linzey’s work as I would have liked, but I especially found
confirmation of my ideas in Linzey and Regan (1990).
5
We both wrote significant parts of our books while fellows at the Center for
Philosophy of Religion, at Notre Dame.
The Plan of This Book 5
1.2 Epistemology
6
See Hájek (2003a, b) for an overview of the issues.
6 The Problem of Animal Pain
7
One of Eleonore Stump’s great and recent achievements is to draw proper
attention to second-personal knowledge.
8
Two great introductions to interpretations of probability are Galavotti (2005)
and Gillies (2000).
9
For more, see Dougherty (2010).
The Plan of This Book 7
but this is consistent with this boost being very little. So, for example, if
there are one hundred numbered doors in front of me and I don’t know
which one I’m supposed to go through, the odds that it is a randomly
chosen door are 1/100. But if I find out that the door I need is labeled by
a non-prime, then I get some evidence that it is door #12. It was 1/100
and now it is 1/75, so the new information gave the hypothesis that it is
door #12 a boost relative to its starting point, some increment of confir-
mation. However, we do not have absolute confirmation, that is, the
hypothesis has not been shown to be probably true. On the contrary, it
remains very probably false.10 How to measure the degree of confirma-
tion is a very difficult subject, and there are a number of sophisticated
treatments. However, I will be making no attempt to precisely quantify
the degree to which I think my arguments provide confirmation for my
theory. I simply want to move the reader as far as I can in the belief that
any significant change makes a difference. In this book, I hope to show
that my story is probably true, but I will be happy if what I say gives
it a non-trivial boost for the reader. In my view, the immediate goal of
philosophy is to move people’s probability in the right direction. As
with everywhere else, success in philosophy is incremental.11
Since this book is addressed not just to theists struggling with the
intellectual12 problem of evil but also to atheists and agnostics open-
mindedly interested in what strategies theists can fruitfully pursue to
mitigate the problem of animal suffering, I need to say something about
a natural objection by those latter parties. A natural thought is “I’m not
a Christian, so your proposal can’t get an epistemic boost from the fact
that it is more consonant with the Christian tradition than I previously
thought it was.” A similar issue arises due to differences in overlap of
Christian belief. The coherence of my story with Christian tradition can
affect atheists’ and agnostics’ credences indirectly by blocking some or
all of the disconfirmatory power of the data of evil, as we shall pres-
ently see. However, I am not merely adding some other theses – taken
10
See Dougherty (2010) for more discussion.
11
Note how different this perspective is than that of van Inwagen (2006), where
success is convincing a panel of ideal agnostics. It is also markedly different from
Murray, where success is something like standing one’s ground.
12
The existential problem is better treated by those with pastoral gifts, which
I wholly lack, though I have as a goal to produce a theodicy that has definite
pastoral applications.
8 The Problem of Animal Pain
13
Swinburne (2003) essentially defends this thesis.
The Plan of This Book 9
Here is an analogy that might help. Anselm defined God as “that than
which no greater can be conceived.” In short, the absolutely perfect
being. God has what Plantinga calls “Maximal Greatness.” Making this
a central notion of philosophical theology has come to be known as
“perfect being theology” (see Morris 1987, 1991; Rogers 2000). It is
not perfectly transparent what all will be included in the property of
being perfect. But once one comes to a reasonable judgment about what
perfection entails, then for many great-making features, once one real-
izes it is a great-making feature one will have thereby seen that God has
that property as well. And when this happens it is not that one has added
to one’s concept of God, one has merely discovered what one was already
implicitly committed to. So, again, to be clear, I am not seeking to add
the notion of animal resurrection and deification to bare theism, I aim
to show that it is implicitly included in theism (conditionally). That is,
every possible world in which God exists and animals suffer is a world
in which they are resurrected and deified by God.
Here is one way that these ideas get applied. If we let E represent the
data of animal suffering and T represent theism, it appears that Pr(T | E) <
Pr(T) which makes E disconfirmatory of T. Now let S represent my story
about animal resurrection and deification. If Pr(T | E & S) = Pr(T), we say
that S has “screened off” E’s disconfirmatory power with respect to T just
mentioned. In the language of defeaters, E was a defeater for T, but S is a
defeater-defeater, and T goes back to its original probability. And it could
be, of course, that S doesn’t screen off all of E’s disconfirmatory power,
but rather only a portion of it. However, as will become clear, theism
needs more than a defeater-defeater, and the greater work of S will be
something more striking, to show that Pr(E | T & S) is actually surpris-
ingly high, higher, in fact that Pr(E | ~T) by a large margin. That is, not
only does E not disconfirm T, it positively confirms it, relative to naturalism
(the relevant alternative to T14).
Of course, unless T entails S, Pr(T & S) will be at least somewhat less
than Pr(T) and so even if S “saves” T from E, S might “sink” T with its
own weight. So the question of the value of Pr(S | T) is a very important
one. And here there is revealed an interesting way in which the data of
evil can be used to plumb the content of theism.
So suppose that we are certain about E. A very natural way for the
atheist to argue against T on the basis of E will be to point to some
14
I take Deism to be broadly logically impossible: The attributes in bare theism
entail that if there are beings of worth in the universe, God finds worth in them
and responds appropriately.
10 The Problem of Animal Pain
But even the lemma Y does not get from E to unjustified animal suffering
(X) all by itself. There are, in fact, other assumptions, part of a series
of “Z factors” that are very basic assumptions required to get from the
facts about evil to the conclusion that there exists unjustified animal
suffering. Here are some plausible examples.
I will not spend much time addressing such Z-factors. Such basic assump-
tions are safe with me. In this book, I am happy to assume that all the
necessary Z factors are true, though I think each are surprisingly non-
obvious upon reflection. Thus I will often bracket them in discussion.
Doing so allows me to say that reflection on the data of animal suffering
described in E allows us to discover this.
(*1) (E & Y) → ~T
(*2) E → (T → ~Y)
15
The notion of the defeat of evil will be treated below.
The Plan of This Book 11
In this way, learning E can teach us about what it really means to believe
T. Given E, we must embrace T & ~Y, so the believer in T needs to tell a
story S that entails both T and ~Y. The more probable the story is, the
better. My main endeavor, then, is to tell a story S, such that (a) S entails
T & ~Y, (b) we do not have direct evidence against S, and (c) Pr(T & S) is
not much lower than Pr(T). One important part of this is to show that,
modulo E, T entails S. The strategy will be to show this by showing that
S is the only possible way that ~Y. Assigning my theses as the values of the
variables, my project crucially involves arguing that the only possible
way animal suffering is not unjustified is if they are resurrected and
deified.
Here’s another way to think about the way in which the facts about
animal suffering can teach us about theism. There are two ways for T to
be true, for T is logically equivalent to
E can rule out (T & ~S) and teach us that believing T rationally commits
one to believing (T & S). Thus, if (T & S) is not implausible – that is,
it’s not the case that the two conjunctions “don’t get along,” and S is
not intrinsically improbable, and S is not improbable on our evidence,
and so on – T will have been discovered to have really been (T & S)
all along. E is no objection to (T & S), given the story I will tell. In
short, E does not even partially disconfirm (T & S) and therefore does
not even partly disconfirm T (since (T & ~S) is logically impossible, it has
no measure in the model16). Indeed, as I hope to show, (T & S) makes E
likely, and therefore, with almost trivial assumptions, E confirms (T & S).
This is necessary to show because a Bayesian version of the problem of
evil – such as the neo-Humean one Draper (see Draper and Dougherty
2013) offers – can gain some epistemological purchase from E even if E
does not directly disconfirm T. For, letting N stand for naturalism, these
comparative results are consistent.
16
This is consistent with my fallibilist scruples: this is a mathematical model,
not a case of confirmation by evidence.
12 The Problem of Animal Pain
In some cases learning that one way a proposition can be true is closed
off decreases the probability of that proposition. This is very common in
games of chance and other purely mathematical contexts. For example,
if you have a lottery ticket that wins if either 923846 or 453789 are
drawn, and you find out that it is not the former number, your chances
of winning are cut in half. In confirmation theory, disjunctive theo-
ries are commonly used to illustrate problems in updating. Paul Draper
(2014) gives a good example of when learning that one way of p being
true has been eliminated reduces the probability of p.
Suppose three balls are randomly drawn from one of four urns. Perhaps
a card is randomly drawn from a standard 52-card deck and the suit
of that card determines from which of the four urns the ball is drawn.
According to theory-12, the balls all came from either the first urn or
the second urn. According to theory-34, the balls all came from either
the third urn or the fourth urn. Now suppose that the first, third, and
fourth urns each contain 900 yellow balls and 100 purple balls, while
the second urn contains 3 yellow balls and 997 purple balls. Further,
it is observed that all three of the balls drawn are yellow. Notice
that there are two versions of each of the two theories. According
to first version of theory-12, all of the balls came from the first urn.
According to the second version, they all came from the second urn.
Similarly, theory-34 can also be divided into two versions. Obviously,
the fact that the first ball drawn is yellow “favors” theory-34 over
theory-12 (in the sense of raising the ratio of the probability of the
one theory to the probability of the other) because that ball is almost
twice as likely to be yellow if theory-34 is true than if theory-12 is
true. Of course, once a defender of theory-12 sees that first yellow
ball, he will have good reason to believe that the first version of his
theory is more probable than the second version and so, if he clings
to his theory, he will base his predictions about the color of the next
two balls on that version of his theory. Of course, when the next two
The Plan of This Book 13
In this context, Draper is absolutely right. Finding out that one way
for T12 to be true has been effectively eliminated makes T12 less prob-
able relative to T34. However, it is fairly well known that not all contexts
are like this. Buchak (2014) offers an example (with relevant references)
like the following, which is an adaptation.
Consider two hypotheses. IN says that Trent is in town, and OUT says
that Trent is out of town. We’ll assume that IN and OUT are equiprob-
able for you. You know that if I’m in town I’ll be at a bike shop. There
are two bike shops in town: Townie Bikes, a locally owned and oper-
ated bike shop, and Big Bart’s Bike Barn, a large chain store. As far as
you know, I’m equally likely to be at the one as the other.
But then you learn I’m a total hipster snob and I’d never go to the box
store. That eliminates the lower right cell. Standard updating is going
to result in the OUT column being larger than the IN column.17 One
of the ways of IN being true has been effectively eliminated. So if we
were to treat this case like the balls-in-urns kind of case, we should take
ourselves to have obtained a reason to think that IN is false, we should
decrease our credence in IN. But of course that would be crazy. This is
fairly obvious and generally agreed upon among those who have written
on the topic (see Buchak for references). What is not agreed upon is
a general diagnosis of what separates such cases from the mundane
17
One standard way of updating would give 2/3 of IN & at Bart’s “credence
mass” to OUT and 1/3 to IN & at Townie, since there is a 2:1 ratio of credence
mass between the two.
14 The Problem of Animal Pain
mathematical cases. I think that there are two kinds of situations that
are sufficient to preserve the probability of the general hypothesis when
a species has been eliminated.
One such situation is when the reasons for believing the hypothesis
pertain to the generic features of the hypothesis independently from the
species. For example, suppose, as is quite plausible, that the evidence for
common descent of humans and chimps (that they share a common
ancestor) is consistent with both Darwinian gradualism and punctua-
tionism. Now suppose biologists discovered it was simply impossible for
the mutations postulated by punctuationism to occur, so that punctu-
ationism was effectively ruled out. This should not decrease our confi-
dence in common descent at all. Another example: Suppose Liz becomes
convinced from historical studies that Christianity is true. Suppose
further that the only three ways to be a Christian are to be Catholic,
Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. In the course of investigating each of
these species of Christianity, she learns that sola scriptura is incoherent,
since Scripture affirms authority outside Scripture, effectively eliminating
Protestantism. In no way should Liz’s credence in Christianity go down.
These cases suggest that when one’s support for a theory pertains directly
to its general features, eliminating a species will not decrease the prob-
ability of the main theory. Note that in Draper’s case there is no genus
theory. The theories in question are mere disjunctions, not species of some
natural kind.
Another kind of situation where it seems the genus does not lose prob-
ability from losing a species is when one learns (or takes oneself to learn)
that one of the species is impossible. So suppose Dorothy (mistakenly,
in my view) thinks she has refuted dualism and so come to know that
materialism is true. She then reflects on the fact that there are reductive
and non-reductive materialisms. She initially assigns equal probability
to these two species. Then she comes to learn (as I suspect) that non-
reductive physicalism is conceptually incoherent and so metaphysically
impossible. Should Dorothy reduce her credence in materialism? It seems
to me that she should not. In this case, not only do the previous consid-
erations apply, but because the hypothesis has been discovered to have
been impossible all along, what is happening is essentially are reparti-
tioning of the outcome space: You are going back to the beginning and
taking out one of the possible outcomes in the list because, as you now
know, it never should have been there in the first place. In the literature
on probabilistic updating, how to update on conditionals and how to
update on information about the outcome space are matters where there
The Plan of This Book 15
18
This is true both for the reasons listed above but also for many other reasons
including problems with commutativity (see Weisberg 2009 and McGrew
2014) regularity (see Easwaren 2014), and rigidity (Leitgeb and Pettigrew 2010,
not to mention anyone who has ever had a paradigm shift in what makes what
probable).
2
The Problem of Animal Pain
The work of this chapter is to state the problem under consideration with
some precision (§2.1), and to gain some reasonable clarity in the terms
at play (§2.2). I will also address the issue of just how much suffering I
take there to be (§2.3).
The first half of this chapter treats the nature and structure of the problem
along with some of the main conceptual components involved in that
structure. Two crucial notions arise as a core component of framing
the problem: pain and suffering. Discussion of these ideas in the litera-
ture is particularly vexing. The second half therefore focuses on these
central notions. The challenge of this chapter is to adequately balance
presenting the “big picture” with providing a sufficient level of detail to
make the problem clear. This will not be easy to do. My method, befit-
ting a Texan, will be a sort of “two-step” where I focus in, then pan out,
then focus in again. We begin, of course, with the broadest question.
1
I will typically write from the perspective of a Christian theist, since that is the
tradition I know best, and the one most under attack in the previous literature.
However, much of what I say is likely to apply to Judaism or Islam. I agree with
Adams (1999: 3) that there are advantages to be had by working within a specific
tradition, though, as will become clear later, my view of the relationship between
“bare” theism and the theism of Christianity differs importantly from hers.
16
The Problem of Animal Pain 17
who hold that God is a part of the moral order. (That God is a part of the
moral order is denied both by radical Calvinists and radical Catholics.
The former is common; for the latter see Davies 2006.2) Henceforth, by
“theists” I shall refer to only those theists who take God to be in the
moral order. Animal pain – more particularly, its profusion3 and inten-
sity – is a problem for these theists because, prima facie at least, it is not
at all what we would expect from an all-powerful, all-loving God. Yet it
seems, prima facie at least, to be just what we’d expect (or at least not
too surprising), given naturalism. Thus, until other data and explana-
tory virtues – especially simplicity – are taken into account, it looks like
naturalism is a much better explanation of the data of animal suffering
than is theism. That is surely a problem for theists.
In other words, the problem of animal pain for theists consists in a
certain kind of epistemic threat. For when one theory explains some
data, that is, some evidence, better than a rival, then, ceteris paribus, the
evidence favors that better explanation. As I hinted at just above, it may
well be that there are many other data that favor theism and so tip the
scales of evidence on the whole in favor of theism. And it may be that
theism is so much simpler than naturalism that even an explanatory
benefit for naturalism will not, in the end, tip the scales of evidence
in favor of naturalism.4 Though it will be necessary to treat these other
issues in cursory fashion below in order to see the broader picture into
which the work of this book fits, full treatments of them remain subjects
for other books. This book is only aimed at assessing the evidential force
the data of animal suffering have on theism.
Now, according to one kind of view, sometimes called fideism (from
Latin fide, “faith”), being evidentially challenged is not necessarily a
problem for religious belief. On a strong fideism, religious beliefs are
2
If I understand such views, I find them monstrous and something like blas-
phemous (libelous?) accounts of God. I hope I don’t understand them correctly.
3
I use the term “profusion” quite intentionally. It is an allusion to Hume (1980:
ch. XI). The term is picked up in Rowe’s original, influential formulation of the
problem (Rowe 1996 (orig. 1979): 2, 5, 10). Howard-Snyder (1996b: 289) points
to “so much horrific evil rather than a lot less” and Langtry (2008: 162) to “a lot
of suffering or dysfunction.” I agree with what all these accounts of the starting
point of the problem of evil point to: that the quantity of evil in the world matters
to how strong the argument from evil is. There are also issues of its intensity and
particularly cruel nature in what have been called “horrendous” evils (e.g. Adams
1999). I will not always use that term as specifically as Adams does.
4
Swinburne (2004: ch. 5) gives an argument for the quite striking simplicity of
(“bare”) theism.
18 The Problem of Animal Pain
not to be evaluated for evidential fit at all. Rather, religious beliefs are
simply exempted from the normal process of evidential evaluation. This
view has few, if any, sophisticated defenders today.5 (There is a view
with the same consequence sometimes called “antirealism” about reli-
gious beliefs, which is a form of noncognitivism about religious beliefs
or discourse. A toy theory that illustrates the basic idea is the thesis that
“God” refers to something like the best intentions of mankind or some
other abstraction of the human mind like that. As far as I can tell, this
kind of antirealism seems to be fairly popular in religious studies depart-
ments and many theology departments as well, but it is almost nonex-
istent among philosophers, thankfully.)
However, more modest fideisms exist. For example, Bishop (2007a)
requires that evidence be essentially counterbalanced and that for religious
belief to be appropriate (in the absence of compelling evidence) that there
be strong moral reasons for it. I will not argue for it, but I will assume a
form of evidentialism in this book. A precise formulation is not necessary
(see Dougherty 2011a: 6ff), but I will take evidentialism to entail that it is
always epistemically unjustified to hold a belief that has a lower epistemic
probability for one than an alternative. So I will take it that the evidential
threat posed by the apparent explanatory advantage of naturalism over
theism requires that the theist address the issue squarely.6
I will attempt to address that problem by giving a theodicy (broadly
construed). That is, I will be offering a plausible story the theist can tell
about why the facts are as we find them. This story will appeal to more
than bare theism. It will add to bare theism some other theses. It will
thus, to some extent, reduce the simplicity of the theism defended here.
I will be arguing two things about these additions, however. First, I will
be arguing that some of these additions are not, in fact, additions at all,
but somewhat hidden consequences of theism, teased out as such by our
line of inquiry. I take it to be a common phenomenon in philosophy
that one only comes later to realize some of the logical entailments of a
thesis. Second, I will argue that the auxiliary hypotheses included in the
story do not significantly reduce the probability of theism. To represent
that argument, I need to say a few things about how I will understand
simplicity and expectation.
5
It is not always easy to tell how radical the fideisms of Phillips (1993) and
Malcolm (1993) are.
6
I shan’t have room to say much about epistemic probability in this book,
but more on it shortly. For the most part, I am happy to officially hew closely to
Swinburne (2001).
The Problem of Animal Pain 19
7
See Swinburne (1997b) for a defense.
8
Draper (1989) defends an argument which may be equivalent. In Draper and
Dougherty (2013, and forthcoming) I present the argument this way.
20 The Problem of Animal Pain
Options: (i) Other data (for example, arguments from natural theology)
support theism over naturalism at a greater ratio than the data of evil
favour naturalism over theism; (ii) The data are more surprising on natu-
ralism that at first appeared; (iii) The data of evil are less surprising on
theism than at first appearance; (iv) any combination of (i)-(iii).
about animal suffering do not count against theism. (For more on this,
see Dougherty and Walls 2013.)
Second, if auxiliary hypotheses can allow theism to predict, at least to a
modest degree, the sort of situation we find in nature and to do so at least
as well as alternatives to theism, then theism can even pick up a moderate
boost in probability, which may help if there are other data that turn out to
disconfirm theism. Are there such data? Well, even though Aquinas tried
to list at least three objections to any thesis he defended in the Summa
Theologica, on the existence of God he only raised two objections. One
was the problem of evil (a version of the so-called “logical” problem of
evil: that the mere existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of
an all-good and infinite God), and the other was, essentially, the idea that
God was an “unnecessary hypothesis” (to use Laplace’s famous phrase)
because natural science could explain everything in need of explanation.
But if that were true it would not be a fact that disconfirmed theism, it
would merely show that theism did not have empirical evidence on its
behalf.9 But what of the data about human suffering, isn’t it a separate
matter from the suffering of non-human animals? Yes, however, if the
explanation for animal suffering I will propose works, it will also work
for humans. Thus, if I am successful in this endeavor, there should be no
epistemic remainder to the problem of evil. That is, there should be no
residual disconfirmation to theism from the problem of evil.
Two notes on the datum: First, the datum is not merely the existence
of some animal suffering. The datum concerns intense animal suffering,
and it concerns the profusion of it. That is, of the profusion of intense
suffering. Profusion of trivial suffering would not be strong evidence
against theism. And perhaps a few isolated cases of intense suffering
also would not be strong evidence against theism. A case could be made
that they did, but I will focus on the clear case of the profusion of very
serious suffering. The profusion of intense suffering constitutes strong
prima facie evidence to favor naturalism over theism. On the surface,
that there is widespread intense suffering fits much better with natu-
ralism than theism.
Also, the datum from which I start is not pointless suffering or the
appearance of pointless suffering as in the work of William Rowe.10
9
Actually, that is true only on certain ways of construing the alternatives to
theism, but that is another matter.
10
Rowe (1979, 1996, and 2001) provide a sampling. See Trakakis (2007) for a
detailed study of Rowe’s arguments.
