A Major Addition to the
Gallery of Heroes.
From Whose Togas I Dangle

W. Norris Clarke, S.J.
June 1, 1915-June 10, 2008
The writings of the late Father W. Norris Clarke, an
appreciative and engaging critic of Whitehead and
Hartshorne,
has forced me to rethink my understanding of St. Thomas. I spoke
with him briefly by phone in the early '90s when I was working my way
through David Braine's The Reality of Time and the Existence of God,
which Clarke had just reviewed for The International Philo-sophical
Quarterly. Remembering many years later the cheer-fulness and
energy with which he took that call from a stranger, I regret I did not
keep in touch. Fortunately, all of his major papers have been
anthologized. In addition to several that have meant a great deal
to me, I will hunt down and format for posting nonanthologized articles
and reviews. What I have done so far is listed below.
Anthony Flood
May 22, 2010
Earthquakes and Theodicy: Five Years Later
No
need to update what I wrote to The Spectator [UK]
on January 15, 2005 (appended below,
posted here soon thereafter): just substitute
the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010 for the
Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. The televised
spectacle of intelligent and morally sensitive religious
persons offering the lamest of rationales for why their
God, who (as they and their flocks insist) could
have held the North American and Caribbean tectonic
plates in place, permitted them to shift has moved me to
highlight my half-decade-old letter.
I
have come to accept that the all-knowing and all-loving
lure of the cosmos lacks any coercive physical
power. For me, asking why God couldn't prevent an
earthquake is almost like asking why you couldn't.
(Almost, because you at least have some coercive
physical power [albeit insufficient for preventing
tectonic shift], but
God has none [not even
enough to lift a pebble].) If mainstream theists
cannot imagine worshiping such a deity, that says more
about them than it does about what it takes for
something to be God.
Visitors are invited to essay non-cop-out answers and
send them to me for my possible edification.
Anthony Flood
anarchristian@juno.com
February 1, 2010


The Moral Idiocy of
Paul Johnson’s Theodicy
Anthony Flood
To assert, as Paul
Johnson does, that “the giant waves were acts of a benevolent God” [The
Spectator, January 15, 2005]
is to use language provocatively, but not wisely. We can get all we want
of such talk from the local pub. To answer his question, “What had the
deaths of 150,000 Lisboans [and more than that number of South Asians in
2004] to do with a fundamental question like the existence of God?”: it
has to do with the moral character of the being whose existence is
affirmed, if not also that of the affirmer. Both the recent and more
remote catas-trophes represent massive instances of excessive, non-disciplin-ary evil
[ENE], evil (a) that no good consequent to it could
justify, and (b) so intense that to entertain it in terms of its possible
consequent good is itself morally objectionable.
In the
case of God, at least as small “o” orthodox Christianity classically
conceives him, the power to prevent ENE is infinite and the risk is zero. Refraint under those circumstances is unin-telligible given the moral
character that is also attributed to God, i.e., boundless
loving-kindness. That is, boundless lovingkind-ness combined with the
power to bring about any noncontradic-tory state of affairs under any
circumstances (or none, i.e., ex nihilo) creates a surd so long as
there is any evil in the world, but especially so long as there is any
ENE. Surds are not intellectually difficult; they are intolerable and to
be removed from one’s worldview forthwith.
The
“Darwinian Central Committee” that Mr. Johnson holds up to ridicule at
least recognizes the problem to which he is embarrassingly insensitive.
When, however, he refers to the magnitude of the tsunami’s human toll as
“only the tiniest ephemeral blip on the worlds demographic radar,” he
could not drive people into the atheistic camp more effectively than if
had intended to do so. Each human component of that “blip” had a life
that, regardless of what Johnson thought of it, he must have thought worth
living. Each of those lives is now lost, and that loss has caused
incalculable grief, multiplied by 150,000. And anyone who could have
prevented it or any other instance of ENE, but didn’t, is morally
challenged. But God is morally perfect. How is that for a problem, Mr.
Johnson?
The
noble souls who are doing what they can to help the tsunami’s victims are
acting according to their sense of moral responsibility: all things being
equal, morally responsible people prevent or remedy ENE when they can.
The extent of their aid will vary with means, other obligations, and the
risk to life, health, or property to which risk their prospective help
might expose those goods. For example, a person of normal moral
sensibilities spontaneously acts to move a child out of the way of a
careening car if he cannot stop the car. He does not sit on his duff,
drink in hand, as the tragedy unfolds, muttering, “Well, the driver, the
kid, and the kid’s guardian all had free will. That’ll teach arrogant and
boastful people how fragile life is.” No, they condemn him under those
circumstances, and if given the opportunity, some would be inspired to
beat the bearer of that attitude within an inch of his life.
