Week Thirteen: Evil, Too, Is the Work of the Necessary Existent

Skeptic: “So, what came of your reflections?”

Believer: “I was busy throughout the past week and couldn’t devote much time to studying or thinking about our discussion. How about we talk about something else?”

Skeptic: “Unlike you, I kept thinking about the implications of the causal argument, and I noticed a few more things.”

Believer: “What else?”

Skeptic: “If we regard the Necessary Existent as the designer and cause of all phenomena, another conclusion follows: all the evil that has occurred in the world is caused by that same Necessary Existent.

“Your God cannot be the Necessary Existent of the causal argument, because in Islam and the other monotheistic religions, God is said to possess three attributes:

“God is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good.

“A perfectly good being cannot commit evil.”

Believer: “Wait a minute! Where did you get the idea that the Necessary Existent is the designer as well as the cause of all phenomena? I mean the part about being their designer. Why do you think it is also the designer of evil and of our evil actions?

“For it to be the cause of evil is one thing; for it to be its designer is another. It is true that evil phenomena require a cause. But saying that the Necessary Existent also designed them suggests that it could have designed something else but, with evil intent, chose to create evil instead.”

Skeptic: “For a few minutes, I’ll do as you do and imagine the Necessary Existent as a personal being, and then I’ll answer you. When God is said to be omniscient, perfectly good, and omnipotent, that means God knows that alternatives other than the good are available to him and has the power to choose them, but because he does nothing but good, he chooses only the good. In this conception, the notion of design is already implicit in calling him good—and that is precisely the sort of thing that should not be attributed to the Necessary Existent.”

Believer: “I don’t understand what you mean.”

Skeptic: “If we accept that the Necessary Existent is merely the cause that brings phenomena into existence, but does not design them and has no role in determining which phenomena it creates, then this means that it is compelled to create phenomena as it does. It could not have carried out any other design. It must therefore itself be subject to some higher force or higher law compelling it to create these evils, these desires, these acts of will, and these actions. In that case, it itself—and whatever it wills—is the product of a greater design that it has no choice but to carry out.

“It would therefore no longer be omnipotent. It would merely be the executor of a predetermined design. If nothing else existed, and yet this predetermined design already existed for it to execute, two questions arise: Has this design itself existed eternally? Or is the design a phenomenon that was brought into existence by something?

“If the design has existed eternally, then there have been two eternal existents: one is the design of the universe, and the other is an eternal Necessary Existent that either could not do anything except execute that design or did not know that it could do anything else. Such a Necessary Existent would not merely fail to be omnipotent; it would also fail to be omniscient, and it could not be perfectly good either. It would be nothing more than the cause of phenomena according to an eternal design—a design just as eternal as itself.

“But if this design is itself a phenomenon, then it must necessarily have a cause. The cause that brings a design into existence is what we call a designer. Is this designer something—or someone—other than the Necessary Existent?

“Monotheists regard their God as omniscient. When they speak of God’s knowledge, they seem to conceive of him as a thinking being who knows innumerable possible states and designs and must choose one of them to bring about. Yet the causal argument gives us no grounds for attributing knowledge to the Necessary Existent in this sense, much less for calling it a designer. All that follows from the causal argument is that at least one Necessary Existent has brought the phenomena of the universe into existence. Whether it possesses knowledge, and whether it has the power to do things other than what it does, are not conclusions that follow from the argument.

“By the way... I’ll say it again: I don’t think it is appropriate to use the pronoun ‘he’ when referring to the Necessary Existent. ‘He’ is a personal pronoun, used for persons, whereas in establishing the Necessary Existent we stripped it of all the traits and attributes of personhood—traits belonging to temporal and limited phenomena such as human beings. So it makes no sense to use a personal pronoun for it, unless our mistaken familiarity with thinking of it that way makes us unable to rid ourselves of the idea that it is a personal being. Anyway...

“The idea that the Necessary Existent first thinks and designs and then executes its design is not something that follows from the causal argument. Indeed, one might say that since such stages would require the Necessary Existent to undergo change and pass through different states, it cannot go through them at all.

“At most, we can say that if a Necessary Existent exists, it creates without thinking and without weighing alternatives, and that knowledge has no meaningful application to it. If such a Necessary Existent creates good, we should not call it benevolent; and if it creates evil, we should not call it evil. If, whenever we observe something good among its creations, we call the Necessary Existent benevolent, then we are attributing awareness to it as well as a capacity to choose between good and evil, and in a sense treating it as the designer of good phenomena. But then, whenever we observe an evil phenomenon, consistency requires us to regard the Necessary Existent as equally capable of choosing evil and as the designer of that evil phenomenon.

“I still doubt that even the word knowing can properly be applied to the Necessary Existent, because that word is used for a human or animal mental state. Knowledge consists of the true and false representations in our minds, which may or may not correspond to external reality. These representations may arise from information received through our senses, or they may be constructions of the mind itself. In either case, these representations have their own particular limitations, and calling them up in the mind is a temporal process. Choosing among them and deciding to act upon one of them is likewise a temporal process, and it can occur only through a succession of phenomena, both within our minds and outside them. None of these stages, therefore, can plausibly be attributed to a Necessary Existent that can be neither limited nor temporal nor subject to change.

“Applying concepts such as knowledge, designing, thinking, or deliberating to the Necessary Existent would therefore be meaningless. Using words coined to describe human or animal mental states cannot convey accurate information about the Necessary Existent to our audience; on the contrary, it completely misleads them about its true nature. That is why neither you nor other believers can stop using the pronoun ‘he’ for your God, even after understanding the causal argument and concluding that your God must somehow be identical with the Necessary Existent and therefore cannot be a personal being.