22 The Problem of Animal Pain
11
One might think that Peter van Inwagen (1996a, 1996b, and 2006) has shown
that, due to vagueness concerns, there could be morally justifiable pointless evils.
For example, for any (or nearly any) instance of suffering in the world, it could
have been very slightly less without making the world significantly worse off.
But this is only to say that the residual had no particular point. It will still have a
global point: being a consequence of a natural law for which there is a point or of
a chance process for which there is a point.
12
For a detailed treatment of skeptical theism, see Dougherty (2014).
13
See Wykstra (1984) for a very early use of this analogy and Bergmann (2001
and 2009) for a more recent use of this strategy.
The Problem of Animal Pain 23
either augment our cognitive capacities or make sure that the majority
of suffering he permits is for reasons we understand14 (or, alternatively,
he could be clearly present to us during such times when he has suffi-
cient reason to keep us in the dark about the reasons for which he
permits the suffering15).
An even more devastating problem for skeptical theism is that skepti-
cism (or agnosticism) about what to expect from God does not make the
version of the problem I have focused on go away. The problem as I have
formulated it is one of favoring. The data, I claim, seem, at least at first,
to favor naturalism over theism. And if theory A says nothing about
datum D but theory B predicts it, then D gives B an advantage over A. So
even if we cannot sensibly assign any probability at all to how likely it is
that we would find what we find given theism, if it is predicted by natu-
ralism, then the evidence favors naturalism. Think of it like a game. You
try to predict some event. If you get it right, you get a point, if you get
it wrong you lose a point. Since there is a penalty for getting it wrong,
you are allowed to pass. So, according to skeptical theism, theists pass
when it comes to predicting the data. So theism doesn’t lose a point,
on the assumption that skeptical theism is true. That is, theism is not
in the least directly disconfirmed by the evidence. But that does not
mean that theism isn’t indirectly disconfirmed. For the naturalist does
not pass. The naturalist predicts a world indifferent to animal suffering.16
Since rational belief encompasses alternatives, even giving the skeptical
theist everything she wants, the evidence still favors naturalism. Or so
it seems.
At any rate, I am not skeptical of our ability to form reasonable expec-
tations concerning theism. So I shall be arguing for a certain theodicy
that I think is at least not unexpected on theism and, perhaps, quite
expected.
14
See Dougherty (2012) for an extended consideration of the parent analogy.
15
And thus the problem of evil leads directly to the problem of divine hidden-
ness. See Howard-Snyder and Moser (2001) and Dougherty and Parker (2013). See
Dougherty (2012) for an argument against the parent analogy.
16
But doesn’t it fail to predict a world at all or a world complex enough to have
suffering animals or a world where there is any consciousness at all or a world
where there are human-like beings who care? Well, no, I think, and though I think
natural theology is quite successful, I am here concerned only with the question
of how successful natural atheology is. Many theists have argued against the argu-
ment from evil, but none have defended theism well against the neo-Humean
argument (van Inwagen 1996c comes close, but gets no cigar). Bergmann (2009)
touches on it briefly. See Draper and Dougherty (2013) for a direct engagement.
24 The Problem of Animal Pain
17
A full issue of Topoi (1995) is dedicated to the subject of whether or not
theism is a theory in the relevant sense.
18
See Sober (2008) and Kitcher (1989) for information pursuant to this point.
The Problem of Animal Pain 25
E Since near the beginning of sentient life on Earth, there has been a
profusion of intense animal suffering. That is, wherever there has been
sentient life very significant levels of suffering have been quite common,
and there has been a lot of sentient life.
The careful reader will have noticed that I have been wavering between
the terms “pain” and “suffering.” In many contexts this is innocent
enough. However, it will become very important that we are clear about
these notions for what is to follow. Therefore, I shall now explicate the
notions of pain, suffering, and the relationship between them.
The International Association for the Study of Pain defines human
pain (though there is nothing specifically human about it, as I will
argue) as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated
with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such
damage.”19 This is too narrow a definition of pain as such, obviously,
because some pain has no physical cause at all, even if it has physical
realizers, pathways, etc. One thing that is important about this defini-
tion, which I shall accept as generally correct and quite important, is
that it defines pain in emotional rather than cognitive terms (I will not
spend time considering the meaning of “sensory” in this context, but I
19
International Association for the Study of Pain (2012).
26 The Problem of Animal Pain
flag it because the term is used quite differently in the pain literature).
This will be important for Chapters 3 and 4 because a prominent objec-
tion to the notion that animals are the subjects of pain is that to have
pain, an organism must have a certain kind of consciousness and that
they have that only if they have certain cognitive capabilities. The above
definition of pain does not seem to be encumbered with such views.
Its primarily affective character has the potential to circumvent the
described objection completely. The details of this dialectic will become
clear in Chapters 3 and 4, but for now I will simply introduce the bare-
bones idea behind the objection to make clear why this notion of pain
is important.
There is a view called neo-Cartesianism according to which for an
organism to experience pain, it must be capable of an advanced form
of cognition: higher-order thought. That is, an organism must have the
ability to think about its own mental content. Unsurprisingly, it is quite
questionable whether or not non-human animals can satisfy the require-
ments of this highly intellectualized theory of pain. Some theorists try
to argue that non-human animals do satisfy this condition. I, however,
will be arguing, essentially, that neo-Cartesianism is simply confused or
irrelevant given current trends in pain theory as revealed by the above,
notable account of pain.
Though I like the broad notion of pain above, the term “pain” tends
to have a narrower usage in the literature on the problem of evil as well
as in ordinary language, so I will for this and other reasons prefer the
term “suffering” as the name of the central phenomenon in my datum.
Suffering will include both physical pain and mental pain as well as
other forms of distress and failure to flourish. I have in mind something
very close to what Rollin calls “negative mattering” (2011: 425) or what
van den Bos, Houx, and Spruijt call “negative experiences” (2002). As
Rollin points out “physical pain is by no means the only morally rele-
vant mattering – fear, anxiety, loneliness, grief, certainly do not equate
to varieties of physical pain, but are surely forms of ‘mattering’ ” (2011:
425). This is in perfect accord with the National Association for Science
directives that focus not just on pain but stress and distress (National
Research Council 2008). Furthermore, animal welfare advocates routinely
express their concern for animal well-being in terms broader than phys-
ical pain. Consider this member of the “Animal Welfare Principles” from
the American College of Animal Welfare (this is a group aimed primarily
at providing specialized training for veterinarians).20
20
American College of Animal Welfare (2010).
The Problem of Animal Pain 27
“Animals should be cared for in ways that minimize fear, pain, stress,
and suffering.”
theists face from facts about how the lives of animals go badly in various
respects.
In considering suffering to be the basic phenomenon, I am in agree-
ment with Eleonore Stump. She points out (2010: 5ff) that the standard
concept of pain is not broad enough to constitute the problem that goes
by the name “the problem of pain.”21 I think it is fitting that Stump’s
account – the most recent book-length treatment at time of writing – is
in agreement with the language from Rowe that kicked off the contem-
porary discussion of the “evidential” problem of evil. In the very first
lines of his first section of his first major article on the subject he says:
This only commits Rowe to the thesis that what he means by “suffering”
is a paradigm of evil, but the fact that he mentions suffering often (and
its profusion and intensity) and never evil in general is some evidence
that in fact it is the suffering itself that constitutes the problem rather
than the existence of evil as such. And his particular examples of human
and animal suffering are not limited to physical pain. In fact, they exem-
plify part of what Stump (2010: 6) calls “the variegated awfulness of
human evils” which also applies to non-human animals.
Caveat: Technically, the way Stump puts it, suffering is an instance of
a more general category of bad states of affairs. She asks the propaedeutic
questions, “What is wrong with the evil human persons suffer? Why is it
to be lamented and avoided? What is bad about it?” (2010: 5, emphasis in
original). And later, after concluding, rightly in my view, that it isn’t just
pain itself, she asks “What is bad about human suffering if it is not just a
matter of pain?” (2010: 6, emphasis added). Thus, badness seems to be the
conceptual anchor in Stump. Swinburne makes this his official position.
21
For a fascinating set of reflections on the nature of pain and suffering, see
the section “When Is Pain Not Suffering and Suffering Not Pain” in Coakley and
Shelemay (2007).
30 The Problem of Animal Pain
agents and their characters, and also when talking more generally
about states of affairs – though an agent of very bad actions and char-
acter is appropriately called evil [sic] ... .Pains and other suffering are
bad states of affairs, but it is odd to call them evil (as I did in the
Introduction), even if some agent causing them or allowing them to
occur would be doing an evil act. Although the problem with which
we are concerned is called “the problem of evil” (and so those words
form part of the title of this book) it is really the problem of the
existence of bad states of affairs, such that (it is claimed) it would be
bad for an agent who could prevent them to allow them to occur.
(Swinburne 1998: 4)
E Since nearly the beginning of sentient life on Earth, there has been
a profusion of intense animal suffering. That is, almost everywhere
there has been sentient life very significant levels of suffering have
been quite common (and there has been a lot of sentient life).
22
And, somewhat, distribution. If all suffering were sequestered in a relatively
small portion of space-time, the problem might not seem as bad. I’m not sure
about that though.
32 The Problem of Animal Pain
enough good – and surely the greater the good the greater the prob-
ability of it eluding our grasp – how can the quantity of the evil make an
evidential difference? The suggestion is quite simple: If, for any quantity
of evil, there is some good that outweighs it (I bracket deontological
issues for now), and the possibility that that enormous good logically
requires the permission of a horrendous evil of arbitrary size, then it
may well be for that great a good that this great an evil is permitted. This
line of thought has been pursued by Michael Tooley.23
[I]f evil can be necessary for a greater good that outweighs it, the
idea of worlds that are larger and larger ... strongly suggests that one
cannot place any upper limit on the quantity of evil that might be
found in a world created by God. (Tooley 1991: 92)
This suggests the following thesis, the No Quantity Too Large (NQTL)
thesis.
23
And is, I think, implicit in Bergmann’s skeptical theses (most recently,
Bergmann 2009 and somewhat explicitly in Bergmann 2012).
24
Tooley’s point may well be about logical compatibility, but I think similar
reasoning applies to confirmatory concerns.
The Problem of Animal Pain 33
doesn’t somehow translate into a benefit for the suffering. This suggests
that quantity matters more than proportion when considering how
strong the basis for the problem of evil is in a world. However, here is a
consideration that pushes me in the opposite direction.
Here’s something I think is true. If you and most of the people you
consider to be properly functioning, intelligent, sensitive people found
yourselves in a world as much like ours as possible except that the
number of people suffering horrendous evils was doubled, you and
most of them would have considerably more doubt about theism than
you do. And I think that one of the ways to assess the expectibility of
states of affairs for theism is to observe the expectation of (properly func-
tioning) theists.
Earlier, we looked at Tooley’s No Quantity Too Large thesis. We’ve
basically been considering the following cousin, the No Proportion Too
Large Thesis (NPTL).
25
The proportion is over observed portions of total lifespans. Also, there is
an interesting epicycle here that is worth mentioning but not pursuing here.
Suppose there are five beings with moral standing. Four of them experience, for
the duration of their finite lives, constant, low-grade pleasure. The fifth indi-
vidual suffers excruciating pain for her duration on earth. I want this world to
come out as having a high proportion of suffering. It is intuitively a world that
raises a problem of pain. But to spell this out would require classifying moments
not just as good or bad but weighting them by a scalar quantity. It is not hard
to see how this should go, but the details would be tedious and take us too far
afield.
26
And it is not insignificant to me that the tradition clearly takes the profusion
of evil to be important, not just its mere existence.
The Problem of Animal Pain 35
We have been considering the nature of the datum that is the foun-
dation of the problem of animal pain. The first chapter identified the
problem as one of a potential failing in comparative confirmation rela-
tive to animal suffering. The second chapter defended the possibility
and sensibleness of making the kinds of judgments necessary for that
kind of problem to exist and clarified important features of the datum.
Now that we have clarified our starting point adequately, we can discuss
the path from there to the problem for theism. I will give the problem
a probabilistic analysis. This chapter will cover three things. First, I will
briefly describe the formal structure of the argument in Bayesian terms.
Then I will consider, for each of the two components of the equation,
what a plausible assessment of their values might be. The first step is of
obvious importance. The second (two-part) step is important for situ-
ating the importance of the outcome of considering the problem of
animal pain and situating it within a broader context in the philosophy
of religion.
(
Pr (Hp | Evidence ) Pr Evidence | H p
= ×
)
Pr H p ( )
Pr (Hd | Evidence ) Pr (Evidence | H d ) Pr (H d )
36
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 37
1
Perhaps you will remember weighting from grammar school. Suppose the
teacher informs you that you will be given two exams – a midterm exam, which
counts for 40% of your grade, and a final exam, which counts for 60% of the
final grade. And suppose you get 93 points on the first and 88 points on the
second and you wonder if you’ve made the cut at an average of 90. You can’t just
average the grades, for that would ignore the weighting. So you use the following
equation .4(93) + .6(88) = your grade. The weightings are multiplied with the
exam scores to give you your grade, which is the “weighted average.” Similarly,
you can’t just assess how well hypotheses do on the evidence; you also have to
consider how they ought to be weighted by their prior probability. Thus, the prior
probabilities are multiplied with the likelihoods to give the final probability of
the hypothesis.
2
I do not assume (or think) that the Kolmogorov axioms are the only (or best)
way to represent epistemic probability, but we needn’t get into that here.
38 The Problem of Animal Pain
3
Jeffreys (1961: 432) lays out a hierarchy of favoring, but I think it is far too
conservative.
4
The fact is, I think the prior probability of theism is many, many, many times
more than naturalism, given that there is anything at all. Thus, I think evil would
have to favor naturalism many, many, many times more than theism for agnosti-
cism to be justified. I do not expect most atheists will think this though, so I will
argue that it is not at any rate much less.
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 39
Elementary
Particles
u c t γ
Quarks up charm top photon
Force Carriers
d s b g
down strange bottom gluon
νe νμ ντ
electron muon tau
Z
Z boson
Leptons
e μ τ W
electron muon tau W boson
I II III
Three Families of Matter
5
The Higgs boson now stands awkwardly off to the side, but I’m going to
ignore it for illustrative purposes. Also, I assume that there are gravitons, though
this has not been confirmed yet.
40 The Problem of Animal Pain
6
I will not here address the issue of in what sense God is a necessary being.
Plantinga, and a large number of analytic theists, think that God’s existence
is “broadly logically necessary” (Plantinga 1979: 2), but others who are less
Platonistic think of God’s necessity in other ways. See specifically Swinburne
(1994). If Plantinga is right, then theism postulates no brute facts at all.
7
Unlimited power plausibly entails perfect freedom and Swinburne argues that
God’s perfect knowledge, power, and freedom entail his perfect moral goodness
(2004: 99ff).
8
For more on the place of chance in a world sustained by God, see van Inwagen
(1995: 42–65). See also Kraay (2008a and 2008b).
9
But isn’t this postulated person of a very unfamiliar kind? I don’t think so,
since it is a being with beliefs and desires, an agent that acts for ends. But what
about the fact that this person is conceived as disembodied? In answer, first, I am
not willing to concede to materialism about minds whether human or animal.
Second, I don’t see why the dissimilarity of disembodiment is particularly rele-
vant considering the much more significant similarity in agency. To think other-
wise seems to fly in the face of a fairly obvious functionalism. I recommend
Taliaferro (1994) on this.
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 41
Pr(E | T)
Pr(E | N)
E Since near the beginning of sentient life on Earth, there has been a
profusion of intense animal suffering. That is, almost wherever there
has been sentient life very significant levels of suffering have been
quite common (and there has been a lot of sentient life).
Here is one way to see it is plausible that Pr(E | N) is not very low. N
entails that the universe is indifferent to the well-being of sentient crea-
tures on Earth. It is plausible that left to chance the distribution of pain
and pleasure among sentient beings would be utterly indiscriminant
of any discernable connection to moral properties.14 In a naturalistic
universe we don’t expect there to be any rhyme or reason to suffering.
naturalism and supernaturalism start out with the same area. Second, if they do,
it is not clear that the naturalism you get when you take it to be the negation
of supernaturalism will have much by way of explanatory power. Also, the argu-
ment works only to the extent that the non-monotheistic region of supernatu-
ralism has much measure. I think there are good arguments that it has very small
measure, so that the probability of traditional infinitary monotheism takes up
most of the space of supernaturalism. For more see Draper and Dougherty (2013),
and Draper and Dougherty (forthcoming).
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 43
Or rather, the fact that the only rhyme or reason seems to be tied to
reproductive success is something not surprising on naturalism. E seems
to be a natural consequence of an indifferent universe.
Of course, what is presupposed in the preceding paragraph is a cosmos
that exemplifies a number of properties the exemplification of which
plausibly constitute good evidence for theism. The existence of animal
pain entails the following items: the existence of contingent beings, an
orderly cosmos, biological complexity, and consciousness. And in some
way we must include in our total evidence the higher-level fact that
investigating the issue entails some moral knowledge. And it is not at all
clear how naturalism can explain the existence of moral knowledge. We
might as well not leave out evidence provided by the fact that we can
make the kinds of judgments required to think through the issue. And of
course this entails the existence of rationality as well. But even leaving
aside the evidence we get from our consideration of the evidence, these
other first-order items are all things that are often considered good
evidence for theism. And since if A entails B, A is logically equivalent to
A&B, a consideration of the evidential impact of A is in a way incom-
plete without a consideration of the evidential impact of B. So theists
may well have a rebutting defeater in the wider evidence for the theism-
defeater from E. However, it would be better to have an undercutting
defeater for evil, which is essentially what a theodicy provides. E seems
so natural on the assumption of N that the theist may need both some
rebutting defeater and some undercutting defeater to appeal to. Natural
theology considers the positive evidence for theism, including what is
entailed by the existence of animal pain. We will set this aside, since this
is a work of theodicy.
The Irenaean theodicy may well work for humans, but it is of no use
when considering the problem of animal pain, so we should set it
aside for dealing with that problem.
I will be arguing against this thesis, and that will be work aplenty.
Here are some of the more substantive assumptions I’ve made above.
1. Moderate rationalism: Bare theism (and mere Christian theism) can right-
fully and usefully be treated relevantly similarly to scientific hypotheses.
That is, they can be suitably judged for simplicity, coherence, and fit
with the evidence in ways that bear on their probable truth.
2. Non-fideism: Evidential considerations are importantly relevant to
religious belief. Thus, it is a serious problem for a religious perspective
if it is at odds with the evidence or if the evidence favors a competing
hypothesis. (The moderate fideism in Bishop 2007b may be compat-
ible with this, though I reject it for other reasons.)
3. Non-skepticism about science: Most (or at least most of the core (or
at least much of the core)) of standard scientific doctrine is at least
approximately true (to some appropriate degree of probability).
4. Realism: The entities postulated by scientific and religious theories
that are probably true, probably exist. All the entities postulated by
completely true theories exist.
14
Paul Draper develops at length this Humean argument against theism (but
not necessarily for atheism, since it is consistent with deism). See Draper (1996).
15
See, for two prominent examples among many, Murray (2008: 6, 125) and
Betty (1992).
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 45
Here is a question that might have arisen for readers not unfamiliar
with the literature on the problem of evil. Addressing the question
will prevent some possible confusion. Some may think that the Bayes
Factor version of the argument I have given constitutes a version of
the “evidential” problem of evil rather than the “logical” problem of
evil. My position is that there is no such useful distinction to be had.
Mackie called his version of the argument a “logical” problem because
it consisted of the problem for theists that it appeared that a certain set
of propositions was logically incompatible (that God exists, that God
is omnipotent and perfectly good, and that evil exists). But of course
the existence of pointless evils (in a strong sense of “pointless,” not
Hasker’s weak sense16) that form the basis of Rowe’s so-called “eviden-
tial” argument are also logically incompatible with God’s existence.
Appeals to knowledge and certainty will not help, for those are person-
relative notions and one would only obtain a sociological categoriza-
tion of arguments.17 It is nearly certain that there is widespread animal
suffering (the opposition will be treated in Chapters 4 and 5), and if
it were to turn out that this was simply irreconcilable with theism,
as is plausible in the absence of the kind of theodicy I will advocate,
then the problem of animal pain would be like paradigm instances
of the so-called “logical” problem of evil. All that matters in consid-
ering a challenge to a hypothesis is how an item of evidence affects
the resulting probability of that hypothesis or how it fairs with respect
to competing hypotheses. All that matters in the problem of pain is
whether it reduces the probability of theism and if so to what extent
and how it affects the evidential balance between theism and relevant
competitors. That will be the focus of this book.
16
Hasker (1992).
17
For an account of the distinction that has these faults, see Howard-Snyder
(1996b: xii–xv). For a particularly baroquely Boolean version see Murray (2008:
11).
46 The Problem of Animal Pain
18
Thanks to Blake McAllister for jogging this point.
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 47
19
I’m talking about the heuristic level here. That is, that asking a question
directly might not be the best way to get that question answered.
20
Though I already had material on the evolution of theories of mind in
animals in Chapters 4 and 5, Todd Buras pointed out its relevance here.
48 The Problem of Animal Pain
21
There is a lot of confusion over how close to Scotus Aquinas is on theological
predication, but only the most extreme interpreters of Saint Thomas should have
a problem with what I am saying here.
22
Bergmann (2001: 289, 291) and (2009).
23
Though in orthodox Christianity, God is tri-personal, it is still sensible to
speak of God as “a” person due to the unity of the Godhead. I wish to be explicit,
though, that this manner of speech is not meant to deny a robust doctrine of the
Trinity. Indeed, I am a social Trinitarian.
