Actual Pain vs. Remembered Pain - A Crucial Difference for the Problem of Evil
In his blog post entitled My Paper on Morality without God is finished of March 1, 2025, John W. Loftus mentions his visit to Notre Dame University to meet James Sterba. A photo accompanying his post shows a reprint of Sterba’s article An Ethics without God That Is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution (Religions 2024, 15(7), 781; doi.org/10.3390/rel15070781). Religions is an Open Access journal, so Sterba’s paper is free to read online. (Read it now! I’ll wait.) The paper overlaps considerably with Sterba’s recent book:
Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering?: A Debate by James Sterba, Richard Swinburne, OUP Oxford | 2024 | ISBN: 9780192664693, 0192664697 | Page count: 160.
Publisher’s blurb:
Could a Good God Permit So Much Suffering? presents a debate over whether the degree and amount of moral evil that actually exists in our world is logically incompatible with the existence of the all-good, all-powerful God of traditional theism. James Sterba puts the case in favour of this proposition, on the basis that the evils of the world are so horrendous that their occurrence violates principles requiring the prevention of moral evil, conclusively showing the non-existence of an omnipotent and perfectly good God. In reply, Richard Swinburne argues that our major benefactors, parents and the State, have rights to permit us to suffer if doing so is necessary to secure some good for ourselves or others. Therefore, Swinburne claims, as so much greater a benefactor than are parents and the State, it follows that God has a far greater right to allow suffering to a high degree if allowing such suffering is the only logically possible way for God to secure some very great goods for ourselves or others. Further responses from both Sterba and Swinburne continue the debate, ensuring that all lines of argument are thoroughly explored.
The rest of this article assumes you’ve read Sterba’s paper and/or the book, but this article should stand on its own well enough if you’ve followed this blog on the subject of horrendous suffering. And don’t forget God and Horrendous Suffering by John W. Loftus (the book).
Let’s Critique Swinburne
I found myself face-palming through Swinburne’s portions of the book. It’s the usual evidence-free apologetical special pleading, by a theologian who, like most theologians, seems to have never read a science book. Sterba took care of Swinburne’s arguments pretty well but there is a lot more one could write in rebuttal to Swinburne - like the entire atheist literature. (Thereby far exceeding a book that aims to be brief.) In particular, note the very brief summary of Swinburne’s notion of suffering that “is necessary to secure some good for ourselves or others”. As a somewhat scientifically informed person, I struggle to see how any form of suffering (or any particular process) is necessary to secure any good (or any particular result) in a universe with an omnipotent God in it. After all, the Book of Genesis falsely asserts two different (and contradictory) creation narratives in which God magically creates the entire universe (or what was then known to the human author of Genesis as the universe) without requiring any discernible process at all. Perhaps the only thing approaching a process in the Genesis accounts is the part where God creates Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Given that the universe we see around us is a pretty complicated place, there seem to be no real limits on the sort of universe that such a God might create. Therefore, it’s hard to understand why Swinburne believes that any form of suffering is necessary to secure any good. If God could create such a universe of stupefying complexity by magic in one go (apart from requiring a starting rib to create Eve), then why would an omnipotent God have needed to leave any additional work un-done for feeble humans to complete through unnecessary drama? Especially when this further work is trivial by comparison to the original work. There is nothing I can learn or accomplish through my experience of suffering that holds a candle to creating the universe. Only an egomaniac could imagine otherwise. Thus Swinburne’s premise seems incoherent to me.
Sterba Leaves Induction in the Holster
I thought Sterba was ambitious with his attempt to find a deductive argument against the theodicy of Swinburne (and others), while leaving safely holstered the familiar atheist arguments that are “merely” inductive. Those inductive arguments include Richard Carrier’s emphasis on the consistent failure of 400+ years of modern science to find any shred of evidence for any supernatural being or phenomenon active anywhere and on any scale - when such evidence should be easy for science to find. Sterba is quite correct that no inductive argument is ever completely final (as Hume assured us with his Problem of induction) - there might be the proverbially lurking black swan. However, I like my chances with science. For much the same reasons, I don’t lose any sleep over the possibility that Bigfoot is real. (Bigfoot is worth a future blog post, because reasoning about Bigfoot can help us understand the folly of faith - Bigfoot is good practice for learning how to take an outsider’s stance to a proposition, since few of us were brainwashed to believe in Bigfoot since age 4. Thus we are mostly outsiders to Bigfoot already, so we can try the Outsider’s Test without our brains rebelling against it.) I don’t worry about Bigfoot despite the fact that a merely biological Bigfoot is almost somewhat plausible, in contrast to the traditional meddling God described throughout the bible who appears to be as close to being ruled out by science as any empirical proposition can be.
Can God Make it up to Us?