Inability, however, is normally not blameworthy: no one is responsible
for failing to do what he cannot do. So if the God of, for
example, Whiteheadian process theology exists, then the microagents
(“occasions of experience” was Whitehead’s term) that comprise the cosmos
are all open to divine persuasion, but not determined to become as God
wills. That philosophical theology provides that (a) there is morally
perfect, world-transcending being who is eminently and constantly related
to all other agents that comprise the world, (b) all of them are jointly
responsible for the world’s having the contingent actual-ity that it does,
but (c) it is not necessary to conceive God’s supreme power as the ability
to push gross matter around, e.g., hold tectonic plates steady.
God cannot
mechanically interact with gross physical objects like those
plates, and is therefore not responsible for failing to hold them still,
or do any of the countless other things that would result in no evil, or
at least no ENE.
Although ENE exists, the choice
between (a) affirming the existence of a God of boundless compassion
combined with the power to bring about any noncontradictory state of
affairs (under any or no circumstances) and (b) denying God's existence is
a false alternative. There is a third option: modify one's concept of God.
Modified October 1,
2006
My “Dialog” with Roger Ebert on Death
The following is my response to “Go Gently into That Good Night,”
renowned film critic Roger Ebert’s eloquent expression of agnosticism in
the face of his probable death from cancer. In his brief response, he
graciously overlooked my lapse from mindful-ness of the personal context
of his thoughts. I tried to make amends in my follow-up. All this may
be viewed
on his blog. I encourage my
visitors to become his as well.
May 6,
2009
If
everything is burnt up in the inevitable collapse of the universe, what,
in the end, are we contributing to? What does our “kindness” matter?
As Bertrand Russell famously wrote in 1903:
“That
man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were
achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves
and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of
atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling,
can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of
the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday
brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death
of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must
inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these
things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no
philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the
scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding
despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
Henceforth? Safely? The impregnability of Russell’s (and your?)
position is superficial, momentarily tenable only if one ignores the
stake of contradiction driven through its heart (and the untenability of
the empiricism that cannot make sense of the science it depends on).
Russell may have written your credo, but how can it not drive you
either to madness or despair? There may be, as you believe, nothing for
us on the “other” side of our deaths. Unless, however, there is an
everlasting divine life to which we contribute, a repository of
experience that cherishes every worthwhile experience, then in the end
nothing means anything, because a universe in ruins that began as “accidental collocations of atoms”—albeit ruins in a future distant
enough for us to evade—stamps an expiration date on all value.
To
consider the case for such a theistic ethical “contributionism” would,
of course, require you to grapple with the arguments of a philosopher
like Charles Hartshorne. It’s much easier to take the agnostic way out
and suggest that that’s the best human beings can do.
On May 25, 2009, Mr. Ebert wrote:
A
wonderful quotation. I believe Russell is correct, and he has not
driven me to madness and despair. To the contrary, he helps me to
understand.
Shortly after which I wrote :
Mr.
Ebert, thanks for commenting on my post of May 6. What I should have
done there and belatedly do now is salute the courage and honesty with
which you are facing more immediately what we all face eventually.
Apparent oblivious-ness to personal circumstance marred my expression of
disagreement with your agnosticism. You seemed prepared for what
Socrates said it was the office of philosophy to prepare one for [Phaedo
67e]. I find the spirit of your reflections Socratic, not Stoic,
and therefore encouraging of dialog. I’m gambling, therefore, that you
will receive this follow-up Socratically.
I
appreciate your appreciation of Bertrand Russell’s eloquent confession
of faith, but don’t understand your “understanding.” In seconding his
thoughts, you are following the logician’s equivalent of a chess
grandmaster. A grandmaster can blunder, however, inadvertently inviting
checkmate. I claimed that his description of the universe’s ultimate
heat death as a firm foundation for human living [“only on the firm
foundation of unyielding despair can the soul’s habitation henceforth be
safely built”] plunges a “stake of contradiction” through the heart of
his worldview (and yours) and shatters the facade of its serenity.
I can
see that it has not driven you either to madness or despair, neither of
which, of course, I wish on you. As your interlocutor, however, I asked
how you avoid either, logically how. Russell’s
eschatology is but a protracted version of Sisyphus’s boulder-rolling
exercise, whose existentialist point Camus sharpened to perfection.
I
therefore surmise that a “blessed inconsistency,” a logical lapse, an
intermittent forgetfulness of what one believes about this when one
turns one’s attention to that, spares you the aforementioned mental
afflictions. It cannot, however, spare your position the fate of basic
incoherence, to which the only alternative is silence, a dilemma to
which a man of letters like yourself cannot integrally be indifferent.
On a
positive note, I suggested that an escape from the dilemma might lie in
a worldview that made sense both of one’s virtually ineradicable ethical
contributionism and one’s rationality. The latter human traits and
Russell’s worldview are like matter and antimatter.
With respect,
Tony Flood
The
"dialog" ended there.—A.F.