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 49
free will will in fact pursue it when there is sufficient reason). Thus,
states of affairs are, at the most general level, expected to the extent
that they are good states of affairs, that they realize some kind of value,
and the higher the value, the higher the expectation. Of course there
will be a large infinity of ways of realizing the highest goods (there are
likely to be very high goods the co-exemplification of which in a world
is not compossible), so no particular way of realizing them will have
an antecedently high mathematical probability. But we are not trying to
predict in advance which goods will be realized in which ways. We are
“retrodicting,” asking ourselves what makes sense of what we take to be
the case.24 When doing this, what matters is not so much which tokens
occur but rather which types are tokened. Given that God is a rational
agent, we expect the best kinds of values to be tokened (and, of course,
for means to serve ends well: We want the goods to be brought about in
the most fitting way).
Of course, this explicit description of the basis for expectations from
God makes it easy to state the skeptical theist objection. For will there
not be goods greater than we are capable of conceiving? And if so, isn’t
it as likely as not that animals are allowed to suffer for some good we
cannot conceive and one that doesn’t require anything like the kind of
theories you will propose in this book? And, anyway, with an unknown
number of unknown goods in God’s purview, how can I argue that we
should expect just sorts of states of affairs as I will advert to to explain
why animals suffer so, instead of one of the vast number of unknown
goods? In other words, since explaining some aspect of creation is
just explaining for what reasons God acted – what good he sought to
achieve – if we have so little access to the range of reasons for which
God might act, how can any such explanation be offered with any confi-
dence that it – and not another – is the right one?
Some authors grant this point and are content to assume a defen-
sive posture wherein the mere possibility of God’s having reasons allows
them to dig in and remain unmoved by the data of evil. Perhaps there
is something to this, but it is clearly sub-optimal. I will have more to
say about this below. For now, however, I just want to point out that
there is no clear reason given by skeptical theists for the proposition that
there are unfathomable goods in the relevant sense. Yes, even a good
24
There is a view according to which forward-looking predictions generate
stronger epistemic reasons than do backward-looking ones. This view is called
“predictivism.” For an argument against it, see Swinburne (2001: 221–232,
appendix on Predictivism).
50 The Problem of Animal Pain
Hollywood director can make you say “I didn’t see that coming!” but
it’s not at all clear that that our inability to anticipate in advance what
God might do is relevant. The reason is that I will not offer a great deal
of detail in my theodicy, and I will only be suggesting what I take to be
logically necessary given that God’s character entails that he will pursue
the highest kinds of goods.
I see no clear reason to think there are kinds of goods of which we
are unaware, in any relevant way. This is because we have reason to
believe we have a sufficient grasp on human nature. We know what
is best for humans – love, friendship, knowledge, virtue, health, etc.
But we also have a grasp, then, on the general goods for sub-human
creatures insofar as they approximate the functions of human beings.
So for animals that can experience friendship, friendship is a good for
them. For animals that can have knowledge, knowledge is a good for
them. And of course health is a good for animals. So then if there were
some grand unknown good for the sake of which animals were allowed
to suffer, it would have to be “built out of” these goods of which we are
aware. And since a reason is just a grasped good, in knowing that these
are the kinds of goods that would have to be realized with the appro-
priate relation to current suffering, we know the kinds of reasons God
would have to have in mind.
There is another kind of objection to this picture that also stems from
a sense of piety. Doesn’t this image of God-as-rational-agent result in
something like deism? I don’t think so, but if it were so, that should not
be regarded as a huge downfall. Would it really be surprising if the gap
between the “God of the philosophers” and the “God of the covenant”
needed to appeal to revelation to be bridged? For my own part, I am
assuming, without defense25, that if we let H state some fairly standard
historical facts about Jesus and the Apostles, and let M state a kind of
mere Christianity, then Pr(M | T & H) is high. Thus, the picture I take
myself to be defending is a kind of mere Christianity, but I am happy
to defend a more deflated form of theism and work to bridge the gap
elsewhere. The move from atheism to deism is a step in the right direc-
tion, and it makes the prior probability of revelation go up. As Philo says
in the closing remarks of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,
after concluding that something like deism was the result of natural
religion, “the most natural sentiment which a well-disposed mind will
feel on this occasion, is a longing desire and expectation that Heaven
would be pleased to dissipate, at least alleviate, this profound ignorance,
25
But see Swinburne (2010b).
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 51
The literature on the problem of evil has suffered from two unfortunate
distinctions. The first is the misleading distinction between the so-called
“logical” and “evidential” problems of evil. The second was introduced
by Alvin Plantinga in 1974. In God, Freedom, and Evil (1974a), Plantinga
defines a theodicy as an attempt “to specify God’s reason for permitting
evil or for creating a world that contained evil” (10, see also 27, 28, and
58). He distinguishes this from a defense. “Here,” he says, “the aim is not
to say what God’s reason is, but at most what God’s reason might possibly
be” (28). The chief aim of a defense, as Plantinga has it, is to demonstrate
that God and evil are broadly logically compatible.26
Both the defender and the theodicist, Plantinga says, seek a story that
includes both that God’s creating the world and that it contains evil,
demonstrating their consistency. On the weak interpretation of defense
in Plantinga, “whether [the story] is true is quite beside the point” (1974a:
28). On this interpretation, it doesn’t seem like the defender even needs
to consider the story epistemically possible. Of course, if, like me, you
think that everything metaphysically possible is epistemically possible,
then you will get epistemic possibility for free.
This notion of a defense is very weak indeed, but not the weakest
notion in the literature. David O’Connor’s notion of a defense, for
example, is weaker.
[A] defense tries to ensure that [theism] survives the charge or attack
against which [it] is being defended. [It does not] have to establish
that the evils cited in a given antitheistic argument are logically
consistent with God ... .Thus, against a prosecuting argument whose
aim is to show that certain facts of evil are inconsistent with God, a
defense succeeds if it shows that the prosecuting argument fails to
establish its conclusion. (O’Connor 1998: 2)
26
“Might possibly” is ambiguous. One reading, which seems consonant with
what else Plantinga says is that the first modal is epistemic and the second is
alethic. That is, a defense is an assertion of the following kind. “It is epistemically
possible that it is metaphysically possible that X” where X entails the existence
of some state of affairs which includes both God’s existing and the evils of this
world.
52 The Problem of Animal Pain
27
For a very interesting foray into the relation between probability and expla-
nation, see McGrew (2003).
54 The Problem of Animal Pain
suffering, and if one finds them somewhat plausible as well, then the
theist’s overall burden is lifted. Let’s follow Daniel Howard-Snyder (1999) in
denoting the sum of all the reasons God might have for allowing the evils
we take there to have been and call it “The Reason” (100). Since if there is a
God, he acts on all the reasons there are, The Reason would be God’s reason
for permitting the evils that occur. We would like to know The Reason. That
is, we would like to know all the goods for the sake of which God permits
the suffering of animals. There is no way to know in advance the number
of such goods (and of course many of them would be expected to lie in the
future, which complicates matters). So the only reasonable thing to do is to
go around collecting them where we find them and see how they add up.
If we only label the reasons we collect “possible” or “impossible”
(whether metaphysical or epistemic), we will end up with no useful way
to sum their significance. But if we label them, as best we can, with some
weight, the evidential weight they have in our epistemic scales, then we
will have some way to estimate their collective strength. Knowing this
magnitude is important for another reason that requires that I make
clear two different ways in which reasons can add up for a person.
Take a number of reasons R1–Rn. Reasons can be fully sufficient for an
action or only partly sufficient for an action. By a “sufficient reason” here
I mean a good (grasped as such) that is sufficiently good to provide an
all-things-considered reason to perform some action. Though there are
intermediate and mixed cases, I think a simple illustration will suffice.
Suppose you want to know if S had a good reason to A. I assert that
there are three goods – G1–G3 – that will result from A. And you agree
that if any one of G1–G3 result from my A-ing (and all else remains
the same) then A-ing was justified. Still, you must consider for each Gi
how convinced you are that it will in fact obtain. Suppose that for each
of them you think there is, say, about a 20% chance that it will occur.
Suppose further – as is very unlikely in the real world – that the each Gi’s
occurrence is probabilistically independent of the others. Then there is a
60% chance that one of the good outcomes will occur. And since each of
the good outcomes provides a sufficient reason for the action, you could
be committed to the rationality of A-ing even though for each individual
reason for A-ing you are pretty sure it will not occur (the details matter
for a final determination). Humans are prone to ignore this kind of
fact and instead exhibit a bias toward “big reasons” ignoring cumula-
tive effects.28 The fallacious thought goes something like this: “None of
28
This is a type of availability bias most like the subadditivity effect. See Tversky
and Koehler (1994) for discussion.
The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain 55
29
Michael Murray (2008) comes close to saying something along these lines
(195–197) but never gives the suggestion much shape and then (198–199) trails
off into another line of thought. I was worried I’d been “scooped” but came out
with the sense that I hadn’t been.
30
See Dougherty and Pruss (2014) for an extended defense of thinking of evils
as anomalies.
4
Is There Really a Problem?: The
Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism
The problem of animal pain, as I have formulated it, entails that there
are a significant number of animals that suffer in a morally significant
way. Though that suffering was defined quite broadly, physical pain has
for most constituted the crux of animal suffering. But, of course, purely
physical pain is very rare. When you are in “physical” pain, it is how
much you don’t like it that is the real problem, and that is a psycho-
logical state. The two may come apart in theory, but rarely in practice.
Some theorists would deny the very existence of a significant portion of
the data the problem of animal pain stems from. If there is no problem
worth considering, then there is no sense in strenuously seeking a solu-
tion. If there are not data crying out for an explanation, it is a waste of
time to carefully craft one. In this chapter, after some epistemological
prolegomena, I consider a prominent attempt to deny the data.
Here is an overview of the main dialectic of this chapter. Section 4.1
argues for the proposition that most animals (at least at the level of
mammals and above) feel morally significant pain is a dictate of common
sense (§4.1.1). The kinds of reasons we attribute pain to animals are
exactly the same as those for which we attribute pain to other humans.
It is also the common consensus of the scientific community (§4.1.2).
Therefore, unless we are given a defeater for this thesis, the most reason-
able attitude to have toward it is acceptance. Section 4.2 presents the
thought of those who do attempt to defeat this default starting point
mount both a positive and negative assault. The positive assault has two
prongs: philosophical and neuroanatomical. The philosophical assault is
to advance a theory of conscious experience that requires some kind of
cognition that animals are supposedly unable to have. Though surpris-
ingly popular, this is the weaker facet of the attack.
The neuroanatomical front is to argue that at least non-primate
mammals lack key neuroanatomical features necessary for morally
56
Is There Really a Problem?: The Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism 57
1
I wish to note that reflective equilibrium epistemologies do not have to be
examples of coherentism. A foundationalist reflective equilibrium epistemology
is perfectly coherent; it only requires corrigible foundations. Plausibly, this is the
method Chisholm endorses.
58 The Problem of Animal Pain
2
For interesting takes on the relationship between self-trust and trust in others,
see Foley (2007) and Zagzebski (2012).
Is There Really a Problem?: The Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism 59
Dennett (1978), Nelkin (1986), and Nelkin (1994) agree that the common
sense notion of pain may have to be compromised to some degree or
another. Dennett practically gives away the shop (see Conee 1984 for a
reply), but Nelkin offers a more measured approach, though he does give
up the notion that to hurt is essential to being in pain. In fact, he goes on
to say, after considering the variety of pain experiences, “There is nothing
obviously alike in all pain phenomena, if we consider only the phenomenal
states in themselves. They all hurt, of course; but the question is whether
the hurt of these states lies in their phenomenal ‘feeling’ ” (Nelkin 1994:
329–330). I confess I simply lose my grip on the subject when people start
talking this way. There is a way to hurt that is independent of how some-
thing feels? Even if there is some sensible interpretation of this language,
things have gone awry when you have to start speaking that way.
We will look at this in detail below, but the idea here is to get before
our minds how much of a departure from common sense we are
willing to tolerate. Neo-Cartesianism, though in no way logically tied
to Cartesian dualism about mind, has provoked strong statements by
philosophers of mind. Dretske asks “[W]hen a dog scratches, are we to
believe that the itch is not conscious, or that the dog’s experience is
totally different from ours ... ?”3 Alastair Norcross (2012) even goes so
far as to refer to “neo-Cartesian Silliness.” Clark (2013: 531) does him
one better: “Anyone acquainted with non-human animals, whether in
a domestic, a laboratory or an agricultural setting, and still more in the
wild, is likely – unless they are behaviourists or psychopaths – to act on
the assumption that animals have feelings and a point of view.”
When we step on a dog’s or cat’s tail, and they give their characteristic
shrill yelp or shriek, common sense issues a clear verdict: The animal is
in conscious pain.
And I must say I find the necessary phrase “conscious pain” redun-
dant. Consider this strong statement by the International Association
for the Study of Pain (IASP).
3
Dretske (1995: 110–111). Thanks to Beth Seacord for bringing this quote to my
attention in her excellent and detailed “Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness
and Animal Experience” presented at the Center for Philosophy of Religion,
University of Notre Dame, Spring 2012.
60 The Problem of Animal Pain
The concept pain, it seems to me, includes the property being unpleasant.
I simply cannot make sense of a notion of a pain that doesn’t hurt.
There are no doubt some painful sensations that are very nearly indis-
tinguishable from pleasant sensations (there may even be indeterminate
cases) which accounts for my love of very spicy food. It could be that
I’m rewarded with endorphins for the experience, which would give a
certain positive association to the experience even if the core experi-
ence were intrinsically unpleasant. The reader is referred to Dennett
(1988) for an interesting discussion of these issues. And there are no
doubt complex sensations that involve some painful sensation as essen-
tial to the complex and the complex is on balance pleasant. This latter
phenomenon is apt to be misdescribed as a “pleasant pain” especially
when the pain and pleasure are of quite different types as when a “phys-
ical” pain (a pain clearly associated with a physical state) gives rise to a
mental pleasure: that familiar ache of the legs during or after a strenuous
hike or of the arms during or after a hard climb.
Ultimately we must distinguish a number of issues, given the IASP
definition of pain (even when expanded). I think it wise to work with a
philosophically informed version of their definition rather than to turn
to the philosophers as a primary source for the notion of pain. Much
research is currently underway on the nature of pain,4 but philosophers
have previously been fixated almost exclusively on the epistemology of
pain and its relation to the mind–body problem. It is astonishing that
4
At the time of writing, I have just presented at the Nature of Pain: Hedonic
Tone, Motivation, and Non-Human Animals project at the University of Glasgow,
part of the Pain and the Nature of Minds project run by the Center for Philosophy
of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. Millions of dollars were allocated to
study the nature of pain, with considerable attention to non-human animals.
Is There Really a Problem?: The Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism 61
5
It’s clear from context they also consider it sufficient.
6
Especially how it interacts with endogenous painkillers and administered
analgesics.
Is There Really a Problem?: The Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism 63
7
As of this writing, Gary Varner’s (2012) book Personhood, Ethics, and Animal
Cognition is at the stage of galley proofs, and I have set up a “debate” between
him and Colin Allen for the 2013 American Philosophical Association Both the
state of the investigation and the complexity of the issues make my consensus
approach most prudent, given my defense of the general methodology.
64 The Problem of Animal Pain
4.2.1 Introduction
Descartes is often thought to have considered non-human animals to be
unconscious automata, like extremely complex wind-up toys. Probably
this was not his mature view, though some of those he influenced seem
to have thought this. Leibniz attributes to “divers Cartesians” (probably
Arnauld and Malebranche) the view that animals “are only machines.”
For his own part Leibniz thinks this thesis unnecessary since “properly
speaking, perception is not sufficient to cause misery if it is not accompa-
nied by reflexion. It is the same with happiness: without reflexion there
is none.” So though he grants, “One cannot reasonably doubt the exist-
ence of pain among animals” he nevertheless concludes, “animals, since
they do not reflect, are susceptible neither to the grief that accompanies
pain, nor to the joy that accompanies pleasure” (Theodicy, III.2508). He
thus does not consider animal pain of moral significance and so does not
take there to be a problem of animal pain component of the problem of
evil. Reid also considered this same distinction.
8
Thanks to Sam Newlands for bringing this passage to my attention when I
presented this chapter at the Center for Philosophy of Religion, University of
Notre Dame, Spring 2012.
Is There Really a Problem?: The Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism 65
9
Murray does not claim to be a neo-Cartesian, but he does defend it.
66 The Problem of Animal Pain
you are being bitten by a mosquito and it hurts! Not only that, but you
realize that the pain was mounting during the seconds preceding the
crossing of a threshold; you just weren’t paying attention to it. Similarly,
you might suddenly realize that for some time you’ve been hearing an
alarm go off or that a light on your office phone has been blinking.
Prior to turning your focal consciousness on these experiences, you were
still having them. You hosted phenomenal red, heard the sound of the
alarm, and felt the pain before you realized you were in pain. You were
oblivious to it. It is at least plausible that this occurs.
According to Type III neo-Cartesianism, animals have phenomenal
consciousness, and they are aware of it, but they don’t care. If they have
“pain” it doesn’t bother them. This is because they lack the ability to
form pro- or con-attitudes toward these feelings. I will call this “the numb
view.” What all these kinds of neo-Cartesianism have in common – the
blind view, the oblivious view, and the numb view – is the thesis that
non-human animals lack some key mental capacity, and that this lack
prevents them from experiencing morally significant pain.
I will argue against neo-Cartesianism as follows. Neo-Cartesians have
offered philosophical and neurological arguments for neo-Cartesianism.
Each of the three types of neo-Cartesianism is supported by arguments
for retentive theories of consciousness. The numb view depends espe-
cially on neuroanatomical arguments that we will discuss below. My
arguments for more liberal theories of consciousness tell against all three
types of neo-Cartesianism. I will cast doubt upon the alleged neuroana-
tomical differences between human and non-human animals, which
are used in support of the numb view. HOT theories of consciousness
offer a rebutting defeater for our endoxic starting point by providing the
basis for a simple argument against animal consciousness of the relevant
sort: They do not meet a necessary condition for having it. The neuro-
anatomical arguments offer both rebutting defeaters of an analogous
kind – sub-human animals lack neuroanatomical features required for
the relevant kind of consciousness – as well as undercutting defeaters –
hard cases that show that common sense could be misleading and that
the observational bases for the scientific consensus could be mistaken.
Murray (2008) does not argue for any neo-Cartesian view. Rather, he
simply says “As one’s commitments in the philosophy of mind go, so
will go one’s stance with respect to the possibility of the [neo-Cartesian]
explanations” (2008: 58). Yet he just defends the view as at least plau-
sible, and it seems to play an important role in his theorizing. Similarly,
Goetz (2009) asks, “Does any one of us have adequate knowledge of a
fawn’s psychology?” (494). Since the answer to this question is “no,”
Goetz argues that we cannot decisively conclude that there is a problem
68 The Problem of Animal Pain
10
Dougherty (2011b).
11
Most of van Inwagen (1996a) seems to play at this level.
Is There Really a Problem?: The Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism 69
and then you assign probabilities to the premises and “turn the crank.”
Since entailment preserves probability without loss, the probability of
the conclusion will just be the probability of the affirmed antecedent
(we can assume we are certain of the conditional). That is, in an entail-
ment, the probability of the consequent is always at least as high as the
antecedent. Thus, the probability you “get out” of an entailment via a
modus ponens is the same as what you “put in” with the affirmed ante-
cedent. Below, I’ll consider reasons in favor of the second premise of the
argument just above.
In what follows, I don’t intend to “rule out” neo-Cartesianism. I intend
to drive its probability down for the reader as low as I can make it go. My
efforts will be met with mixed success. Some readers will not find the
higher-order theory of conscious awareness very plausible to begin with.
For such readers my goal is to drive that probability down farther or to
help keep it low. Some readers might start out thinking it plausible or
highly probable. For such readers my goal is the same. The same goes for
the hard cases Murray uses to raise doubts about the existence of animal
pain. I want to drive down, as much as I can, the probability that those
cases present a problem. Binary concepts like “proving” or “ruling out”
are not part of my methodology.
12
I initially thought this ruled out phantom pain, but the last clause plausibly
captures it.
13
Why have I called this a definition of “physical pain” if it involves emotional
suffering? Much more will be said of this below, but the taxonomy is essentially
etiological. The salient fact about the IASP definition in this regard is that the
root notion is tissue damage. Emotional suffering can also be caused in ways not
relevantly related to tissue damage.
70 The Problem of Animal Pain
never any real threat of tissue damage to my hand. (This could possibly
be accommodated by changing “potential” to “threatened” for it seems
my body interprets his grip as a threat.)
More significantly, consider being very cold or extremely fatigued
with a headache, or having abdominal cramps from diarrhea. These are
all physically bad states that don’t necessarily involve tissue damage or
the threat of tissue damage. You might want to put them in the category
of “discomfort” rather than “pain,” but if they get bad enough, that will
seem like a mistake. The reason I think this is significant is that I suspect
that such bad states of affairs – fatigue, hunger, cold/heat – constitute
a significant portion of animal suffering that is physically based (the
contrast class here is the possibly worse, more paradigmatically psycho-
logical suffering, such as the loss of an offspring or mate). However, I
have no intention of trying to Chisholm the definition of pain until
a true and explanatory set of necessary and sufficient conditions are
obtained. Rather, I will rely upon the extension to guide the intension.
That is, the examples of suffering themselves should be taken as primary,
not the attempts to state what they all have in common (and, indeed,
there may be nothing they all have in common, for it might be that they
are related by a web of family resemblance, which, not being transitive,
does not guarantee that there is at least one thing each member shares
in common). Nevertheless, jargon is efficient, so I need to use it, and to
do so without misleading, I need to say where I think artificial precision
is dangerous.