But back to Swinburne’s theodicy, which hinges on the claim that goods can more than compensate us for felt evil. (Variations of Swinburne’s argument date back at least to Leibniz, and of course to the bible itself, which in several places promises future rewards for present suffering.)
Forget The Wall, Build That Soul
One of the goods that Sterba and Swinburne argue about is “soul building”. This could either refer to a metaphysical soul (another of those supernatural things that science can’t find any evidence for), or more prosaically it could refer to our commonly observed and experienced psychological learning, which of course would not outlive the death of our brains. But while we are still alive, the notion is accessible, and serves as a base for Swinburne’s analogical leap to a metaphysical soul that is being built along with our ever-learning brains.
Sterba might be more generous to the theistic case than he needs to be, by playing along with the idea that suffering might build our souls. Sterba then demolishes that argument in the book as any sort of solution to the Problem of Evil. Sterba makes his own case better than I can repeat it, so read his paper and book. I’ll give my own thoughts on the matter, with reference to the natural history of pain and how it works to be fitness-enhancing, and sometimes fails to work.
Humans Are Products of Biological Evolution
…and Boy Howdy Does That Entail a Lot
From a Darwinian perspective, humans are animals who evolved in much the same way as other animals, by an iterative process of random genetic mutation (the producer of variation) followed by natural selection. (Domesticated animals have evolved further, under human guidance or artificial selection. This is how wolves became domestic dogs, likely the most morphologically diverse species of animal, in merely 15,000 years or so.) Biologists tell us that humans share roughly 98% of their DNA with their nearest relatives, the chimpanzees. Therefore everything that makes us uniquely human - including our capacity to concoct endless religions - comes from just that 2% of our DNA that we don’t share with any other animal. Humans in turn share about 99.9% of their DNA with each other. That might seem to suggest that human genetic diversity is negligible, and many well-meaning egalitarians have sought to give exactly that impression. (An “egalitarian” in this sense is someone who takes an enlightened stance that humans should have equal rights, equal opportunities, and maybe even equal outcomes. I agree that those are desirable goals. Most people you’d call “liberal” or “progressive” are egalitarians, and I always vote for them, given that the alternative in the USA is some ghastly blend of science denial, fascism-lite, Christian Nationalism, Putin fanboy-ism, and Elon Musk. But some egalitarians go further, by making a moralistic argument against the very possibility that innate human differences might get in the way. This is a huge other subject, marvelously controversial (because it matters a lot), as well as extremely topical at the moment as Trump destroys every trace of DEI everywhere he can, save for a massive carve-out for women’s sports, the largest DEI program that exists (and perhaps the least recognized as such), but which seems acceptable to Christian Nationalists as a pretext for beating up on trans people. Sorry for the run-on sentence there, but this is a huge topic that deserves its own blog post or a series of them, guaranteed to raise everybody’s blood pressure.)
(Relatively) Tiny Things Can Sometimes Have Large Effects
But as we know from mosquito bites and climate change, large effects can come from relatively tiny causes. A mosquito weighs less than a millionth of what you weigh, but you will not ignore the mosquito bite. And since mosquitoes are highly efficient disease vectors, that bite may sicken or kill you. Climate change, in turn, might wipe out civilization, despite resulting from a relatively tiny change to Earth’s atmospheric composition. Climate change deniers are fond of pointing out that carbon dioxide is a “trace” gas in Earth’s atmosphere, which it technically is. But you can read any climate science textbook, assuming Trump hasn’t burned all the copies, to find out what sort of impacts that relatively tiny change can cause. Similarly, a 0.1% difference in DNA between two people might seem relatively small, and it is, but a difference just 20 times larger gets you all the way to a different species. So there is a lot of room in that 0.1% of human DNA that varies to create an awful lot of genetic diversity. In fact human genetic diversity is something like five times greater than domestic dog genetic diversity, since dogs have been diversifying for considerably less time than humans have. Anyone who thinks human genetic diversity is no big deal should participate in politics! Not all of our political disagreements are purely cultural.
Why We Feel Pain, and Anything Else
But back to the problem of pain - why does pain exist? This is easy to understand by observing people who don’t feel pain. For example the disease of leprosy can deaden the pain sensation in the victim’s extremities. The result is that lepers may injure their hands and feet without feeling the damage, and fail to notice infections that fester and eventually cause the loss of body parts. So as much as we may dislike the sensation of hitting our thumb with a hammer, it would be far worse if we felt nothing. Pain is therefore adaptive. For more on this, see the book Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions by Victor S. Johnston. We experience pain for the same reason that we have hands, eyes, lungs, digestive systems, and every other fitness-enhancing adaptation that our evolutionary history happened to produce.