“In Islamic culture, so many human attributes have been ascribed to God that perhaps you cannot, even for a moment, conceive of him as anything other than a personal being. For example, the God of Islam possesses the attribute of the Avenger, which cannot be an attribute of the Necessary Existent. It is obvious that there is no sense in a Necessary Existent that is the cause of all our desires, acts of will, and actions taking revenge on anyone or anything other than itself. Nothing and no one other than the Necessary Existent has any causal agency in bringing phenomena into existence. Still less does it make sense to attribute to it a vengeful personality, as though its particular nature and qualities constrained it in such a way that it could not simply remain indifferent to the actions of its servants.”

Believer: “In any case, if we are going to describe God, we have to use words that have meaning for us. At the same time, we have to remember that these words are not being used in their ordinary sense; they are used only to bring a higher concept closer to our understanding.

“Keep in mind that Islam places great emphasis on the fact that nothing is like God, precisely so that people do not fall into this kind of misunderstanding.”

Skeptic: “You said that before. But isn’t there a contradiction between emphasizing in one place that nothing is like God, while elsewhere describing him as ‘quick to become pleased’?

“Being pleased is a psychological state, and speed in becoming pleased indicates nothing other than a change in God’s states. It even emphasizes that this change takes place in time, and apparently compares the speed of his becoming pleased with the speed at which other beings become pleased, placing him among those who become pleased more quickly. All of this implies that God is comparable to beings that he is supposedly unlike in every respect.

“When I encounter cases like this, I arrive at one of two conclusions:

“1. Perhaps ‘Laysa ka-mithlihi shayʾ’ was not intended to mean that he is absolutely unlike every other being. Perhaps it meant instead that no being can measure up to him—that he shares certain relative similarities with other beings but possesses every attribute to the highest possible degree. If others are great, he is the greatest. If others are powerful, he is the most powerful. If others possess knowledge, he is the most knowledgeable. If others are intelligent and make clever decisions, he is the cleverest.

“If this interpretation is correct, then ‘Laysa ka-mithlihi shayʾ’ means that no one reaches his level; it does not mean that he is utterly devoid of the attributes found in created beings or that his mode of existence is completely unlike theirs.

“2. But if I assume that ‘Laysa ka-mithlihi shayʾ’ means that he possesses none of the attributes of phenomena such as human beings, then I arrive at a second conclusion: given the abundance of human attributes ascribed to him, this religion contradicts itself in its description of God. The founder of the religion, like other people of his time, conceived of his god as a personal and human-like being, while at the same time trying to purify him of certain attributes, until eventually he arrived at the conclusion that his god could not resemble any other phenomenon at all. In other words, the Islamic prophet’s conception of the Necessary Existent gradually developed, and all these conflicting descriptions reflect the human history of that development.

“In any case, whether the Necessary Existent designs phenomena or creates without design or thought, we can still conclude that evil phenomena are wholly and completely its effects. The assumption that the Necessary Existent is identical with the God of the monotheistic religions—who is supposed to be perfectly good—is impossible.”

Believer: “If you are mistaken about causal determinism, then your judgment that God is evil will also be mistaken. Remember that the problem of determinism and free will has not yet been settled, and many philosophers defend free will. So if ‘free will’ is real, then the human evils that occur in the world cannot be blamed on God. He could still be omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good, with no contradiction among these three attributes or between them and the other attributes of the Necessary Existent.”

Skeptic smiled, paused briefly, tapped the tip of his pen against the paper several times, then looked at Believer and said:

“I thought we were supposed to reach conclusions ourselves, using our own reason. If we are going to wait until the wise people of the world all reach a single conclusion about determinism and free will, how many years do you think we’ll have to wait? Are you postponing the issue indefinitely? Until the entire world reaches one unanimous conclusion, are you going to suspend your religious faith and stop teaching religion? Or, on the contrary, will you preserve your faith and continue teaching it?

“Do you really think it is rational to wait for a universal consensus on determinism and free will? Or are you merely using this as a strategy to protect your faith and prevent me from using your own argument from causality against your religion and your own God?”

Believer: “To be honest, that just slipped out. We’ve already discussed this before. Don’t take it too seriously. Waiting for every thinker to reach the same conclusion would not be reasonable.”

Skeptic: “I think that if I wanted to test the attributes of the God of your religion against the conclusions of the causal argument, you would have to sit here for several more weeks listening to the contradictions that emerge.

“Now it is time for you to say whether you are committed to the conclusions of the causal argument in every case or not. If the causal argument establishes the existence of a First Cause, do you regard it as sound and rational and then appropriate that one conclusion for your religion, while ignoring its other immediate conclusions when they show that the First Cause and the God of your religion do not share the same attributes, that punishment in the afterlife is impossible, and that the Necessary Existent is not perfectly good? Do you simply turn away from those conclusions and leave in order to preserve your faith in such a religion?

“You spoke with great enthusiasm about existence and nonexistence, proceeding step by step until you finally arrived, with great confidence, at the existence of the First Cause. Why, then, do you so stubbornly set aside the other conclusions of that same argument—conclusions that emerge at the very same moment as the First Cause is established?”

Believer: “I am not trying to be stubborn. But I believe with my whole being in the truth and reality of the afterlife and in God’s goodness, and I am certain that there are answers to what you have said and to your arguments. I will try to find those answers and present them in our future discussions.

“We’ll continue next week.”