Another important term is “nociception.” The IASP definition is “the
neural process of encoding noxious stimuli” where a “noxious stimulus”
is “a stimulus that is damaging or threatens14 damage to normal tissues.”
We see reflected here some of the same narrowness as in the IASP defini-
tion of “pain.” However, as long as we keep this in mind, we can harm-
lessly adapt. We must be a bit careful, however, because some of the
terminology is somewhat more importantly specialized. For example, a
“nociceptor” is “a high-threshold sensory receptor of the peripheral soma-
tosensory nervous system that is capable of transducing and encoding
noxious stimuli.” This makes reference to a particular set of neurons.
This leads to a legitimate distinction between “nociceptive pain” and
“neuropathic pain.” The former, naturally, is pain arising from the trig-
gering of nociceptive neurons, the latter arises from damage or disease
to the somatosensory nervous system. That is, it ultimately reports what
14
Note that here the contrast with the actual is the threatened, which supports
my proposed modification above.
Is There Really a Problem?: The Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism 71
is going on inside the body, not what is happening to the body from
outside of it. It is not, strictly speaking, part of the sensory apparatus.
Thus, we should keep in mind both a broad sense of nociception – the
neural process of encoding any realization of negative physical affect –
and the narrow sense of nociception provided in the IASP definition.
15
As with the argument for the existence of minds in other humans, the
analogy argument – or, more broadly, any discursive inference – is subject to
many criticisms. For treatment of this problem see Allen (2004) and Allen et al.
(2005). For a reply, see Varner (2012).
76 The Problem of Animal Pain
these cases are actually quite problematic: They are not very well under-
stood and there are multiple interpretations of their meaning.
The only basis I have been able to find for affirming that lobotomized
and opiated individuals really do feel pain is that they use some pain
terms like “sharp,” “throbbing,” and the like to describe their experi-
ence. While under normal circumstances we invest considerable trust
in people’s reports of their experiences (indeed, some strong founda-
tionalisms hold such introspections to be infallible), these cases are far
from normal. Why take the word of someone lobotomized or opiated
on this matter? For lobotomized individuals especially, we know that
their emotional and affective abilities are dulled. This could lead to
misleading answers on the standardized questionnaire used to gather
the results (Melzack 1975: 277–299).
Also, anyone who has had a significant medical or dental procedure
under a local anesthetic can recall that one can feel many different kinds
of pressure during such procedures that lend themselves to the same
terminology used by those in pain: “sharp,” “dull,” “throbbing.” When
I had a severely broken arm/wrist, the paramedics immediately gave me
a huge dose of morphine. When they cut my biking glove off, I could
easily have described my experiences along several dimensions with
pain language. But it wasn’t pain, it was just a form of pressure with
pain-like properties amenable to description in pain language.
Though Nelkin (1994: 333) reverses his 1986 hypothesis that the
language practitioners take to be descriptive of phenomenal states are
in fact of affective states of the patient, he admits it is ambiguous, and I
think the reversal is a mistake. I suggest that until these phenomena are
better understood, what seem like clear conceptual connections should
be retained rather than rejected because of some odd cases.
Let me put this suggestion in the language of the epistemolog-
ical foundations I laid out in the second section. I suggested that the
endoxa – in this case the common sense attribution of pain to animals
plus the consensus of core (fairly non-ideological) animal welfare
researchers – receive a benefit of the doubt and that skeptics – in this
case, neo-Cartesians (whether philosophically or scientifically based) –
bear a burden of proof. I was clear that philosophical reflection or scien-
tific discoveries were most definitely capable of overturning the endoxic
view. However, for that to occur the anomalous phenomena would have
to be well understood. This is far from the case with morphine pain,
lobotomy cases, and blindsight. On the contrary, there is considerable
uncertainty about the underlying mechanisms at work and much uncer-
tainty about how consciousness is realized in the brain.
5
There Is a Problem: The Defeat of
Neo-Cartesianism
77
78 The Problem of Animal Pain
of certain ideas from linguistics for how they can yield a model of knowl-
edge of pain that avoids neo-Cartesian rationalistic assumptions.
1. If animals lack X, then even if animals have “pain” states, they cannot
form pro/con judgments about them.
2. If animals cannot form pro/con judgments about their “pain” states,
then those states have no moral significance.
3. Animals lack X.
4. Therefore, animals’ “pain” states have no moral significance.
1
This applies to at least mammals and above, but plausibly to some birds as
well, and possibly to some other non-mammal vertebrates.
There Is a Problem: The Defeat of Neo-Cartesianism 79
the same features as the good life for a human animal: shelter from the
cold and heat, companionship, plenty of food and water, leisure time to
play, etc. Probably, a very low percentage of non-human animals thrive
in this way; few achieve their natural telos. Importantly, this kind of
suffering doesn’t depend on one’s reflective or perceptive abilities. But
this is puzzling if the world is created by an all-powerful (and so all-
knowing and all-loving) Being. Even when we move from bare theism to
Christian theism, one traditional explanation – the Fall – seems muted.
There is no corresponding puzzle on Naturalism.
The basic idea behind the strategy I will describe, endorse, and expand
is that the plausible thesis that neo-Cartesianism takes too far – that
pain states must be the object of some kind of awareness – can be satis-
fied in ways more plausibly fulfillable by non-human animals. I will
suggest that this is plausible due to the availability of more direct and
non-conceptual modes of knowledge.
Nelkin, a leading pain theorist, opines that “There must also be a
cognitive state which involves an evaluation of the phenomenon as
something like, ‘Harm to the body,’ ” and thus agrees with a basic intui-
tive tenet of neo-Cartesianism. However, he goes on to lower the bar:
“The evaluation is a kind of de re belief, regarding the phenomenon”
(Nelkin 1994: 325). This kind of evaluation is said to be a “sponta-
neous, non-inferential evaluation of that state as representing a harm”
(332). He goes on, when considering the consequences of his evaluative
theory of pain, to suggest that only a very low-grade awareness of self is
required for the “evaluations” that form the core of his theory of pain.
Basically, he thinks any animal capable of being aware of the external
world as external implies a basic concept of self, enough, in his view,
to satisfy the higher-order awareness requirement of his own theory
of pain (Nelkin forthcoming). “Seeing as” is an immediate, intuitive
mode of knowledge not requiring the explicit application of concepts.
Research on seeing-as petered out in the 1970s for the most part as an
object of independent study (Polanyi’s (1967) “tacit knowledge” has
not, sadly, found much of an audience in contemporary Anglophone
philosophy) but has survived somewhat in the literature on emotion,
to which we will return below.
With respect to the consequences of his theory for animal conscious-
ness, Nelkin considers this objection to his theory:
2
It is worth noting that it apparently doesn’t even occur to Nelkin to deny that
animals feel pain.
There Is a Problem: The Defeat of Neo-Cartesianism 81
3
See also Solomon (2007: ch. 18), and Roberts (1988 and 2003) for background
on the connection between emotion and evaluation.
82 The Problem of Animal Pain
There are many unexplored paths the theorist about animal conscious-
ness might take through the philosophy of language. If we grant to the
creature, a chimp, Noam, a thought relevantly similar to That hurts!
Then we might apply a semantics similar to Evans’s “Understanding
demonstratives” (1981) to arrive at the conclusion that Noam does
have a thought about his own state of mind. The demonstrative will
clearly denote Noam’s pain. Then on a structured theory of propositions
with relata as Evans describes, Noam and his thought will literally be
a constituent of the content of the thought That hurts. Stanley gives a
modified account of an Evans-like view using relations one can only
stand in to oneself or at least in virtue of which we think of ourselves as
ourselves. He concludes, “The fact that certain thoughts contain these
first-person ways of thinking as constituents is what makes them first-
person thoughts” (Stanley 2011: 85–86). There is not time to explore
this lead much further, but it is indicative of the many ways in which
future discussion could turn. For now, I will just sketch the outlines of
this kind of strategy.
In the philosophy of language, it is almost impossible to make sense of
various puzzles and linguistic phenomena without being at least semi-
Fregean. It is extremely difficult to write down a satisfactory account
of modes of presentation, but the basic idea is not hard to understand.
When Lois Lane sees Clark Kent, she sees Superman. However, she
doesn’t see him as Superman. He is not presented to her in a way that
her mind processes under that description. And of course the problem is
not that she lacks the relevant concepts, for she clearly has the concepts
Clark Kent and Superman, it is just that she lacks the appropriate mental
connection between them in the “files” in her mind. Though the Clark
Kent/Superman example is the textbook way to introduce the sort of
puzzle that gets one thinking about modes of presentation, there are
more helpful examples for our purposes.
There is a famous argument against physicalism called the Knowledge
Argument. Here is a brutally oversimplified version. Consider Mary. Mary
is the world’s foremost authority on color. She has performed experi-
ments doing cutting-edge research in color theory. She has read every-
thing ever written about color and has deduced everything else. Oh, and
one more thing: Mary is colorblind. Now consider this argument.
I think that theists need to reject this argument, for God, being omnis-
cient, will know all the facts (there are puzzles about that, of course,
especially de se facts indexed to others), but he will not know what it is
like to be envious or gluttonous or to be weak in other ways. One way to
resist the knowledge argument against physicalism is to say that Mary
doesn’t learn any new facts, but that, rather, she grasps an old fact under
a new mode of presentation. This mode of presentation consists in part
of the application of phenomenal concepts. A phenomenal concept is,
very roughly, a concept one can have only by having a certain expe-
rience, by hosting a certain phenomenal content, or exemplifying a
certain phenomenal property (which property may well be the denota-
tion of the concept; the phenomenal property is at least in part constitu-
tive of the phenomenal concept).
The suggestion, in brief, is that to require animals to cognize their
pain via a reflective higher-order thought seems to over intellectualize
the process, but at the same time hits on an important idea: A crea-
ture utterly blind to its own pain could not truly be said to suffer. A
middle ground is that many animals – at least mammals, but plausibly
some birds and perhaps reptiles – grasp the fact that they are in pain via
a mode of presentation peculiar to first-personal experience and thus
don’t need the concept of self. Since many philosophers take modes of
presentation to be narrow functional roles (i.e. internal causal roles), it
is in fact quite plausible that a semi-Fregean proposition structured of an
individual, a property, and a mode of presentation – or on a neo-Millian
view, a “guise” (Braun 2004, Cullison 2007) – could be the content of a
thought for an animal who is otherwise reflectively ungifted.
The technicalities can be left to further research, but the funda-
mental idea is that one can host a phenomenal content, in the words
of Stanley’s translation of Frege, in that “special and original way
in which each of us is presented to himself, and not to any other”
(Stanley 2011: 83). There is something it is like to host something first-
personally, and this is phenomenologically both obvious and so close
to us as to be impossible to pin down. I see no reason, however, to
think this mode of knowledge takes much by way of cognition. Clearly
it takes more neuroanatomy than an earthworm has, but I suspect that
even in humans pain isn’t (ordinarily) made conscious by any kind
of cognition, especially cases of extreme pain that seem to wipe the
mind blank of cognition. One is simply directly acquainted with the
raw Owwwww!!! of the pain in a way where the directness itself is so
palpable that it is itself a way of knowing the pain as one’s own. There
are two components here. One applies Russell’s distinction between
There Is a Problem: The Defeat of Neo-Cartesianism 85
5.1.3 Recap
In Chapter 4, Sections 4.2.3.1 and 4.2.3.2, I considered two ways to moti-
vate neo-Cartesianism: philosophical – the HOT theory of phenomenal
consciousness – and empirical – the Lobotomy Argument. In Section
5.1.1, I argued that the Lobotomy Argument can be circumvented by
a move away from the rationalism of neo-Cartesian views and toward
more contemporary emotion-based theories of pain. And then in
Section 5.1.2 I argued for a mode of knowledge of pain that also rejects
aspects of Cartesian rationalism. These moves serve as defeater-defeaters
defending the default view of common sense and scientific consensus:
non-human animals feel morally significant pain.
4
Gallup (1970).
There Is a Problem: The Defeat of Neo-Cartesianism 87
believe that any animals are capable of thinking about their own think-
ings ... [so] none of their mental states will be conscious ... ” (193). This
conclusion seems utterly incongruent with the admission that chimps
can have beliefs about the beliefs of other chimps. One would think that
a chimp’s ability to have beliefs about the beliefs and desires of another
chimp would at least inductively support the proposition that chimps
can have beliefs about their own beliefs and desires. Let’s examine the
reasoning that leads Carruthers to this bold conclusion.
He asks the reader to consider the greatest display of intelligence by a
chimp that he is aware of. This consists in watching a bunch of fruit and
vegetables (18 pieces or so) being hidden in a one-acre field. Then, entering
by a different point, it can collect two-thirds of the food on average. It also
collects first the fruit, which is preferable to chimps. His argument that
great apes cannot think about their own thoughts consists entirely in an
analysis of this case. He says that if they could, we would expect them to
do much better. Specifically, we would expect them to figure out that they
would save time by collecting some vegetables along the way with the
fruit rather than getting all the fruit first and then getting the vegetables.
I find this argument weak for a number of reasons.
First, the attribution of reflective second-order thought in no wise
implicates that one is a genius. In fact, it doesn’t even imply that one
will be very smart. I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old right
now. I have no doubt that either of them is capable of second-order
reflective thought. Yet they are, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty
dumb when it comes to efficiency planning. I can easily see them being
far less successful than the chimps in the study. I’ll wager that even
if you told them “Guys, think about your plan here, aren’t their ways
you could save yourself some work?” they would not improve measur-
ably. From past experience, I could even design the plan and give it to
them and they still couldn’t do a lot better. I’ll bet most readers have
an adult uncle or brother-in-law who is only marginally more capable.
So it seems to me there is just no considerable expectation that the
bare existence of second-order reflective thought would be manifest in
“dramatic improvements in performance” (186). For that expectation, a
certain amount of additional “IQ” would be required. According to Paul
Cooijmans, chimps’ IQs average in the “Moderately Retarded” category
(between mild and severe) (see Cooijmans 2012). On the other hand,
bare second-order reflective thought does seem sufficient to allow an
animal to think about its own pain. You don’t need much by way of
intelligence to know that you are in pain. (Furthermore, that one has
the ability for reflexive second-order thought does not imply that it will
There Is a Problem: The Defeat of Neo-Cartesianism 93
be on-line for all processes. It may be that the chimp’s thoughts about
food collection are not poised for uptake into the reflective module,
but pain is. This would not be too surprising, since the former are quite
complicated and the latter quite simple.)
One wonders just how dramatic an improvement Carruthers expects.
For all I know, it might be a considerably complex coordination problem
to try to weigh efficiency against desired outcome. After all, for all
the chimps know, they are in a risky game. Whether in the wild or in
captivity, food is typically available only for a limited time. So the most
“efficient” path in terms of least investment of walking distance might
not be likely to result in the best payoff in the form of a fruit-to-vege-
table ratio.
In fact, unless we know the degree of preference of fruit over vegeta-
bles, we don’t know that the gather-all-the-fruit-first gambit isn’t the
decision theoretically most efficient. For if they value fruit more than
vegetables by a wide enough margin, then relegating vegetables to any
“extra” time beyond the estimated allowance makes perfect sense. If
you put me on a one-acre farm that had dark-chocolate peanut clusters
and broccoli hidden all over it, I wouldn’t waste much time looking for
broccoli. Once I had satisfied myself that I had recovered all the peanut
clusters I was likely to gather, only then would I begin to think about
wasting time on the broccoli. Now it is probably less of a preference
imbalance to vegetables for chimps than there is between dark-chocolate
peanut clusters and broccoli for me. However, this exaggerated analogy
establishes an important point: Efficiency of plan is a function of rela-
tive preferences, and this is information that Carruthers lacks, except
that he knows they definitely prefer fruit. It is, therefore, unclear that
Carruthers has much by way of justification for his prediction.
In fact, even in fairly intelligent agents it is often a more efficient
use of limited resources to rely on heuristics. So even if the chimps
were capable of making the (probably quite) complicated calculations
concerning whether it is better to stop and gather a less-desired item
and risk losing a more-desired item or to proceed on to the more-desired
item, it might not be worth their time to do so. Instead, they might just
proceed by evolved heuristics (which may, in fact, have evolved during
less-advanced cognitive stages and simply stayed on board because they
were sufficiently reliable). One such heuristic is a class of “sure thing”
heuristics. The slogan for these heuristics is “Go with what you know.”
The chimp knows it loves fruit best, so it makes sense to just go get
that first. This hypothesis fits well with what we know about bounded
rationality from cognitive psychology.
94 The Problem of Animal Pain
one is aware. But why stop there? What if one is utterly unaware that
they are aware that they are in pain? Why is that irrelevant to the moral
significance of the first-order state but one order less isn’t? There is a
plausible dictum that “a thing cannot impart what it does not have” (a
rule of thumb, not a necessary truth). Carruthers and Gallup agree that
a state is conscious when it is the object of a higher-order state. But what
if that higher-order state is not itself the object of an even higher state?
What’s so special about it then? How does it come to have the ability to
bestow consciousness on a state when it itself is not conscious? It seems
utterly arbitrary to me.
Second, if pain of which one was unaware were of no moral signifi-
cance, then it would be permissible to torture the sleepwalker. But clearly
it’s not. One might think that this objection fails because the sleep-
walking human would be aware that they were in pain. But that needn’t
be the case. Suppose the sleepwalker is hooked up to a device that tells
us with certainty when someone is asleep. Out comes the sleepwalker
from his room, deftly stepping over a sleeping dog. All the while, the
meter reads “ASLEEP.” To test the resilience of sleep in a sleepwalker, a
scientist pricks him with a pin in the arm. The sleepwalker yells “Ouch!”
but the needle on the meter stays right in the middle of the “ASLEEP”
band. Curious, as scientists tend to be, she is tempted beyond her ability
to resist increasing the intensity of the jabs. Proceeding by small incre-
ments, the scientist continues, and before too long the sleepwalker is
screaming at the top of his lungs. It seems clear this is impermissible.5
But this would not be so if Carruthers and Gallup were correct, for the
sleepwalking subject, being asleep, is unaware that they are feeling such
excruciating pain. This is a reason to doubt that pain is rendered morally
irrelevant just because the subject of the pain is “unaware” that it is
occurring. But if we reject that restriction, then even on high-octane
neo-Cartesianism, morally significant pain is widespread through the
non-human population of the animal kingdom, and the problem of
animal pain returns with a vengeance.
5
Murray and Ross (2006) consider an objection that sounds like mine, saying,
“Access to these states, the critic might contend, is irrelevant to whether it is bad
to be in the state itself. Clearly, if a state is intrinsically bad, it is not made better
merely in virtue of the fact that the creature does not know about it” (176). But
they have in mind a distinction between “metaphysical evil” and “moral evil.”
This distinction does no work against the problem of pain as I have framed it. For
the hypothesis that there is an all-good, all-powerful agent who created the world
predicts that any evil of any kind will need an explanation.
6
The Saint-Making Theodicy I:
Negative Phase
The essence of the soul-making theodicy is that we find the kind of evil
we find in our world because it is precisely the kind of suffering required
to create great “souls,” that is, persons of great character, persons who
exercise the greatest virtues, especially various aspects of the selfless love
which in the Christian tradition is often referred to by the transliterated
Greek word agape. The theodicy is subject to caricature because it may
be seen as a species of the “greater good” gambit.
96
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 97
GGC It’s fine for God to allow you to suffer, because He’s got a big pie
in the sky for you that will make up for it.
This is, of course, crassly put. But it accurately conveys the attitude
of some to a class of arguments that are historically important. Saint
Thomas Aquinas considers two objections to theism: naturalism and
evil. His reply reiterates Augustine’s reasoning.
Note that neither Augustine nor Aquinas say that God brings about indi-
vidual evils so that he can bring good out of them. So far as these quotes
are concerned, the idea is no more than that God will permit evil only
if he can bring good from it later, at some point in the future. The word
“greater” does not occur in either what Augustine or Aquinas says here,
but the tradition has generally interpreted the idea as being that God
does bring about from evils goods which outweigh them. We can put
this idea less crassly but still simplistically as follows:
I will not here address the issue of whether the greater good must
include an appropriate benefit for the very individual who suffers the
evil or whether a good accruing to someone else might justly balance off
an evil suffered by another.1 I’m not aware of any major contemporary
1
Stump (1983) makes a good case that the evils which befall individuals must
be compensated for in the life of that very individual, not just justified by goods
which their suffering brings to others. Adams (1999) adds that they must have
some knowledge of the fact that they are so benefitted. Swinburne (1998) depends
heavily on the good of being useful even when one doesn’t know it, especially
for animals.
98 The Problem of Animal Pain
figure who defends the flatfooted version of the greater good defense
represented in GGS. It is not too hard to see why. It seems to allow for
the following kind of scenario.
The Gatenator Bill Gates enters your house in the middle of the night
with his hulking minions. They start smashing everything in sight,
including family heirlooms. They burn all your family pictures and
then drag you all out on the lawn while they set fire to your house.
Then he gives you a billion dollars.
The idea behind such a caricature is that there is something deeply unsat-
isfying about merely “buying off” someone after bringing suffering to
them. It is particularly troubling that in the book of Job, God can come
off as appearing to act like the Gatenator. (However, see Stump 1996.)
We can assume that there is some dollar amount such that you would
consider yourself overall better off as a result of the payoff. But even
assuming this, it does not seem to make it permissible for Gates to do
this in the first place. One can’t just walk around punching people in the
face and throwing fistfuls of money at them as they lie on the ground
bewildered. Reparations, even if they are in some way sufficient for
damage done, do not buy one’s way out of the guilt of one’s actions.