The Not-So-Intelligent Designer
But as Abby Hafer so delightfully (and dreadfully) points out in her book The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not, the products of evolution range from elegant to ghastly, making it look as though no one intelligent was in charge. And this is the evolutionary basis for the “Problem of Evil” - that is, the reason why “Evil” is seen to be a “Problem,” particularly for the theist who posits an omni-God. For a scientifically literate person, “Evil” is no “Problem” at all, at least conceptually. Rather, it is exactly what we expect to happen when self-replicating molecules get to evolving, and in particular begin evolving brains that can generate experiences. The practical problem of pain for the scientifically informed person is in finding ways to experience less of it than mindless evolution saddled us with, and ideally without causing even more problems in the process.
Justifying the Holocaust Seems Impossible, not to Mention Offensive
In contrast, when we consider a part of our body that normally seems well-adapted enough, such as our hands, we might not struggle to square that consequence of mindless and cruel evolution with our desire to believe in a benevolent God. But our own suffering burdens us in many ways without appearing to compensate us. See the archetypal example, the Holocaust. The Holocaust seems to make the theodicist look silly, even offensive as he or she effectively tries to justify it as being on balance good. Even the usually lesser suffering that defines The Human Condition is hard to square with a God that any sane person could see as friendly. Consider all the pain that you have experienced in life, even if your life has been pretty good. If you knew that some human were responsible for all that pain, how would you view that person? I would have to conclude that this is a person who hates me deeply, or who is at the very least inexcusably negligent. People routinely take legal actions against other people whenever we can identify them as being responsible for even little fractions of our lifetime burdens of pain. If it were possible to bring lawsuits or criminal charges against God, he’d be tied up in court forever. An omniscient God can’t use ignorance as an excuse.
Experienced Pain Vs. Remembered Pain
For the rest of this article I’ll call attention to the necessary difference between experienced pain vs. remembered pain. For pain to be an effective teacher, and therefore part of any “soul building” scheme that might be “good,” it must result in a memory of pain that is less severe than the original experience of the pain itself, which was often debilitating. When pain functions correctly, it is merely a sloppy means to the end of instilling the lesser memory of the pain. Recall what it feels like to smash your thumb with that hammer. For at least a few seconds, the pain virtually paralyzes you. That can’t be good, since you become highly vulnerable to other threats during those agonizing seconds. Which is why the human brain contains another kludge, pain-killing chemicals to be released in an emergency. Thus the acute pain sensation begins to look like overkill - more evidence of our Not-So-Intelligent Designer. But wait, there’s more. Sometimes when we experience pain and trauma, we keep on re-experiencing something very much like the original experience, over and over. The normally fitness-enhancing pain mechanism then becomes fitness-degrading, called post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.
Sterba and Swinburne didn’t mention PTSD in their debate, so I’m mentioning it here. To my unsophisticated eyes it looks like an evolutionary maladaptation which makes a mockery of Swinburne’s notion of soul building. The person after the trauma is in undeniably worse shape than they were before the trauma. That’s not soul building, it’s soul demolition.
Humans Override God on Pain Whenever Possible
Few modern humans remember what surgery was like before anesthesia. If Swinburne is really serious about his claim that pain is a good teacher, and the un-locker of vastly greater goods, one wonders if he’ll act on his belief by taking his next surgery wide awake, should he need one.
As soon as science gave humans a choice between soul building pain vs. anesthetic relief, all sane humans took the relief. If the resulting soul atrophy is causing harm, where is that harm, and will Swinburne personally do his bit to reduce it? I’d guess he will not, because I doubt he is as insane as his arguments are.
Pretty Much All Technology Gives God a Giant Middle Finger of Defiance
What’s true for anesthesia is true for any technology that reduces pain, gives convenience, or expands on our “God-given” natural capabilities. And I suspect that includes pretty much all technology that humans choose to keep. For example, when Swinburne feels like crossing an ocean, does he opt for the soul building exercise of swimming?
Humans need exercise, so I do not disparage it. In fact I indulge in it regularly. But even the ardent exerciser does not wish to be strictly limited to his or her “God-given” capabilities. Even if we choose not to use every technology (for example, because we recognize some of them to be contributing to climate genocide), we still like to have the option should we really need it.
Pain Is of No Value by Itself, Only The Lesser Memory of Pain Produces Value
Even when pain works “properly,” the pain adds no value in itself apart from the attenuated memory of the pain that (ideally) persists after it, and thereafter guides our choices so we will avoid repeating the pain if we can. But here’s the thing: a good God could just give us the memory of the pain, without forcing us to acquire the memory the hard way. And there is precedent throughout the animal world.