Permissibility cannot merely be purchased like a box of cereal.
Furthermore, the hypothesis of theism is that God is perfectly good. So
even if a theodicy could show that creatures had, in the end, received
due compensation, it would not yet follow that the role of the creator in
that theodicy was adequate to the conception of God involved. And of
course, the merely Christian conception of God emphasizes God’s love
for mankind, so any theodicy that wishes to apply to mere Christianity
will be inadequate if its solution does not include a loving role for God.
So if there is anything to a “greater good” defense, it needs to be more
subtle than GGS. But there are crass and simplistic versions of the soul-
making theodicy that sound like instances of the worst kinds of the
greater good defense. Consider these.
SMDC It’s fine for God to allow you to be raped, that way you have
the opportunity to forgive your rapist.
SMDS It is morally permissible for God to allow an evil so long as from
that evil some individual’s virtue of sufficient goodness is displayed.
One problem with these two statements of soul-making is that they are
easily read with a focus on individual, particular events. But the soul-
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 99
2
Plantinga (1974b) focuses on the notion of morally significant use of free will,
for example. See, for example, p. 166ff.
3
Here I depart from Swinburne, I think. See Swinburne (1998: 218).
100 The Problem of Animal Pain
there is nothing in the Fall narrative that strongly supports that it was
God’s primary plan for our Parents to remain in a perpetual state of
paradise.)
As a concrete example of the kind of thing I have in mind, I share
this story. I wrote the last paragraph on the road to a mountain bike
race in which my oldest daughter, 14 at the time of writing, is racing. As
I write this, we are between the race and the awards ceremony. Fiona,
with appropriate pride, won the women’s A-level collegiate finals. This
is a major achievement for a 14-year-old. It is a hard-won achievement,
earned with, literally, blood, sweat, and tears. In fact, this morning I
had to stitch up one of her teammates, Kate, who badly cut herself, and
I myself have had many metal parts installed in my crushed wrist and
probably hundreds of stitches. So I know all too well what I’m permit-
ting her to risk in racing bikes. And it is a “promoting permitting” as
well. For though I didn’t push her to do it, and she did ask, I also encour-
aged her at various stages of the process to take on the risk. I believe she
knows the risks as well. So why does she take those risks? And why do I
permit my beloved daughter, my beautiful, first-born child to take these
risks?
It is hard to say, honestly, but the answer surely involves a number of
things. First, there is the simple fact that she just loves doing it. This is
not sufficient, of course, since one might love doing crack (I suppose).
But it would not be permissible to let your child do crack just because
they liked it. And the same is true for many activities less nefarious than
doing crack. But there is also the fact that it makes her a better person
in so many ways. It makes her physically and mentally stronger, which
is to say that it perfects her human nature. It teaches her that she can
do things she once thought impossible (this is pretty strictly speaking
true: She now rides both up and down rough, steep grades I myself once
thought not within the power of any human being). It teaches her the
value of teamwork. It has been an opportunity for her to exercise the
virtue of magnanimity in how she treats those she has beaten, especially
when she is, quite literally, put on a pedestal above them. I suppose,
now that I think of it, there are probably scores of essays about the value
of sport from which I could crib notes (without ever having to quote the
glib “No pain, no gain”). And though I think Americans make an idol
out of sports and sporting figures, I do think there is considerable merit
to the notion that it can be and often is – at least at the amateur level
once so typified by the Olympics – a prime source of personal and collec-
tive virtue. And with my own case of mountain bike racing as our family
activity, as with many sports, the risks and sacrifices are not trivial.
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 101
4
Raton Range (2010, July 8). My very brief search also turned up a North
Carolina scout who died from falling off a cliff in a hiking/climbing area a few
months ago (WBTV 2012, September 23), a 9-year-old cub scout who was killed
earlier this year falling into a ravine in a cave area I have been to (Ruzich and
Sadovi 2012, May 21), and many similar stories.
102 The Problem of Animal Pain
much greater risk. The picture will be dramatically altered if God has
a way of guaranteeing that in the end, all reasonable creatures think
that their ultimate fate was worth God’s risking the evils that actually
occurred to them.
What I have been trying to do in this section is some important ground
clearing and some important preparatory groundwork. To plant a tree in
weedy or unprepared soil is bad practice and drastically decreases the
probability of that tree growing to maturity.
5
More precisely and holistically, it must show that any disadvantage is more
than off-set by the contribution of natural theology.
104 The Problem of Animal Pain
6
I’m talking about whether the making of a world with the exercise of morally
significant freedom is a good means, not whether particular instances of evil are.
We send our kids to camp as a means to the end of some kind of transformation,
but we don’t ordinarily cause particular events to happen as means to that end.
Likewise, God places us in a world he knows will involve significant suffering,
but he does not intend (at least routinely) any of the particular evils that occur. A
good research project is to apply the doctrine of double effect here.
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 105
7
It could be that many are kept from suicide only by fear or guilt, but I don’t
think that will affect the numbers much. And I can fit despair into theism much
more easily than I can fit deliverance into atheism. The theist can see despair as
authentic, whereas the atheist must “see through” deliverance. See also Swinburne
(1998: 246–247).
8
I bracket here Plantinga’s “O Felix Culpa” theodicy according to which the
greatest good is the Incarnation of God the Son in Jesus Christ (2004: 25). This is
a suggestion worthy of much consideration.
106 The Problem of Animal Pain
Suppose, contrary to fact, that this world were a paradise from which
all possibility of pain and suffering were excluded. The consequences
would be very far-reaching. For example, no one could ever injure
anyone else: the murderer’s knife would turn to paper or his bullets
to thin air; the bank safe, robbed of a million dollars, would mirac-
ulously become filled with another million dollars (without this
device, on however large a scale, proving inflationary); fraud, deceit,
conspiracy, and treason would somehow always leave the fabric of
society undamaged. Again, no one would ever be injured by acci-
dent: the mountain climber, steeplejack, or playing child falling from
a height would float unharmed to the ground; the reckless driver
would never meet the disaster. There would be no need to work, since
no harm could result from avoiding work; there would be no call to
be concerned for others in time of need or danger, for in such a world
there could be no real needs or dangers.
To make possible this continual series of individual adjustments,
nature would have to work by “special providences” instead of
running according to general laws that men must learn to respect
on penalty of pain or death. The laws of nature would have to be
extremely flexible: sometimes gravity would operate, sometimes not;
sometimes an object would be hard and solid, sometimes soft. There
could be no sciences, for there would be no enduring world struc-
ture to investigate. In eliminating the problems and hardships of an
objective environment, with its own laws, life would become like a
dream in which, delightfully but aimlessly, we would float and drift
at ease.
One can at least begin to imagine such a world. It is evident that
our present ethical concepts would have no meaning in it. If, for
example, the notion of harming someone is an essential element in
the concept of a wrong action, in our hedonistic paradise there could
be no wrong actions – nor any right action in distinction from wrong.
Courage and fortitude would have no point in an environment in
which there is, by definition no danger or difficulty. Generosity,
kindness and the agape aspect of love, prudence, unselfishness, and
all other ethical notions which presuppose life in an objective envi-
ronment could not even be formed. Consequently such a world,
however well it might promote pleasure, would be very ill adapted
for the development of the moral qualities of human personality. In
relation to this purpose it might be the worst of all possible worlds!
(Hick 1973: 41–42. See also Swinburne’s similar thought experiment
(Swinburne 1998: 249).)
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 107
It all comes down to what we take God’s purpose to be. Hick rightly
places a strong challenge on the one critiquing the setup of this world
to describe how things could have been significantly different without
making things worse (cf. van Inwagen 2006). Every world with significant
virtue is a world with significant pain. Every world without significant
pain is a world without significant virtue. Significant good and evil are
in this regard a “package deal.” The evil is not a means to the good, but it
is a cost of there being that good. It is simply not possible to manipulate
the world in such a way as to achieve some mythical “optimum balance.”
Consider Plantinga’s notion of universal transworld depravity (Plantinga
1974b: 184ff). Plantinga presents it as a thesis that is true for all we know.
I think it is quite plausible, given the nature of finite persons, that the
inclination to selfishness is inherent (and to degrees that differ less than
we would like to think) in all persons worth creating. Thus, the degree of
badness of worlds it is permissible for God to create does not vary radi-
cally. This suggests a kind of “butterfly effect” problem for those inclined
to think that God could intervene here and there to make a world with
just as much value over the long run with lots less evil over that same
period. The limits of possibility space affect the evidential formulation of
the problem of evil just as much as the logical formulation.
At the very least, it is obvious there are no hard boundaries: There is
no best world, nor is there any world with a least amount of suffering
necessary (van Inwagen 2006). So the question “Why not just one less
horrendous evil?” is confused from the start (see also Hasker 2004:
39). There are innumerable possible outcomes of a world-ensemble
consisting of free agents with significant power to harm and to heal in
a world of fixed natural laws. Theism predicts we would fall somewhere
in this range. It does not distinguish where in this range the world will
fall. The world-ensemble from which we have emerged has given rise to
wars and heroes and diseases and nurses and hunger and charity and
bullies and teachers, sinners and saints. In short, it gives rise to consider-
able opportunity for virtue, much of which has been taken, and, sadly,
much of which has not. And there is no good reason to think that the
removal of one evil here would not result in the addition of an approxi-
mately equal evil over there. This is a very special kind of world, one as
rare as prime numbers, perhaps, and that there should be such a world
is entailed by God creating anything at all.9 In the next chapter, I will
9
God’s creating is contingent. However, so is my eating a fresh, warm cookie
that has been offered to me. Something can be contingent and still be a “slam
dunk.”
108 The Problem of Animal Pain
take these thoughts and put them into a fine-tuning argument from evil
for theism. But for now there is more to say about sainthood and the
defeat of evil.
One striking feature of many canonized saints is that not only do they
not regret their suffering, they seem to desire it. Consider this rather
strong statement often attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola.
Jesus’s words acknowledge the badness of what he was to face and even
a desire not to face it. The saint-making theodicy does not call evil good.
He both wants and doesn’t want to face his trial. And that is surely how
it is in retrospect for those who have suffered greatly: They both wish it
never happened and don’t wish it never happened. Both Mary and Jesus
knew they were part of a Divine Drama they didn’t fully understand.
Before their earthly stint was over, they both suffered terribly. Yet if the
Christian story is true, no doubt they both are glad to have played a
role, any role, in the drama of salvation. If the Christian story is true,
then they don’t regret their “Let it be” at all, even while recognizing the
intrinsic badness of their suffering. Neither, in the end, doubts that God
has been good to them.
I have suffered very little in my life, barely even worth mentioning.
But in the minute suffering I’ve encountered, I’ve caught a glimpse of
how it has been integral to what modicum of saintliness I have. On one
occasion, I spent a long day in jail. Supposedly innocent until proven
guilty, I was treated like scum. I was held in a six-by-six foot solitary
confinement cell (easy to measure as I am just a little over six feet tall)
for hours before I was processed. Then my belt, watch, and shoes were
taken and I was given “flip-flops” to wear instead. Without exception,
the officers seemed to assume I was a murderer or something given the
way I was dragged, pushed, barked at, and otherwise neglected (the food
wasn’t terrible though, I have to admit). Fortunately for me, I had a close
friend who was a lawyer and plenty of money to make bail before having
to spend the night. Most of my cellblock mates were not so lucky. It
was a miserable, humiliating experience with both mental and physical
suffering. Time deprivation, for me, was like psychological torture and
the handcuffs left marks on my wrists for weeks.
On another occasion, I broke my hand off, snapping the radius and ulna
right at the joint. After hours of reconstructive surgery, I had considerable
hardware sticking out of me, what they call an “external fixator” (google
it, if you dare). People stared at me and grimaced. Other’s quickly turned
away. Children could be heard asking their parents what happened. People
didn’t want to converse with me, as they always had before. I got a small
taste of what it was like to be an outcast or someone with a permanent
disability (I still suffer considerable pain and have reduced mobility, but I
can cycle again). After the metal was removed, I endured months of phys-
ical therapy where, day by day, I gradually tore lose the scar tissue a millim-
eter or so at a time on machines that were very much like torture devices.
Yet I am happy for this solidarity with those brothers and sisters that suffer
more deeply than I did, gruesome and costly as the experience was.
110 The Problem of Animal Pain
I would not undo suffering that injustice and the other attendant
sufferings. I am glad I went through them. They made me who I am
and, though I am clearly not done yet, I am a much better person for
these experiences. Do I hope that I suffer more that I might be a better
person yet? At one level, of course, no, for I fear suffering. But when I
can muster the moral courage, yes, I hope that I have further experi-
ences that make me more saintly, more a lover of all persons human and
divine. I am like Augustine saying, roughly, “Lord, make me pure, but
not yet” (2006: Confessions, Book 8). In the end, only God knows what
I can take.
Can I possibly expect someone who went through the Holocaust to be
able to say they were glad it happened? No, I cannot possibly do that. It
is psychologically impossible for me to fuse those two concepts in one
thought. But I do find Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl’s response to the
Holocaust inspiring and illustrative (Frankl 1985). His life, and many he
documents, are a testimony to the human ability to find meaning under
any conditions. It seems clear he would not have wished it away if it meant
losing the enlightenment he found there.10 Many, of course, did not find
10
And his own suffering cannot be underestimated. Perhaps the most famous
passage in his most famous book contains a testament to the love of his wife.
We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles,
along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept
shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very
sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken;
the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned
collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could
see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what
is happening to us.”
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for
miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging
one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us
was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were
fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a
dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with
an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and
encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun
which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is
set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many
thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which
man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human
poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man
is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 111
enlightenment there and did lose their faith (though some found it11).
But it is no part of theism that such enlightenment comes only or mostly
in this life. Rather, it is a part of theism that there will be an afterlife to
continue the process. And the afterlife is not an auxiliary hypothesis. For
there is no possible world in which creatures suffer and are not given full
opportunity for compensation and recovery. The afterlife is “built in,” a
logical concomitant of theism in worlds with suffering.
What my own little experiences illustrate in a little way and what
Frankl’s life and those he and others chronicle illustrate in a very large
way is the concept of the defeat of an evil. Chisholm introduced the term
though the general idea surely predated him.12 It is similar to his notion
of epistemic defeat. Chisholm’s formal definition of defeat in the realm
of value is very complicated, but we can get the gist of it by bridging from
his notion of epistemic defeat. Let h be some hypothesis and e and d be
this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contem-
plation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot
express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in
enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a posi-
tion man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his
beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to under-
stand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contempla-
tion of an infinite glory.” (56–57)
“Listen, Otto, if I don’t get back home to my wife, and if you should see her
again, tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I
have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married
to her outweighs everything, even all we have been through here.” (76)
She died in Bergsen-Belsen concentration camp. His mother was gassed, his
father died in camp, and his brother died in the mines.
11
Consider the following testimony, of which much more could be produced.
“Why hold fast to the God of the covenant? Former believers lost Him in the
Holocaust Kingdom. Former agnostics found Him. No judgment is possible.
All theological arguments vanish. Nothing remains but the fact that the bond
between Him and His people reached the breaking point but was not for all
wholly broken. He (a survivor) is a witness the like the world has not seen”
(Fackenheim 1973: 171).
“Loss of faith for some equaled discovery of God for others” (Wiesel 2004: 6).
“The truth is that among those who actually went through the experience of
Auschwitz, the number whose religious life was deepened – in spite, not to say
because, of this experience – by far exceeds the number of those who gave up
their belief” (Frankl 1975: 16).
All three quotes appear in Williams (2000).
12
It is reminiscent of certain holistic ideas of Leibniz.
112 The Problem of Animal Pain
It is easy to see how this works with an example. That (e) your high
school teacher says that (h) the civil war was all about slavery is a good
reason to think that it is so. But when (d) your college history professor
says there were other factors, your new total evidence (e&d) no longer
supports h. The stronger testimony epistemically defeats the support of
the weaker testimony.
But note that there is a very different way that defeat can work. Begin
again with your high school teacher’s testimony. That is, let e and h
have the same values as above. But this time consider that you learn (d’)
that your high school teacher never even graduated from high school
and has been discovered to have been making up all kinds of things.
Again, this is a case of defeat, because though e confirmed h, e&d does
not. However, this time it is not because d’ is stronger than e. Rather, it
is because d’ shows that e was misleading in the first place. In a sense, in
light of d’, e no longer counts in favor of h.13 The former kind of defeat is
usually called rebutting defeat. The latter is usually called undercutting or
undermining defeat. Now let’s look at the parallel notion in value theory.
Let g be some good, e be some evil, and L be a particular life.
So suppose (e) I wreck my car but (g) my insurance buys me a new, better
car without raising my rate (and I have no deductible) by selecting my
name at random in a drawing to receive this benefit. By itself, wrecking
my car is a bad-making feature of my life. But when taken together with
the new car, I’m on the whole better off. But just as there are two kinds
of epistemic defeat, there are two kinds of axiological defeat. Compare
the former case to a case in which due to the car wreck, I am paralyzed
13
And in a sense, it still does count against it, since relations of epistemic
support are quasi-logical relations that hold necessarily when they hold at all.
Thus, the “in light of” condition is needed.
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 113
Adams is clear that this meets two of her desiderata: 1. It ensures not just
that God is just but that he is good; 2. That evil is not just systemically
14
This is based on an example Todd Buras raised in a talk by Mark Murphy at
Baylor Universitiy.
114 The Problem of Animal Pain
defeated but in a way that (i) accrues to and (ii) is at least partially
recognized by the one who suffers the horrors (55, 156). Of course, the
individual need not recognize and appropriate the defeat right away.
Indeed, since the integration is almost always a gradual process, it is
impossible to notice all at once. It could dawn on one or one could
notice it happening, but full appreciation only happens in hindsight.
Since it does not appear to happen to most people in this life (though we
have little to no evidence about what happens at the moment of death),
we can assume that most of the work gets done in the next phase of
existence. As Hick (1997) says, we march under the banner “No theodicy
without eschatology” (48). What is important is that the agent herself
eventually comes to have a perspective on her life in which she endorses
the events that have constituted her path to virtue. This is an important
part of Adams’ picture from start to finish, and I endorse it.
A few clarifications are called for here. The first quote attributes to the
horror participant the property of being glad for their participation in
horror, while the second attributes the property not wishing away their
participation in horror. These are two different properties, though the
former plausibly entails the latter. Furthermore, as I noted above, one
can both wish away and not wish away a past event. I have a hard time
endorsing being glad for as universal to the defeat of evil, at least if it is
unequivocal gladness (though see Robert Adams 1987 and Hasker 1981).
Gladness is a paradigm case of defeat, and as I have said, I myself am glad
for some of the worst things I’ve suffered. But then I haven’t suffered
much. I think that one can exemplify the latter property without exem-
plifying the former property and that that latter property is sufficient for
the defeat of evil. It is said “Time heals all wounds” and perhaps even-
tually this is true. (What will Holocaust survivors think a billion years
of paradise hence? I really don’t know.) On the other hand, virtue is its
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 115
15
Hasker’s (1981) treatment of the logic of regret is not wholly successful, but it
is powerfully suggestive. What seems clear to me is that future researches should
look for a plurality of pro and con attitudes we have toward our suffering. So long
as there is some sufficiently strong con attitude toward our suffering, the badness
of that suffering will receive its due; so long as there is some sufficiently strong
pro attitude to our lives, God will have been sufficiently good to us.
116 The Problem of Animal Pain
$1,000,000 to it. So you go to a wealthy friend and ask for a $100 dona-
tion. They refuse, saying that that would cause them to go without a
really nice meal. Even if we assume, contrary to what I suspect, that they
are under no obligation to give, we will issue a negative judgment on
them. We will judge them as miserly and uncaring, as vicious in various
ways. In like manner, if, after reviewing one’s earthly life one would
not join their will to harms that were objectively “worth it,” we would
judge them and not God. A full treatment of this issue would involve
issues of autonomy and consent. For example, does the Creator require
the consent of the creature in this particular kind of case? I think not. Is
there a kind of tacit consent involved in living in community with other
human beings? Perhaps. Further work needs to be done here, and I hope
some readers will do it.
It could even be that if Molinism is true that God uses his middle
knowledge to ensure that people are only permitted to suffer harms
he knows they will endorse when they understand their role. A similar
move is available to the Boethian.16 These and other important and
interesting issues pertain to details of the defeat-enriched soul-making
theodicy which we must leave for another occasion.17 If you don’t like
16
Eleonore Stump plausibly interprets Aquinas as holding that “a person of
faith has in effect given consent to living a life which includes suffering” (Stump
2012: 405). And, in a sensible way of looking at it, whether a person is a person
of faith is something that, from God’s perspective, does not change throughout
a person’s life. So if, from our perspective, they become a person of faith, in the
relevant sense, only long after death, then the whole continuant person will be
considered as a person of faith for God and their consent will be “retroactively”
applied to their whole life, including the portion of their career where, from our
perspective, they did not appear to be, perhaps even to themselves, a person of
faith. Swinburne, who is not a Boethian, says this: “But of course I cannot choose
[before I am born], and God has to make the choice for me. God sometimes pays
us the compliment of supposing that, if we had the choice, we would choose to
be heroes” (1998: 250). These matters deserve more investigation.
17
Aquinas seems to hold an interestingly related position. He thinks that greater
excellence of character (in at least a dispositional way) leads God to allow that
person to suffer the greater, much as a general sends his best men into the worst
battles. Stump glosses this passage saying “Presumably, part of what makes such
persons better is that they would be willing to accept greater suffering for the
sake of greater glory” (Stump 2003: 577, n. 52). On the view I sketched, people
are better in proportion to how much they are willing to suffer for others. Perhaps
this can reach pathological proportions. If so, then I take it there is still some
threshold such that unwillingness to sacrifice that amount for a specified benefit
for others is vicious (lacking in empathy, compassion, love) and that willingness
to suffer more than that amount is increasingly virtuous up to but not including
the point of pathology.
The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase 117
The last chapter concerned the defeat of evil. Given theism’s capacity to
defeat evil from within its value system, evil will not count against God’s
existence. For theism is only in tension with indefeasible evil (which is
probably a better way to characterize what has been called “gratuitous”
evil). And we have no evidence whatsoever that there is any indefeasible
evil. However, though this is our theodical foundation, it is not enough
to fully answer the Bayesian argument from animal suffering. For, on the
face of it, the suffering is just what we’d expect given naturalism. And
failing to predict the opposite of the data is not on par with predicting
the data. So in this chapter, I take the considerations of the last chapter
and present in Section 7.1 the fine-tuning argument for theism from
evil. Its structure is much like the fine-tuning argument for theism from
the initial conditions of the universe. In Section 7.2, I make its appli-
cation to the Bayesian problem of evil from animal suffering perfectly
explicit. In Section 7.3, I consider whether there is any evidence that the
amount of suffering observed is definitely beyond the range of expecta-
tion. I finish, in Section 7.4, with some exploratory reflections on how
we can assess what worlds to expect based on what kind of story the
lives of the sufferers amount to.
118
The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase 119
1
This general line of theodicy began in an undergraduate paper at the University
of Missouri written for Peter Markie called “The Best Possible Kind of World: A
Quasi-Leibnizan Theodicy.” I thank him for his comments and for conversing with
me like a philosopher regardless of my rank. It was seeded by a careful reading of
Peter van Inwagen’s “The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God” in van
Inwagen 1995. Kraay 2008a and 2008b were a fascinating follow-up.
2
I mean from all the natural numbers. The Prime Number Theorem gives the
probability for any finite sequence. It is not uncommon to hear mathematicians
say that there are more primes than squares (see, for example, Coppel 2009: 364
and Schumer 2004: 3). I take this to be a perfectly sensible way to speak about a
literal truth that is hard to systematize.
120 The Problem of Animal Pain
To see why not, we need to be careful not to make a certain kind of easy
mistake. Think of the best kind of vacation. Nothing ever goes wrong: the
drive to the airport is relaxed, the plane is on time, the room is perfect,
and all the events go just as planned. If we think of a good life as like
a good vacation and of a good world as one where all the lives are like
good vacations, then this world is not in the running for best possible
kind of world. But we must resist this kind of thinking. We must remember
to judge the value of a world by the kinds of values realized there. When we
think about the value of a world, that is, we must first have a scale of
value to place it on. We must be able to make some comparative judg-
ments about which kinds of states of affairs are better than others. We
must ask ourselves what kinds of goods are best. I have tried to flag unde-
fended assumptions as I have gone along. Every important intellectual
endeavor must make substantive assumptions along the way, and no one
book can defend them all. I have also tried to be as clear as possible, given
various limitations (space, my cognitive abilities, relative importance of
ends), providing definitions where I can with suitable efficiency (which
in complex labors can prove quite laborious). Above, I spoke often of “the
highest virtues” and mentioned some of them. I said that what unites
them is love. Here is a more complete specification of them. Undefended
assumption: courage, compassion, kindness, generosity, benevolence,
mercy, magnanimity, tolerance, honor, truthfulness, trustworthiness,
responsibility, friendship, cooperation, diligence, discipline, helpfulness,
gratitude, and, especially, empathy and forgiveness are among the highest
manifestations of love (which is the highest of the virtues).
The Irenaean theodicy begins with this value-driven approach. Its
fundamental assumption is that how one responds in life is more impor-
tant than what happens to one (cf. Swinburne 1998), that the best kind
of life is the one exemplifying the highest virtues. And the greatest of
these is love. Of course, one may reject this theory of the good life, but
that is separate from one’s rejection of God. That is a dispute in axiology.
So among the additional assumptions I am willing to make for my argu-
ment is that the right way to judge the moral value of a world is how it
exemplifies the highest virtues.
As Swinburne has so ably defended (2004: ch. 2 and ch. 6) the predic-
tive power of theism comes from the nature of the God posited. What
God can be expected to want is a world in which the highest virtues
are displayed.3 This involves two components: what can be expected is,
3
Undefended assumption: The display of virtue is significantly more valuable
than the mere presence of the disposition. Objection: So then what is so good
The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase 121
first, the display of the highest virtue and, also, the highest virtue. What
must God bring about if he wishes to create a situation in which these
virtues will be fostered? The logically necessary preconditions for the
display of the highest virtues are evils of sufficient intensity (but not
so intense as to destroy the psyche of most of those in the situation)
and of the sufficient frequency to provide multiple opportunities and to
form habits (but not too frequent so as to yield too high a probability
of complete demoralization of the souls of all who go through them:
There must be sufficient chance of success for a sufficient number of
individuals). This gives us a toy matrix of nine possible relevant kinds
of universe (illustrated by Figure 7.1). Only one of them successfully
occupies the “goldilocks” region with respect to the right amount of risk
in the world.4
Figure 7.1
about Heaven, where virtues will not be on display? Reply: Properly speaking,
the highest good is union with God (Stump 2010 and much of her work that has
preceded it has made a powerful Thomistic theodicy from this launching point),
and this requires, for reasons I shall not get into, knowledge gained by having
displayed the highest virtues. The details must await another occasion. And of
course there are other great goods that require bad states that give God additional
reasons to allow considerable suffering. See Swinburne (1998: Part II).
4
Of course there will be other parameters too, but appropriate sophistication
will only make the model stronger. For example, I assume a uniform distribution
here, but I expect that favors naturalism.
122 The Problem of Animal Pain
quite rare for people to lead lives5 they consider on the whole not worth
living (and, of course, it is more rare that they are right). This is much
more to be expected given theism than naturalism for the reasons given
above, so the facts about the distribution and intensity of evil favor theism
over naturalism. Naturalism leaves it to chance which kind of world there
should be. Theism entails that we will be in a type-5 world, since it is the
best possible kind of world, so Pr(Type-5 | T) = 1. Of course there are more
variables than just frequency and intensity (and there will be various
dimensions of intensity). So a mature version of our toy model would be
more complicated. But I think this would only amplify the result.
Let a “badness-ensemble” describe which types of bads are tokened
and to what degree and their distribution among the population of
beings with moral standing in a universe (and let it be exhaustive, so
that one could deduce the corresponding “goodness-ensemble” from
it). The range of kinds of badness-ensembles consistent with or promo-
tive of opportunity for the exercise of the highest virtues among the
total possibilities (properly understood and measured) is very narrow.
Theism predicts we would land in that range. Naturalism leaves it totally
at random. What I am suggesting here6 is that the Irenaean theodicy
nicely plays into a fine-tuning argument for theism from the nature of
suffering we presently find displayed in our world.
I have told a story about how bad states of affairs fit into not only a
good world, but the best kind of world. My main goal was to explicate
an up-to-date and original version of the soul-making theodicy to apply
to animals, which for obvious reasons I have called the “saint-making”
theodicy. A central theme was the transformative power of triumph over
tragedy in the formation of virtuous, saintly character. I have assessed the
value of this largely in the only form possible: illustrating it from various
aspects of our lives. If my assessment of the value of those stories being
lived out, and the permissibility of allowing them to be lived, is secured
by their reasonable potential for defeat of any evil encountered in the
lives of those who live them, then the purpose and permissibility of
creating a world-ensemble like ours will have been established. I will now
direct these thoughts explicitly to the Bayesian argument from evil.
5
By “life” here, I mean to pick out the this-worldly segment of an individual’s
total existence.
6
I first suggested this in print in Dougherty and Walls (2013), 380–381.
The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase 123
EH Since very near the beginning of human existence, there has been
an abundance of intense human suffering. That is, wherever there
has been human life, very significant levels of human suffering have
been quite common.
This is one way of describing the situation. But the same facts can be
described in various ways depending on what concepts we apply and
from what angle we are viewing it. My wife suggested the following
example. Consider the following description of a state of affairs.
7
If one pounded their fist and insisted that there was shift in the facts under consid-
eration in this case, then I would stomp my foot and insist that either it wasn’t a
difference that made a difference or that the shift (or addition) was necessary to accu-
rately represent the problem, just as psychological explanations of human action
would be more enlightening from the human level even if reductionism were true.
124 The Problem of Animal Pain
I now wish to look at EH through the lens of God’s plan. That is,
having considered above what kind of values God can be expected to
have and, consequently, what kind of actions is he likely to take, we can
re-describe the facts described by EH in the following way.
EH’ Since very near the beginning of human existence, suffering has
come with a frequency and intensity which falls into the relatively
narrow band with enough magnitude to foster saints but not so much
as to widely overwhelm people or make struggle futile.
This data places our world in a certain class of worlds, one theism says
must exist, if God creates. It is also describes a class of worlds which it
is permissible to create, so far as we know, since there is no evidence of
any indefeasible evil. If you prefer to think of EH’ as a second-order fact
about EH or the facts described by EH, I will not press the matter. The
question is whether the following likelihood ratio is top-heavy (greater
than 1) or bottom-heavy (less than 1) (or dead even, but that’s terribly
unlikely).
Pr(EH’|T&S)
Pr(EH’|N)
The more top-heavy this ratio is, the better the theodicy; the more
bottom-heavy it is, the worse it is. Suppose that one thinks the theist
has some decent natural theological arguments for theism: cosmological,
ontological, fine-tuning from natural laws, what have you. Then even
if it is modestly bottom-heavy, the theodicy might be successful in the
scheme of a cumulative case. For even if the ratio is somewhat bottom-
heavy, theism will not have lost much probability from the data of evil. If
the value of the ratio is 1 (or approximately 1), the probability of theism
will not be affected (or not affected much) by data about evil. A ratio of 1
represents the theodicy as exactly neutralizing the argument from evil.
The Numerator So how high is Pr(EH’ | T&S)? I have suggested that it
is very high indeed, 1, in fact. For an EH’ world is a logically necessary
condition to the best kind of world, and God is morally required to
create the best kind of world, or in more basic language, his knowledge
of values motivates him to do so with no countervailing motives. Let
Kbe the class of best possible worlds. Every world k in K is a world with
a significant number of opportunities for sainthood and a not insignifi-
cant number of saints. All saints display some of the highest virtues. All
opportunities for sainthood involve very significant trials. Thus every
The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase 125
a. T → K (From that God must create the best kind of world ensemble)
b. K → S (From the value of sainthood)
c. S → EH’ (From that sainthood requires very significant trials)
d. T → EH’ (From a, b, and c)
e. If d, then Pr(EH’ | T) = 1 (Theorem)
f. Pr(EH’ | T) = 1 (From e and d)
g. T → S.
h. T ≡ (T&S).
i. Pr(T) = Pr(T&S).
8
Swinburne misses this, I think, for the exact same reasoning applies to the
existence of Heaven. See Swinburne (2004: 264).
9
Letting C be the proposition that God creates, then I think that ((T & C) &
~EH’) is logically incompatible.
126 The Problem of Animal Pain
10
There might be a many-way tie for best kind of state with incommensu-
rable goods and/or incompatible goods. We would then expect a good balance
between compatible kinds of goods, and none of the greatest goods would be at
all surprising.
11
I actually think Jeffreys’ scale is extremely conservative, as I suspect he was
looking for a kind of robustness in measure that ignored prior probabilities.
12
Indeed, I agree with Swinburne (1998: 245) that there is something wrong
with one if one isn’t sympathetic with some initial incredulity concerning
theodicy.
The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase 127
13
Strictly speaking, all goods have a prima facie allure for God. But only the
best kind of goods can have an ultima facie allure. And, again, we must allow for
best compossible aggregates and for the possibility of incommensurability. The
main idea, though, is that all the best worlds where God creates have saints, and
all saints suffer; the greater the saint, the greater the suffering, within the limits
of what a creature can bear and what it is permissible for God to allow. Just how
much a creature can ultimately bear is in itself an interesting question. I am
aware of no sustained attempt to show of any particular evil that it is intrinsi-
cally impermissible for God to allow. But see Dougherty (2008), (2011c), (2014),
and Dougherty (2014, Section 6.2), and Dougherty and Walls (2013, 372) for a
problem concerning intrinsic impermissibility.
128 The Problem of Animal Pain
perspective. It is like inferring that your birthdate does not appear in the
decimal expansion of pi because it doesn’t occur in the first thousand
digits (you have to go nearly half a million digits out to get to mine).
Contrast our ignorance with respect to evil’s defeating humans with our
knowledge of evil being defeated in the lives of humans. What we do
know is that for every type of horrendous evil that has befallen a human
on earth, some of the individuals who have undergone them have gone
on to flourish as human beings in ways to which their horror was inte-
gral. Frankl (1985) is a prominent example, but there are many more.14
When an evil is defeated, it is integrated into a good whole; it does not
itself become a good. The Holocaust is an evil that is so vile I can scarcely
write or say the word. It is almost like the “N-word” in that respect. Yet
I am constantly amazed by the human spirit as I discover more and
more books by Holocaust survivors like Mike Jacobs, who lives about an
hour north of me, whose book Holocaust Survivor: Mike Jacobs’ Triumph
over Tragedy tells how “he kept hope alive in his heart by helping others
and by undermining Nazi efforts, no matter the risk to himself. A story
without hatred or bitterness, Holocaust Survivor teaches us that when we
recognize that freedom comes from within, we are never completely
powerless” (from http://www.dallasholocaustsurvivor.com/book.html).
There are more books like this than I could read in preparation for this
one.15 One that stands out is The Triumph of Wounded Souls (Lerner
2004) in which a child of Holocaust survivors tells the story of seven
children who survived the Holocaust. Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Coles
(1999) says this in his endorsement of the book: “As a child psychia-
trist, I was completely immersed in every page of this well written and
compelling manuscript, which poses enormous questions about survival
and meaning – how the young endure (and even prevail) under the
most awful of circumstances.” I picked these two books because they
are two of my favorite Holocaust survival accounts, but I now realize
they also both have “triumph” in the title. It is a testament to the fact
that not even the worst evils humans encounter are indefeasible. Many
will not triumph in the very midst of such horrors or even shortly after
14
Not long ago a book called The Shack (Young 2011) was very popular in
Christian circles. While theologically very light, it dramatically portrayed the
ability of horrendous evil to be defeated in someone’s life.
15
My reading of Holocaust literature is primarily to “hold my feet to the fire”
and not cut corners or lose touch with the severity of the problem or its human
dimension. Yet it is virtually impossible to delve into Holocaust literature and not
encounter a number of stories like this whether one is looking for them or not.
The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase 129
them. But these stories show that the human spirit – which is the imago
dei16 from receiving the breath of God – is equal to anything thus far
observed on earth. It provides reasonable hope that, in the end, there
are two kinds of people: those who have already triumphed over their
suffering, and those that will.17
Do such stories mean that it was a good thing the Holocaust happened?
No, it was a bad thing that it happened, a terrible thing. Does the fact
that some people triumphed over this great evil show that there is some
character flaw in those who did not triumph? No, the most we can say
about those whose earthly stories did not end in triumph is that they
had not yet triumphed. Whether they eventually will is something about
which we have very little evidence.
From these reflections I conclude that there is not enough evidence
for the proposition that the degree of suffering in this world exceeds
the range predicted by theism. That range is set by a desire for a world-
ensemble that will likely result in a considerable number of saints. That
range would be exceeded in a particular life only if evils occurred to that
person which were such that either it was impossible for that person’s
existence to be on balance good for them or it was impossible for that
evil to be defeated within the context of a life that individual is glad for
and self-endorses. There is no good reason to believe evils that satisfy
either of these conditions have occurred. Thus, we must conclude that
the evils of this world fall within a permissible and predictable range,
given theism.
It is my hope that the reader who has not had the kind of gestalt I
had can at least see that such a world is, upon reflection, unsurprising
given theism, or at least not very surprising. But on naturalism, it is
quite surprising. For there are ever so many ways it could have been
unsuitable for virtue and saintliness, the greatest of created goods. It
seems to me that the range of reasonable values for Pr(EH’ | N) will
not reach as high as .1. If the considerations above convince you that
such a world as ours is at least as likely as not, then that gives theism a
Bayes factor of 5, which according to the Jeffreys scale (which I think
is too conservative) results in “substantial” confirmation. But suppose
you have some modicum of sympathy for the picture I painted but are
16
For more on animals and the imago dei, see Clark (2013: 534ff).
17
I bracket here the issue of whether anyone could consciously wrongfully
choose to “hold on to” their bitterness over suffering forever. There is no better
treatment of this than C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce (2001a). For treatments of
the problem of Hell, see Kvanvig (1993) and Walls (1992).
130 The Problem of Animal Pain
still pretty convinced it’s false: Suppose you would take 2:1 odds against
God’s creating a world-ensemble likely to end up approximately like our
world. Still, that results in a Bayes factor of over three, and this is spotting
the naturalist a value that is much larger than what I think reasonable
for a maximum value. The numbers, of course, are somewhat artificial,
but they do represent the dynamics of confirmation. And the dynamics
here seem to indicate that it is going to be a hard sell for the naturalist
to claim an advantage on the Bayes factor, and thus the saint-making
theodicy achieves the goal for which it is deployed. It shows that the
Bayesian argument from evil provides no advantage to naturalism.
I end with a summary of the argument.
18
There is no best world. Perhaps God creates an infinite number of persons or
even an infinite number of worlds (see O’Connor 1998). Even a finite number of
beings existing for an infinite amount of time creates an infinite amount of value,
though there are puzzles here (see Lauwers and Vallentyne 2004). These issues are
too far afield to pursue here.
19
He will, that is, if he brings about any world at all. The state of affairs of God’s
existing is sufficiently good that satisficing allows God to justly choose not to
create anything at all.
The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase 131
20
And recall we have made the provisional assumption that the prior prob-
ability of theism and naturalism are about equal, though I think theism is very
much simpler than naturalism.
132 The Problem of Animal Pain
our deeper selves, to live such stories, even if we are often afraid to
seek them. Great literature seems to depend heavily on these themes.
Shakespeare himself has said,
21
As You Like It, Act 2, scene 1, 12–17. The Duke has been betrayed and lost all
he has when he says this.
22
In fact, Aquinas says that “among the best of all the parts of the world are
God’s saints” (quoted in Stump 2012: 402).
The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase 133
23
I actually think this appearance is misleading. I think the probability that
Jesus is the Incarnate Word conditioning on the conjunction of bare theism and
historical facts about Jesus is very high. So letting “I” name the proposition that
Jesus was the Incarnate Word and “J” name the proposition containing all the
historical facts about Jesus, I think that Pr(I | T&J) is so close to 1 that Pr(T&I)
is only very slightly less that Pr(T). For arguments to this effect, see Swinburne
(2003) and Wright (1992).
24
The truth is I do not think it just “happens” to be within the Christian tradi-
tion. I don’t think it is a coincidence at all. The point is that because I am not
appealing to any legendary material about saints but rather matters of historical
record, I am appealing to background evidence and so not adding anything to the
content of the theism which I am defending.
8
Animal Saints
134
Animal Saints 135
1
Some, including several students and Marilyn McCord Adams, have asked
whether participating in the beatific vision isn’t a greater created good. All I can
say to this now is that the goods of being are prior to and partly constitutive of
the goods of relation. One must first be the right kind of being before being able to
enjoy the beatific vision.
136 The Problem of Animal Pain
To some, the pain suffered in the animal kingdom beneath the human
level has constituted the most baffling aspect of the problem of evil.
For the considerations that may lighten the problem as it affects
mankind – the positive value of moral freedom despite its risks; and
the necessity that a world which is to be the scene of soul-making
should contain real challenges, hardships, defeats, and mysteries – do
not apply in the case of the lower animals. (Hick 2007/1966: 309)2
As we will see, the reason Hick thinks his Irenaean strategy does not apply
to non-human animals is that they do not possess the requisite cognitive
powers or the power of free will. Adams expresses a similar sentiment.
2
A contemporary counterpart: Goetz (2009), saves the problem of animal pain
until the last section of his very, very long entry on the problem of evil. And after
having developed a genuinely interesting theodicy, all of a sudden goes skeptical
when it comes to animals. See Goetz (2009: 492ff).
Animal Saints 137
The animal’s goods and evils are exclusively those of the present
moment, and in general it lives from instant to instant either in
healthy and presumably pleasurable activity, or in a pleasant state of
torpor. The picture, then, of animal life as a dark ocean of agonizing
fear and pain is quite gratuitous, and arises from the mistake of
projecting our distinctly human quality of experience into creatures
of a much lower and simpler order. (2007/1966: 314)
138 The Problem of Animal Pain
Folk psycho-biology would place worms and clams well below horrors’
reach but might equivocate about chimpanzees or dolphins, perhaps
even dogs or cats. If all mammals and perhaps most kinds of birds,
reptiles, and fish suffer pain, many naturally lack self-consciousness
and the sort of transtemporal psychic unity required to participate in
horrors. (1999: 28, emphasis added)
The more fruitful question for theodicy is not why animals are liable
to pain as well as pleasure – for this follows from their nature as living
creatures – but rather why these lower forms of life should exist at all.