Baby Zebra Gets the Lesson without the Pain
A baby zebra, for example, doesn’t have to learn to run away from hungry lions by actually experiencing what it’s like to be torn apart by hungry lions. The zebra is instead born with the ability to run, within just minutes of birth, as well as plenty of built-in understanding about what it needs to run after (Mom) and away from (predators). The baby zebra’s pre-built “soul” is the result of the cruel deaths of countless animals adjacent to the zebra’s ancestral line, who didn’t run fast enough or at the right times in the right directions. So in that sense, the instinctive lesson had to be learned at the expense of something else (all the animals who didn’t get to be ancestors to the zebra because they got eaten). But a good God could have skipped all that bloodshed and just given the zebra the lesson magically. And a good God could similarly just give us whatever lessons we might otherwise only learn by suffering. Since the lesson that results from suffering must be (far) less painful than the suffering itself - otherwise, what’s the point of learning, if it does not reduce the future pain? - a good God could simply instill that lesson and skip the suffering. By the principle of equifinality, the end result should be exactly the same no matter what path an omnipotent God might choose to produce it.
That is, if Swinburne thinks there is some genuine authentic value that can only result if humans actually suffer enough, then he doesn’t believe in an omnipotent God. And this is a common feature of all theodicies as far as I can tell - they all have to walk God back from at least one of his omni-properties.
As cruel as evolution is, it is not even more cruel - it doesn’t force every baby zebra to learn every lesson the hard way. Therefore it seems that learning things the hard way is not as good as learning things the easy way. An even better God might therefore give us more easy lessons - perhaps all of them. Given that an omnipotent God can choose from many paths to the exact same result, a maximally good God would choose the least cruel path. As baby zebra shows, we humans cannot be on the least cruel path to acquiring whatever lessons Swinburne thinks we need to learn.
DNA Could Pre-Build Our Souls
DNA is a highly efficient means of information storage, so a good God could instill a lot of lessons that way, giving us pre-built souls (if we conflate psychology with metaphysics, as Swinburne does - I do not, but like Sterba I can play along). And if even more information storage were necessary, a good God could have given us an even more efficient means than DNA.
And evolution did put many lessons into our brains, such as our instinctive fear of snakes and spiders. Even on islands where humans have lived for centuries with no wild venomous snakes, many people retain their innate fear of snakes. Meanwhile, our feeble brains are comparatively helpless against many novel threats, such as all the familiar leading causes of preventable death today: cars, guns, cigarettes, booze, fossil fuel, sloth and gluttony, etc. Even if we educate ourselves enough to recognize these novel threats, we don’t feel the same instinctive revulsion that we would feel for the prospect of diving face first into a bathtub filled to the brim with spiders.
When it comes to many of the real threats we face, we are as dumb as the proverbial dodos of Mauritius. These unfortunate birds evolved in isolation, and made no effort to run away from the first hungry sailors who landed on their former island paradise. Making things worse for the dodos, they had the misfortune to encounter humans just a century or two before humans began to understand two things:
That animals can go extinct.
And that humans may have to take special care to avoid driving animals to extinction.
To be fair to the dodos, humans wiped them out before scientists had a chance to adequately study them. Thus we don’t really know how “dumb” the dodos were. But the geographic expansion of modern humans unleashed successive waves of megafaunal extinctions around the world. The evidence suggests this was in large part due to humans acting as an invasive species, arriving suddenly in ecosystems full of animals that had evolved without defenses against the deadliest hunters the world had ever seen. Even today, scientists and “eco-tourists” in the southern polar regions can just walk up to nesting penguins who do not flee. Humans have even acted as invasive species towards other humans, such as in the genocide of the Americas. Evolution is a very poor teacher when it comes to the sudden appearances of unpredictable threats. That strikes me as even more evidence that no omni-God is picking the curriculum.
Once Again, Souls Are Metaphysical Nonsense
Sterba is also more generous than necessary by allowing for the possibility of souls that can be built - and which furthermore can survive the deaths of human bodies to carry those hard-won lessons into the afterlife. In light of all that modern science has shown us, this is comparable to allowing the existence of Harry Potter. That is, it’s a concession that no scientifically-informed atheist needs to make. Every example of information storage that humans have ever seen requires a physical substrate, and cannot exist immaterially, as an indestructible soul would have to. But Sterba makes the concession anyway, and shows how his argument still works. However, I didn’t find his argument especially easy to follow, but that’s my fault. Maybe other readers are smarter than I am and will grasp it on the first go!
Catholics Were Burning Heretics not too Long Ago
As a general aside, one has to savor the irony of Sterba at a historically Catholic University like Notre Dame. I wonder when we’ll see someone like him holding a position at Liberty University. That might seem hard to imagine today, but recall that the Catholic Church used to burn people for questioning geocentrism. Maybe Liberty University might also consider leaving the Middle Ages someday.
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