Christian theology enables us to understand, within its own presup-
positions, why the human creature exists: he is a rational and moral
being who may freely respond to his Maker’s love and so become a
“child of God” and “heir of eternal life.” But this explanation cannot
cover the lower animals, lacking as they do a rational and moral
nature. Their existence remains a problem. (2007/1966: 314)
Animal Saints 139
I take it that AIT is consistent with taking the Hebrew Scriptures seri-
ously in their statements about the relationship between man and beast,
but I will not press that here. I note only that AIT entails an independent
relationship. I do not mean a “personal” relationship requiring animals
to think about God (though animals do desire the good, which at least
on a Thomistic account is tacitly desiring God de re). I just mean that
in virtue of being beings with life and sentience, they thereby resemble
God to some degree and are therefore to some degree made in his image
and thus bear intrinsic value.
140 The Problem of Animal Pain
Objection: But so are plants insofar as they live and rocks, insofar as
they have existence. Reply: I’m totally OK with that. Furthermore, as we
shall see in the next chapter, non-human animals share the very same
“breath of God” as humans. Thus, they bear the imago dei in a special
way. As such, they have moral standing (which is an independent issue
from whether they have rights). As beings with moral standing, God
will have concern for them as such and not merely in relation to other
beings.
And if God has duties to his created beings in virtue of bringing them
into being – as Swinburne (1993: 185) affirms and McCann (2012:
135) denies (I’m with Swinburne on this) – then God will have duties
to them that do not depend on other created beings. But even if we
deny God has duties or that he has duties to non-human animals, God
will surely have concern for all beings with moral standing, which count
morally. Thus, to grant animals any moral standing is to place them
in the circle of God’s concern. Though (in many cases) lacking TTPU
and some other meaning-making properties might entail that they are
not capable of being the subjects of horrendous evils, they are neverthe-
less capable of suffering repeated synchronic pains, which are intrinsi-
cally bad states of affairs. And though this might not be as bad as true
diachronic suffering, it is still a very bad situation and so calls for expla-
nation, given that they are creatures about whom a good God would
be concerned. They have conditions of flourishing, and many do not
flourish. This is bad.
There is a very serious further consequence of denying TTPU and some
other meaning-making properties to non-human animals. It is a more
specific version of the Lewis–Hick line, a soteriological version. Lewis
(2002) says “Certain animals may have an immortality, not in them-
selves, but in the immortality of their masters” (635). He is well aware
this leaves out animals in a state of nature – “it is upon the tame animal
that we must base all our doctrine of the beasts” (634) – for it is part of
his view that due to the subordination doctrine in the Book of Genesis,
the tame animal is in fact in a more “natural” state.
There may be something to this line of reasoning. It may be that,
on Earth at least, animals are meant to be subordinate to humans. If
so, then wild animals are not in their “natural” state. This would be
an instance of “fallenness” in nature. The problem is that this way of
looking at the problem conspicuously leaves aside Rowe’s fawn (Rowe
1979), and that is unacceptable. The fact of such suffering demands an
explanation of the theist.
Animal Saints 141
Lewis gives at least one specific argument for why TTPU is necessary
for Heavenly recompense.
[I]t does not seem that an eschatological new heaven and new earth
with a new animal creation, could relieve the problem of earthly
animal pain. For, unless we postulate a heaven for the millions of
millions of individual animals that have perished since sentient life
first appeared, no future state of the universe will be relevant to the
pains that these creatures have undergone. (2007/1966: 316)
So he winds up in exactly the same place as Lewis for exactly the same
reason. Not only is the value and proper understanding of animals tied
to that of humans, so is their possible salvation. However, there does not
seem to be much by way of salvation on offer to animals, and none at all
for those animals in a state of (“fallen”) nature.
But pay close attention to Lewis’s conclusion and spot the non sequitur.
After noting the uselessness of immortality to a creature lacking TTPU,
142 The Problem of Animal Pain
favorable afterlife. And, of course, the whole earthly stage of life is infini-
tesimal in size in comparison with the measure of their whole existence.
Different organisms, the fruit fly comes to mind, have different rates of
development, and it is in no way an objection, in a Christian context,
that animals would spend their whole earthly existence in an intellec-
tually immature state, leaving further intellectual (and other) develop-
ment to the next stage of existence.
The early church used the word “theosis” for a view whereby humans
were, especially in the afterlife, transformed into a state ever more like
that of God. Sometimes called “deification” in the West, this view has
support by both Eastern and Western theologians, though Irenaeus is
an early and ardent proponent. More will be said of this later, but the
Irenaean dictum is “[T]he Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did,
through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might
bring us to be even what He is Himself,” (2010: 554) or as more pithily
put by Athanasius, The Word of God “assumed humanity, that we might
become God” (2007: 93).
“God” here expresses the property of divinity but not in the same sense
as God exemplifies divinity (whether God exemplifies the same property
in a different way or a distinct but analogous property is not a debate
we need enter into here). God’s attributes are traditionally divided into
the “communicable” and “incommunicable” attributes. A communicable
attribute is one that can be shared with a created being such as being alive,
conscious, or rational. An incommunicable attribute is one that no created
being can exemplify, such as, preeminently, uncreatedness. The same
naturally goes for aseity, necessity, and the omnis. However, though no
created being can be (or become) infinite, there is no limit to the growth
that can occur along the dimensions of any communicable attribute. So,
though no human can ever become omniscient, there is no finite upper
limit to how much a human can know. And though no human can ever be
omnipotent, there is no upper limit on how much finite power a human
can have. According to one version of the theosis doctrine, humans, at
least some humans, will never cease growing in knowledge, power, and
love, and thus, in a sense, never cease to approximate God’s nature.
If this is the case, then the gap between what humans currently are
and what they will someday be is truly astounding, beyond the limits of
our imagination. To quote Lewis (2001b), “It is a serious thing to live in a
society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and
most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which,
144 The Problem of Animal Pain
3
There is a passage in Butler where he seems not to be defending as true but
as at least possible a similar thesis: “that they [the ‘brutes’] must arrive at great
attainments and become rational and moral agents” this, he says, “would be
no difficulty, since we know not what latent powers and capacities they may be
endued with” (Linzey and Regan 1990, 90). Butler seems to have in mind what
Plantinga calls a “defense” rather than a “theodicy,” but it’s not clear.
Animal Saints 145
In this section, I will pull together many strands of thought from above
into an explicit argument for the conclusion that in the face of animal
suffering, theism entails animal deification.
The Transcendental Argument for Animal Deification (TAAD):
13. The only way God could do justly and lovingly by animals involves
both animal resurrection and deification. (From 11 and 12.)
14. If God exists, then animals will be resurrected and deified. (From 5
and 13.)
This must be true for the whole of creation, insofar as it has sentience at
all. If there is any sentient being which suffers pain, that being – what-
ever it is and however it is manifested – must find that pain transfig-
ured by greater joy. I am quite agnostic as to how this is to happen; but
that it must be asserted to be true follows from the doctrine that God is
love, and would not therefore create any being whose sole destiny was
to suffer pain. (From a passage in Linzey and Regan 1990, 105).
their credit that Hick and Adams also keep this before the reader’s mind).
What is needed is the defeat of animal suffering. The paradigm case of
the defeat of evil is when the individual endorses their role in the drama
of creation and salvation and is glad to have played it (which might be
different than being glad for it4). I argued in the last two chapters that
the possibility of this kind of self-endorsement of one’s role in horrors
makes possible an effective theodicy. What the Key Conditional does
is establish two things. First, it establishes that the defeat-augmented
saint-making theodicy is available for animals. This establishes the
Conditional Thesis I promised to argue for: That if the defeat-augmented
saint-making theodicy is effective for humans, then it is just as effec-
tive for non-human animals as well. Whether the antecedent can be
discharged was given only limited defense. Full defense awaits another
volume. But the Conditional Thesis greatly ramifies the implications of
a successful defense of the defeat-enhanced saint-making theodicy. The
Key Conditional establishes the Conditional Thesis.
The second important thing the Key Conditional does is this: it not
only opens the theodicy of the previous chapter up to animals, it does
so without any loss in prior probability to theism. The logic of this move
is exactly parallel to that in the last two chapters. Let the thesis that
animals will be resurrected and deified be called “The Package,” P. Let
“T” stand for theism. KC is then represented as follows:
T ≡ (T&P).
4
Again, see Hasker (1981). Nick Colgrove has written a paper for my graduate
seminar on this topic called “Gladness, Regret, and the Problem of Evil: A New
Haskerian Argument” which is a considerable extension of Hasker.
5
That is, all possible worlds in which God creates animals that suffer like they
do in our world are worlds where he grants them the package.
6
It is important to keep in mind that this is not a case where one rules out cells
empirically..
7
In this context, we don’t need to worry about zero-measure non-empty sets.
148 The Problem of Animal Pain
facts about animal suffering, the TAAD puts the problem of animal pain
on the same plane as the problem of human pain. As I have repeatedly
said, that might not be so great (though I firmly believe the theodicy of
the last chapter shows otherwise), but given the fact that the problem
of animal pain at first appeared to be a significantly harder problem,
putting them on par is progress for the theodicist.
8
This was pressed especially hard by Blake McAllister in class and by Marilyn
McCord Adams in her comments on a version of a portion of this chapter at the
Pacific APA, 2013 in San Francisco.
9
Both suggested in Adams (2013), though it never occurred to me to doubt
either one of them.
Animal Saints 149
Primitive thisness But there is another way to track identity that can
stand up to the changes under consideration, which is a philosophical
necessity anyway. Consider the following thought experiment based
on one by Chisholm.10 Consider Smalls and Talls. Talls is six foot seven
inches tall, weighs 285 pounds, and has a very pale complexion. Smalls is
barely over five foot tall, weighs barely over 100 pounds, and is very dark
complected. Furthermore, they look nothing alike, and have very different
beliefs, desires, memories, etc. For example, Talls is a vegan and Smalls
likes nothing more than pit barbeque. Talls drinks mostly Oregonian
Pinot Noir, but Smalls wouldn’t be caught dead with the stuff. In short,
Smalls and Talls have almost nothing in common, inner or outer. Yet we
can imagine them becoming gradually more like one another. Smalls can
become taller and Talls can become smaller. We can transfer pounds from
Talls to Smalls. We can even imagine their features coming to resemble
one another more and more. As they begin to converge on qualitative
duplicates, we begin to notice that they will “meet in the middle” and will
at some time be perfect qualitative copies of one another. Then they will
“pass” one another and Smalls will begin to resemble more the original
Talls, and vice versa. Not only can we do this for their physical appear-
ance, mind you, but also for their mental life and even for their external
surroundings. That is, we can gradually switch their beliefs, desires, and
apparent memories, until, at the end of the process, everything that
Smalls once believed, desired, and hoped for is now a belief, desire, and
hope of Talls instead. Also, we can place them in a symmetric world where
every statement like “Three meters to the left of _____ there is a statue
of Morgan Freeman” that is true of one of them, is true of the other. At
the end of the process, Smalls is an exact qualitative, mental, and relational
match for the original Talls, and vice versa. Yet Smalls is still Smalls and
Talls is still Talls. The reason is that each has what Scotus calls a haecceitas
or “thisness.” This thisness is a non-qualitative property that individuates
individuals. No matter what changes an individual were to undergo, their
thisness “follows” them. So Scotus offers us two ways to account for the
numerical identity of an individual across stages with radically different
functionality. On either of them, the worry goes away.
Identifying with one’s past But even if personal identity can be estab-
lished between the earthly, animal stage of the continuant and its heav-
enly, deified stage, perhaps the latter creature will not be able to “identify
with” their earlier suffering in the requisite way. Marilyn McCord Adams
makes this objection.
10
Chisholm (1967). See also Adams (1979) and Swinburne (1994: ch. 2).
150 The Problem of Animal Pain
Even if a newt feels pain at T1 when its tail is bitten off by another
animal at T1, the newt qua newt cannot turn this into “a meaningful
growth experience” at T2, because the newt has no self-consciousness
and so does not function as a meaning-maker during its newt career.
Even afterwards, it is difficult to believe that anything about the way
it responded qua newt to its newt-pain would “carry-over” to shape
that soul’s character-development in later lives.11
11
Adams (2013).
Animal Saints 151
vicious to regret it on the assumption that God is in fact just and worthy
of love and total dedication and is good to all of his creatures.
So I don’t think there is anything to worry about here. Nevertheless,
pace Adams, I do think that even if there needed to be some particular
connection between the newt’s newtly pain and the newt’s saintliness,
that connection can be accommodated. Imagine that you are reading
accounts of horrendous childhood suffering. It is hard to read, so you
can only read a little bit each day. On one particular day, you are reading
a story about the suffering of a child with the exact same name as you.
As the story goes on, more and more details of the child’s life match
what you know of your own childhood. Intrigued by this, you perform
some investigation only to discover that it was you, and you blocked it
out. Suppose further that, even after repeated attempts to recover these
memories, they remained blocked to you. Nevertheless, all the relevant
details of your childhood are recorded in the book.
So take one particular detail, a day upon which some terrible thing
occurred to you. You are horrified that such a thing should happen to
a child. And though you don’t remember it, you are well aware that it
is you who suffered it. Here’s what I didn’t tell you. You are reading this
book in a cottage in Purgatory. You’ve been given the cottage, which is
on the edge of an area of transition between a dense wood and a plain,
for as long as you want it to review your life. Occasionally, you will be
paid a visit by a person, a human person, but very tall, who asks if you
need anything. One of the things your aide can do is provide you with
information about your life and its connection to enough of the rest
of creation that it is unlikely that your questions would outstrip their
knowledge.
Your aide visits on the day that you have read this passage, and you
have been wondering how in the world this instance of suffering, which
seems to you so utterly pointless, could have led to any good. The aide
begins unwinding the story. At first, they seem like meaningless, unre-
lated details. The aide’s story goes on well into the night. At times, you
think you see connections between what they are saying now and what
they said at some time earlier. The eastern sky begins to lighten and your
aide pauses their story only to make you a tea made from some herbs
they brought in a pouch. With you refreshed, the story continues. After
seven cups of tea, your aide finally enters silence with the words “And
that is how it happened.” For what seems a very long time, you both sit
in silence. With a nod, your aide takes leave. You remain seated, silent for
some time more. “Does this story make sense?” (It doesn’t occur to you to
doubt whether it is true.) “Was it worth it?” You return to the book. You
152 The Problem of Animal Pain
re-read the daily portion that you had finished before your aide arrived.
You still can’t recall this happening to you, but re-reading the story with
the aide’s context in mind triggers a gestalt. “Very well then.” you say, “I
did my part.” You then go and release a dove from a cage, which is the
signal that you are ready to depart your cottage for the next destination.
This story illustrates how even details of one’s life one can’t recall can be
incorporated into one’s first-personal account of one’s life.
C.S. Lewis pictures the first stages of this process for an animal. In The
Magician’s Nephew (1994), which is chronologically first in the timeline
of The Chronicles of Narnia collection, the protagonists, young Polly and
Digory, end up, via some bad choices, bringing a witch into their own
world from one they were illicitly visiting. This begins to cause serious
trouble for Earth, so the children realize they need to get the witch out
of their world’s realm and back to the Wood between the Worlds. The
witch has commandeered a horse-drawn cab and made off with it, astride
the top, driving it like a chariot. Polly and Digory finally get their hands
on her and slip on the yellow ring (the means by which they can return
to the Wood between the Worlds), but she is on the horse and the cabby
is holding the horse, trying to calm it. As a result, they all (including
some shards of the lamp post they crashed into) end up in a different
world – Narnia – just as it is being created. The old cab horse, Strawberry,
gets caught up in the magic of creation as Aslan is bestowing upon some
animals the gift of speech. The Cabby seems nervous about this.
All this time the Cabby had been trying to catch Strawberry’s eye.
Now he did. “Now Strawberry, old boy,” he said. “You know me. You
ain’t going to stand there and say as you don’t know me.”
“Well,” said Strawberry very slowly, “I don’t exactly know ... I’ve
a feeling I lived somewhere else – or was something else – before
Aslan woke us all up a few minutes ago. It’s all very muddled. Like a
dream.”
“What?” said the Cabby. “Not know me? Me what used to bring
you a hot mash of an evening when you was out of sorts? Me what
rubbed you down proper? Me what never forgot to put your cloths
on you if you was standing in the cold? I wouldn’t ’ave thought it of
you, Strawberry.”
“It does begin to come back,” said the Horse thoughtfully. “Yes. Let
me think now, let me think. Yes, you used to tie a horrid black thing
behind me and then hit me to make me run, and however far I ran
this black thing would always be coming rattle-rattle behind me.”
“We ’ad our living to earn, see.” Said the Cabby. “Yours the same as
mine. And if there ’adn’t been no work and no whip there’d ’ave been
Animal Saints 153
no stable, no hay, no mash, and no oats. For you did get a taste of oats
when I could afford ’em, which no one can deny.”
“Oats?” said the Horse, pricking up his ears. “Yes, I remember some-
thing about that. Yes. I remember more and more. You were always
sitting up somewhere behind, and I was always running in front,
pulling you and the black thing. I know I did all the work.”
“Summer, I grant you,” said the Cabby. “‘Ot work for you and a cool
seat for me. But what about winter, old boy, when you was keeping
yourself warm and I was sitting up there with my feet like ice and my
nose fair pinched off me with the wind, and my ’ands that numb I
couldn’t ’ardly ’old the reigns?”
“It was a hard, cruel country,” said Strawberry. “There was no grass.
All hard stones.”
“Too true, mate, too true!” said the Cabby. “A ’ard world it was. I
always did say those paving-stones weren’t fair on any ’oss. That’s
Lunn’on, that is. I didn’t like it no more than what you did. You were
a country ’oss, and I was a country man. Used to sing in the choir,
I did, down at ’ome. But there wasn’t a living for me there.” (1994:
144–6)
Their discussion is interrupted, so we don’t get to hear its end, but the
important thing to note here is the way the human needs to give an
account to the horse for his behavior to the horse during their earthly
careers. The Cabby is able to say some things that justify his behavior
but also shows regret. One gets the sense that they will “work it out”
and come to peace. Heaven is bound to include this pairwise process for
every pair of individuals who had any impact on one another and then,
ultimately, with God. In the process of reconciliation, if God has been
good to his creatures and acted justly by them, then if they are virtuous,
they will find their peace with God. In this peace will be the defeat of
the evil they suffered.
If the future of each sentient creature is as I have envisioned it, then
even though, on my view, there is no need for each individual instance
of suffering to have some particular impact on the psyche of the person
who suffered it, there will nevertheless be an opportunity for it to do so.
And even if an individual cannot “identify with” their past in a certain
psychological way, they can still – knowing how it fits in with the rest
of their life and the lives of others – embrace their role in the drama of
creation.
9
Animal Afterlife
For animals to survive death, one of two things must be true. Either
animals have non-material souls, as most people, especially religious
people, think (though Evangelical Protestantism is a notable exception),
or, it seems, it would have to be possible for the existence of a creature
to be “gappy” in some way. That is, it would have to be possible for a
creature to exist for a time, cease to exist for a time, and then come back
into existence at a yet later time. In fact, I think both of these things are
true. But all I need is for one or the other to be true. By arguing independ-
ently for each disjunct I will be providing two independent arguments
for the needed disjunction. I will be providing arguments that are brief
and related to a large literature, but, I trust, demonstrate the path I stake
out in these issues.
In Section 9.1, I argue for the existence of animal souls. The argu-
ment for animal souls is broken into three parts corresponding to the
Anglican idea of the “three-legged stool” upon which theology sits (the
idea is often attributed to Richard Hooker, but it only has a modicum of
support in his work): Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. I will treat them
in that order in Section 9.1.1, Section 9.1.2, and Section 9.1.3. The argu-
ments will be quite condensed, but, I think, powerful. The purpose is
not to end any debate in philosophy, but, rather, to demonstrate what
a reasonable person can have (and many readers do have) in their back-
ground evidence prior to coming to the problem of evil in general and
the problem of animal pain in particular. In Section 9.2, I offer a model
for gappy existence of a sort. The principle resources are four-dimension-
alism and wormholes. Heaven is conceived of as a contiguous region of
spacetime or a parallel spacetime.
154
Animal Afterlife 155
Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a
living being. (Genesis 2:7)
By the time many readers get to this passage, they have already forgotten
the easy-to-gloss-over verse not far away.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to
everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of
life, I have given every green plant for food. (Genesis 1:30)
1
All quotations will be from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the
Bible, unless otherwise stated.
156 The Problem of Animal Pain
“breath,” and the second being the cognate of chay, “life.” The second
is what the thing that receives the breath of life becomes: nefesh chaYäh,
“a living soul.” You become a living thing when you receive life; you are
alive when you get life. Life comes in the form of breath “neshamah,”
which like the Greek word pneuma means “breath,” “spirit,” and “soul,”
as it is in Isaiah 57:16, Job 26:4, and Proverbs 20:27 at least.
The upshot is that there is no reason at all in the text (or from context)
to drive a wedge between the life that humans get in Genesis 2 and the
life that non-human animals get in Genesis 1. In the beginning, animals
and humans are presented as having the same divine stuff. One might
wonder why the breathing in is only mentioned in Genesis 2, which
tells of the enlivening of humans and not in Genesis 1, which treats the
enlivening of non-human animals. Isn’t this a sign of humans’ special
status? The answer is that it is indeed such a sign, since humans are not
only ensouled but have capacities on earth that allow them to enter into
a special kind of covenant with God. But this is no reason to think that
only humans and not non-human animals have a non-material compo-
nent. That non-human animals also have this, and that it is of the same
essence as humans, is made clear above. It is generally accepted that the
author(s) of Genesis 1 is different from the author(s) of Genesis 2 (tech-
nically the transition is at 2:4), and the author(s) clearly have different
purposes. Genesis 1 is about the creation of the world, and Genesis 2 is
about the beginning of the human family. Yet the author(s) of Genesis
2 clearly picks up the language of the author(s) of Genesis 1 and sees
humans as metaphysically continuous with other animals.
This covers the most important passage of the Scriptures relevant to
our purposes here, but there are others that merit brief treatment. First,
consider this passage from Ecclesiastes 3, where the author is fretting the
lot of mankind.
2
Much of the raw material for this section is gleaned from Jones’s magisterial
(2009).
Animal Afterlife 159
for us alone, but for themselves and for thee, and that they have the
sweetness of life. (Jones 2009: 61)
This deep fellowship and kinship does not mesh well with the thesis
that animals are mere hunks of matter. He goes on,
We pray thee, O Lord, for the humble beasts ... and for the wild
animals ... for thou has promised to save both man and beast. (Jones
2009: 61)
The probability that he would say these things if he thought that animals
have souls is greater than if he did not believe that. His saying these
things fits better into a larger version of the story according to which he
believes in animals having souls than a story according to which he does
not. And, I think, this is so to a considerable degree: his saying these
things is almost inexplicable.
One might object that he goes on to include not only non-sentient
beings but even inanimate objects.
Remember O Lord, the air of heaven and the fruits of earth, bless them.
Remember, O Lord, the water of the rivers, bless them, raise them to
their measure according to your grace. Remember, O Lord, the seeds,
the herbs, and the plants of the field, bless them. (Jones 2009: 62)
The immediate response is to note that after all these have been grouped
together, he sections off humans and animals with a final “Remember,
O Lord, the safety of the people and the beasts” (Jones 2009: 62).3 The
combining of people and beasts in the same section, apart from all the
rest, is to be expected more on the hypothesis that Basil takes animals
to have souls than on the hypothesis that he does not. And it is relevant
to note that the eastern tradition, which Basil inhabits, includes the
following strong statement in the Armenian liturgy.
Every creature which was created by you will be renewed at the resur-
rection, that day which is the last day of earthly existence and the
beginning of our heavenly life. (Jones 2009: 64)
St. Thomas Aquinas The central figure of the Medieval Church and the
most revered Doctor in Roman Catholicism is St. Thomas. Rather than
engage Thomas’s text directly – which would be a daunting task – I will
3
Jones notes this as well.
160 The Problem of Animal Pain
Thus, though they admit that animals have consciousness (37), they
deny that an animal’s soul can have post-mortem survival. After pointing
out that the characteristic functions of animals are sense knowledge and
sensory appetite, which are essentially dependent on matter, Donceel
concludes,
The functions the soul is the necessary condition for5 have ceased.
Therefore,
The soul has ceased to exist.
4
Brennan (1941: 8) and Klubertanz (1953: 50).
5
Brennan (1941: 7).
Animal Afterlife 161
6
Wesley (1872a).
7
See Sermon 109 “What Is Man?” (Wesley 1872b). Available at http://www.
umcmission.org/Find-Resources/John-Wesley-Sermons/Sermon-109-What-
Is-Man
162 The Problem of Animal Pain
8
Some of the basic issues are treated in Andrews (2010).
9
It is really a cluster of problems. See Van Gulick (2012).
10
For this kind of claim see Plantinga (2007).
11
Swinburne (1997a: 180) is a notable exception.
Animal Afterlife 163
12
This argument is due to Jackson (1982). This telling is my own.
164 The Problem of Animal Pain
13
Though, perhaps, such knowledge is logically impossible and so the theist
can still just say that God knows everything it is logically possible for a being like
him to know. There are well-known problems for this kind of move, however. For
a discussion of these issues, see Wierenga (2013).
14
Sometimes the problem of consciousness is divided into a “hard” problem
and an “easy” problem, but that is not relevant to my discussion.
Animal Afterlife 165
15
The popularity of this term stems from Chalmers (1996).
16
Perry (2003).
17
See, for example, McGinn (1989 and 1999).
166 The Problem of Animal Pain
9.1.4 Conclusion
In conclusion, it is a prior commitment of most mere Christians that
animals have non-physical souls, and – for reasons pertaining to the
argument from consciousness – it should be in the background evidence
of anyone who is a dualist about humans.18 Thus, when the theist appeals
to animal souls in her theodicy, she is not adding in extra content. This
is so whether we are considering the “baseline” to be where the theist
finds herself when she is confronted with the problem of animal pain,
or even with a “lower” baseline of a secular or religiously neutral dualist
about human persons (which is what the vast majority of people are).
9.2.1 Introduction
I have just argued that animals do have souls, non-physical parts that
can track their identity after death and to the resurrection. However, I
understand that some readers just won’t be able to swallow that. But if
animals do not have souls, then it seems that the only way they could
be raised from the dead is if it were possible for things to have gaps in
their existence. In this half of the chapter, I will defend that, in a certain
sense, gappy existence is possible.
18
There is also an argument to be made from data pertaining to abstract
reasoning, for some studies suggest that some higher mammals are capable of
using simple syllogisms. Doing so was the basis of a standard scholastic argument
for dualism. There is not room here to do the argument justice, however, since it
would involve detailed scrutiny of the studies.
Animal Afterlife 167
exact copy of me now. If you did, you wouldn’t have made another me.
You’d only have made something as like me as a thing could be without
being me. Since it is an exact qualitative copy, we would differ, my clone
and I, only in our location and in our primitive “thisness.”19 But that’s
enough to make it not me.
In light of these considerations, it might just seem hopeless to make
coherent a notion of gappy existence. As we shall see, however, this worry
depends on an impoverished conception of the world: a conception that
limits the world to what is present. I will introduce the thicker alterna-
tive first via fiction, then gradually introduce details from physics and
metaphysics. Some readers will say “Of course!” but others will be at first
incredulous on a number of aspects. Of those readers I ask patience and
sympathy. The goal throughout is to argue that what I propose is already
probable on readers’ background evidence. At the very least, I will describe
a kind of person – certainly a person like me before ever considering these
matters – on whose background evidence my thesis is antecedently likely.
19
For more on this notion, sometimes called a “haecceity,” see Adams (1979).
168 The Problem of Animal Pain
there were people who thought that only the present was real (I get claus-
trophobic just thinking about it!) – a thesis called “presentism.” Eternalism
also assumes some further theses about time, such as the reducibility of
tense (most importantly, the elimination of “now,” “was,” and “will,”
in favor of dated and comparative “before,” “after,” and “simultaneous
with” language). The eternalist view of time and of past, present, and
future seem to me to have been the mainstay of the Christian tradition,
and so they should be very probable on the background evidence of any
mere Christian. I think, in fact, it is entailed by bare theism, but to defend
that would take us far afield. To increase the probability of the view for
non-traditional Christians and non-Christians, I will briefly describe in
the next section what I think is a good reason to believe four-dimension-
alism. First, however, here is a sketch of the final details of the view.
From the dying individual’s perspective, they just see a swirl before
them as though the world were melting. They are then drawn into the
vortex, things go black with flashes of light, then they begin to see a new
scene emerging. The next thing they know, they are in another place-
time, a “new world” to them. And what of those standing by? Would the
wormholes of science fiction, which represent the technological hopes
and aspirations of many scientists, be visible to anyone in the imme-
diate vicinity of the dying individual? What would they see?
And what of the body that is left behind? Is it a fake? The body left
behind is indeed a sort of cast off “shell,” but it is really one’s body. But the
body one takes with one is also one’s body. There is really no other way it
could be. Heaven is a physical place. “We believe in the resurrection of the
body and the life in the world to come.” The life in the world to come is
a life with a resurrected body.21 The very matter constituting us is trans-
formed into a new heavenly body, but the body that is buried is just our last
connection with Earth’s worldline. The idea of a dead body coming back to
life is resuscitation, like what happened to Lazarus. Resurrection is radical
transformation. This may constitute a revision of the traditional Christian
view. If so, it might be a mere “development” and not be truly revisionary.
But of course, any Christian dualist will not need to avail themselves of
this option. Christian materialists have presumably already made their
peace with departures from the mainline of Christian tradition.
21
Throughout the middle ages, Paul’s mention of the “third Heaven” (2
Corinthians 12:2) is taken to refer to the “empyrean” Heaven which is beyond
even the firmament but is a physical place and the at least temporary repose of
those who have left Earth. For St. Thomas’s view see Summa Theologica I Q 66, a.
3, Q 102, a. 2; Supplement, Q 69, a. 1.
170 The Problem of Animal Pain
One clearly needs to carry a body into the afterlife on the mere Christian
view, but one also needs to leave one behind. How weird would it be if
people simply ... disappeared? We need some token that the person has
left this world entirely, not just wandered off. It might seem odd and even
a bit misleading, but the costs of not leaving a token behind are greater
than the costs of doing so. Compare here Jesus’s choice of mode of exit
from this world after his resurrection, the Ascension. It is a bit weird
and potentially misleading for Jesus to ascend into the clouds when his
mission on Earth was complete. However, consider his options: Go up,
go down, go laterally, just disappear. Any other direction but up has
worse implications, so the choice is between simply not showing up for
dinner one night or ascending. If he had simply disappeared, imagine
the cults we would have founded upon people saying they were Jesus
come back out of hiding! While the method he chose might have been
unusual, it appears to be the best available option. Likewise, I think for
leaving behind a bodily token in this world. Not to ascend would invite
all kinds of false impressions, at least, that is, until such time as fission
and wormholes would become common topics of discussion.
9.2.4 Split brains: the terrible tale of twins Ted and Todd
One of the chief virtues of a theory (ultimately the chief virtue of any
non-revealed theory) is that its being true would make sense out of an
otherwise very puzzling situation. I will present a puzzling situation for
which four-dimensionalism provides an elegant and satisfying solution.
First, however, I must cause trouble.
Consider the following picture of me.
Animal Afterlife 171
Cute, I know. Now, that’s me. But what makes it me? Perhaps the most
obvious answer is that I remember being him, and if I was ever him, I am
always him. Another obvious answer has to do with the fact that that
body grew into my body. It would be really nice if these obvious answers
bore out, but we’ll examine them and see.
What I remember is looking in the mirror and seeing that freckled face.
I remember getting my fancy Pooh shirt out of the drawer. I remember
getting my picture taken in it. In short, there is a clear psychological
continuity with that little dude. Unfortunately, as is all too often the
case in metaphysics, the obvious answer just won’t work. For if you were
to implant all my memories, beliefs, hopes, desires, and all other mental
states into another individual, that individual would not be me. This
would be so even if at the exact moment you created this psychological
duplicate I got total and irreversible amnesia.
So the psychological continuity account of persistence fails. It’s a bit
surprising because it seems to be the most promising at first. Why is
that? Well, while psychological continuity is neither logically necessary
nor logically sufficient for persistence, in ordinary cases, it is a constant
concomitant. The cases used to show that the psychological continuity
account of persistence is false only need to be logically possible to do
their job, since a definition needs to hold in every possible circumstance.
But some logical possibilities are actually very remote, very strange, and
extraordinary. In the ordinary case, the obvious sign of persistence is
psychological continuity.
Another obvious answer has to do with the fact that that kid grew up to
be me. That is, there is a clear and natural path through spacetime from
that kid to me. There is a hunk of matter with fairly natural edges that
can be traced from then to now. It would be really nice if this obvious
answer fared better than the last. There is trouble for this view, but four-
dimensionalism will come to the rescue, saving obviousness. This is a
virtue of the theory and a reason to believe it is true.
Consider twins Ted and Todd. They are not identical twins, but they
are very much alike. One loves to drive boats in the sea, the other loves
to fly planes in the sky. One terrible day, by coincidence (or undetectable
malevolence), Ted is in a terrible boat crash and Todd is in a terrible plane
crash. They are both in a coma in beds in the same hospital room.
Now consider Rod. Rod’s fast car is struck by a train, and his body is
nearly destroyed. His brain is left in perfect condition with the exception
that his corpus callosum is severed, leaving his left and right cerebral
hemispheres out of touch. Some people are born with this condition,
however, and though they tend to be high on the autism spectrum, they
172 The Problem of Animal Pain
live happy lives. He lies awake but on life-support in the room across
the hall from Ted and Todd. The doctor monitoring all of these cases
notices, as the night goes on, that each individual is deteriorating in
certain ways. Ted and Todd are drawing closer to brain death, and Rod’s
body is growing ever more incapable of supporting his mental functions.
Finally, Ted and Todd are declared brain dead. Very shortly after that,
Rod’s body goes into total irreversible failure. The doctor thinks it’s going
to be his worst shift ever, but then he realizes there is a silver lining:
He can transplant Rod’s nearly perfectly functioning brain into one of
Ted or Todd’s bodies. He has done several successful hemispherectomies
wherein the patients led fairly normal lives (the science fiction has not
begun yet, hemispherectomies, though rare, do occur and are usually
successful). He sees how he can do the transplant. He’s ready to go. Then
he realizes that he will have the best chance of at least partial success if he
puts half of Rod’s brain in Ted’s body and half of it in Todd’s body. This is
what he decides to do, and he does it with aplomb. Both operations are a
complete success. Rod’s left hemisphere is successfully transplanted into
Ted’s body, and his right hemisphere is successfully transplanted into
Todd’s body. Congratulations, Doc! Now what did he do?
If presentism were true, this would be a dilemma indeed. The outcome
of each operation (which we’ll call Rod–Ted and Rod–Todd) has an equal
claim on being Rod. But there is absolutely nothing connecting Rod–Ted
and Rod–Todd on presentism. They are discrete organisms. They do each
bear an important relation of psychological continuity to Rod, but as
we’ve seen, that is not enough to establish personal identity. But if four-
dimensionalism is true, the reality is strange, but there is no problem
tracking Rod. Rod simply branches out, like a tree trunk that splits in
two. Maybe his branches will merge again sometime in the future, when
both hemispheres come into a single body. When we see Rod as spread
out over both space and time, a four-dimensional being, we see that
the appearance at present that Rod–Ted and Rod–Todd are disconnected
is merely a matter of perspective. We can’t see in enough dimensions.
We are like a two-dimensional being scanning a human from top to
bottom as they pass through our two-dimensional perceptual system.
First they appear as a dot, then it grows to an oblong circle and their
head passes through our perceptual plane. Then the circle shrinks at the
neck then branches out into a rough ellipse. Then things get interesting.
The ellipse undergoes a fission and separates into two shrinking circles.
For the two-dimensional being, there is no sign at all that the things
he perceives as two are in reality two parts of one thing, connected in a
dimension he cannot perceive.
Animal Afterlife 173
22
Strangely, many four-dimensionalists hold the unusual view (described
in Sider 2001: 153 and defended in Lewis 1976 and Noonan 2003) that what
happens in brain fission cases is that there are two people after the operation
(two distinct people, not just two distinct parts of one person) and that, mirabile
dictu, those two people had previously occupied the same body! It was only due
to the fortunate destruction of the body they shared that Rod–Ted and Rod–Todd
(which now name persons, not parts of persons) enjoy liberation in their own
bodies, according to this view. One wonders whether such coincident existence
is common or whether they were just extraordinarily lucky. I think my account
is far better.
23
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “Heaven” in the phrase in
the Lord’s prayer “who art in Heaven” “does not mean a place (‘space’)” (para-
graphs 2794 and 2802). However, the point here is that God in his inner nature
is not essentially tied to any one place so as to be distant from the Earth, he is
omnipresent; more related to this in the objections section.
174 The Problem of Animal Pain
24
Presumably, philosophy nerds have discussed at length what is going on there.
Though not a “Trekkie,” I humbly submit this possibility for their consideration.
25
See, for example, Hudson (2001) and Baker (2007).
26
Thanks to Nick Colgrove for pressing me on this.
Animal Afterlife 175
thought (that’s why they were sad, you see?), then death would indeed
be the enemy. And before the advent of Christ, Paul might think, one
had wan hope of a resurrection. But since Jesus’s resurrection is “the
first fruits of those who have died,” fear of death, and the hypothetical
finality of death, is no more. They are vanquished. The enemy, then, is
not death itself, but death as it would be, were there no resurrection.
Note that mere cessation of organic activity is not intrinsically bad if
it doesn’t last. Creatures like us whose sleep was a state of suspended
animation would not suffer. Not even decay is bad if it is not permanent.
It depends on what kind of creature one is envisioning. I don’t see an
argument for decay being intrinsically bad that doesn’t have the conse-
quence that finitude is intrinsically bad. Each creature grows at a finite
rate, some faster than others.
One might worry that on my view, still, one doesn’t die. But what can
this mean? On any Christian view, the person persists. What dies is their
body (thus the dilemma for the materialist Christian). And on the view I
have presented, the entire old body stays here and is no longer animated,
the new body – formed from the fission of the particles of the old body –
enters a spacetime with different laws governing those particles and can
be quite different in its nature and powers. As on any view of death, my
view has people leaving behind a dead body. I see no reason whatsoever
to think it necessary to postulate an interval of unconsciousness for the
individual who walks no more upon the earth. However, my view is
clearly consistent with this. As I mentioned above, God could transfer
the individual into the new heavenly spacetime in any form he wanted,
including in some kind of tomb or grave, or in some kind of deep sleep
or total latency, awaiting the arrival of everyone else. Then God could
call them all forth at once.27
Still, it seems that there is one thing missing. It seems that on the
standard Christian view, it is the very body that dies that is raised. After
all, Paul says “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperish-
able” (1 Cor. 15:42). Paul also says that to be absent from the body is
to be at home with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8, paraphrase based on the verses
leading up to it). At least prima facie, that suggests a different picture,
27
This was pointed out to me by Allison Thornton. She also offered me the
general writing advice that anytime one’s view offers flexibility, that flexibility
might as well be put to use to satisfy people’s desired outcomes, even if one doesn’t
share them. Apart from being generally good advice, it is worth mentioning in
the context of this book, since so much of what I say leaves so much open, that it
is worth offering the explicit invitation for people to finish the story in whatever
way works for them.
176 The Problem of Animal Pain
which suggests not taking the former statement too literally. Though
of course the two statements are consistent with one another, they are
very hard to fit literally together in a materialist metaphysics. I leave
further biblical exegesis to professionals. But it seems we already knew
that it couldn’t be the exact same body that is raised, due to cannibalism
(2 Cor. 5:8) and general atomic dispersal. So whatever is raised it isn’t
the same body, and in some cases, perhaps no part of the same body.
However, if one wants such a view, I can give it to them. For, as per
above, God could take one’s new body – which divides off from the old
body and takes consciousness with it – and have it interred in a suitable
grave in a suspended state, awaiting being called forth from the grave.28
In fact, the individual’s body could be literally dead with the cessation
of all metabolic processes so that it was neither alive nor decaying. The
view I have presented might have more resources to accommodate theo-
ries of resurrection than any on offer. This recommends it as true.
Objection 3: Heaven in outer space? Perhaps some will find objection-
able the idea that Heaven is not just a physical place, but either a space-
time region contiguous with that which we occupy or a parallel universe
of the sort that most physicists talk about. The mere Christian should
have no problem with the idea of heaven being a physical place. That
is core creedal content. However, there is a burden on me to explain
the “new” in “new heaven and earth” as it relates to the afterlife. The
phrase is borrowed from the prophet Isaiah by Peter (2 Peter 3) and John
(Revelation 21). In Revelation 21:1, where most people learn the phrase,
we are told “the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” and
then the New Jerusalem comes down from Heaven (Rev. 21:9ff). Earlier
in Revelation (6:12ff), at the opening of the sixth seal, we learn of cata-
clysmic events: earthquakes, black sun, red moon, black sky, mountains
and islands being tossed about. Peter offers more detail: “the heavens
will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with
fire” (3:10) and “the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the
elements will melt with fire” (3:12). He says, in fact, that all along “the
present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire” (6:7). For now,
though, “we wait for new heavens and a new earth” (3:13).
None of the events listed in the Christian Scriptures requires more
than the destruction of our solar system, leaving everything else in the
galaxy untouched. In fact, all the data can be covered by an asteroid
(or comet or whatever) smashing into Earth, while leaving the rest of
28
For example, you might think that in Jesus’s speech, recorded in John 5:25,
he is speaking of the general resurrection instead of his own resurrection.
Animal Afterlife 177
For some, this book will have been a long, strange trip. A central, over-
arching theme has been that so-called “bare theism” isn’t so bare. That is,
that a being who is omnipotent and omniscient will also be many other
things. That is because the properties of omnipotence and omniscience
entail a number of other properties, such as moral goodness and perfect
rationality. And given a fixed realm of value, which I have assumed,
these properties eliminate vast swaths of possibilia. More possibilities
about the future are eliminated when we learn facts about what has
happened in the past. There is no possible theistic world with a past like
ours the future of which lacks Heaven. And what Heaven must be like is
also constrained by what we know about this world.
Another overarching theme is that of probability or incremental
support (“confirmation” roughly as Carnap thought of it). The issue
here is that talk of what we “know” or don’t know is too coarse-grained
to be of much use in complicated issues. There is a bit of an epistemolog-
ical fad right now marching under the vague banner “Knowledge First.”
However, whatever knowledge might be valuable for (I can’t think of
much), knowledge is not the guide of life. Such a guide, as Bishop Butler
pointed out, is probability. If the conclusion of some piece of theodicy is
You can’t know that theism is false then that theodicy is relatively boring.
For that conclusion is consistent with having justified belief that theism
is false, its being an even toss whether theism is false, one’s being right-
fully inclined to regard theism as false, and a host of other attitudes that
would make the practice of religion quite difficult and even, perhaps,
nonsensical. A minimal condition of epistemic adequacy for a theodicy
is that it addresses the question: Just how bad is it for theism, that there
is this suffering? I address that question in this book. And I do so on
a “sliding scale,” realizing that readers will include firmly believing
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196 Index