The Unverifiability of Claims Based on Personal Experience

The Unverifiability of Claims Based on Unreplicable Personal Experience

Sometimes arguments are made for particular points of view by means of appeal to personal, unsharable experiences, or "personal testimonies."  One example of this I've run across a lot comes from the Latter-day Saint community.  "I know that the Book of Mormon is true and I testify to you that it is true."  How do you know that?  "I prayed about it, and God has testified it to me by the Holy Ghost in my heart."  How did that happen?  What was that like?  How did you know it was the Holy Ghost?  "I can't explain it.  It was so clear, so real . . . I just knew it was the Holy Ghost!"  Well, how do you know it wasn't just your feelings?  Perhaps your praying worked on your emotions so that you got a powerful feeling, maybe even had something like a mystical experience of some sort, but it had nothing to do with the truth of the Book of Mormon but was simply a subjective experience.  "No, no, I know it wasn't that."  How do you know?  ". . . I can't explain it.  I just know.  There is no way for me to communicate my experience to you.  You'll just have to have the experience for yourself."  (I've had conversations very much like this in the past with Latter-day Saints.)

This kind of conversation seems to leave things at a bit of an impasse.  I have no way of proving directly that the person I'm talking to did not have a personal, revelatory experience of some kind that proved, conclusively, that the Book of Mormon is true.  I have no access to that personal experience to prove or disprove it.  Nor can my Latter-day Saint friend prove to me the verity of her personal experience.  So where can we go from here?  Actually, the Latter-day Saint way of thinking provides a way out of the impasse, at least to some degree.  I can replicate the experiment, so to speak.  I can pray about the Book of Mormon too, and see if I get the same experience.  If I don't, my Latter-day Saint friend will often suggest possible reasons for the failure--perhaps I was not sincere enough, or I didn't pray in quite the right way, or something like that.  I can then check my procedures, my motives, etc., and if I determine that I was indeed acting with honesty, integrity, and sincerity, that I was praying in the appropriate way, etc., then I can probably conclude from that that my friend's testimony has been falsified.  So there is a way forward there.

It becomes harder when the emphasis is placed on the personal experience and no way is provided by means of which I could replicate it.  If, upon reporting to my Latter-day Saint friend that the Holy Ghost did not testify to me of the truth of the Book of Mormon, she continues to insist that, nonetheless, her personal experience was real and proves the Book of Mormon to be true, despite our ignorance as to why I was not able to receive the same testimony, we are again back at an impasse.  She can't prove her experience true, and I can't prove it false.

This impasse is even more at the forefront in other conversations.  In recent years, a "personal experience" sort of argument has been made use of quite a bit in the areas of homosexuality and transgenderism.  The conversation often goes a bit like this (I'm simplifying to focus in on the point at hand, of course):

ALBERT:  You Christians are wrong to tell gay people they can't live the gay lifestyle.

RICK:  How do you know that?

ALBERT:  Because it is cruel.  Gay people are wired to be attracted to members of the same sex.  It is hard and cruel to tell them they have to suppress this part of themselves.

RICK:  Well, it all comes down to whether or not Christianity is true, doesn't it?  If Christianity really is true, then the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good Creator of the universe and author of the objective moral law has told us that homosexual acts are unethical and we should not engage in them.  He would know, wouldn't he?  So if there is good reason to conclude that this worldview is true, then it follows that homosexual acts are unethical, doesn't it?

ALBERT:  But that is cruel!  You are telling people they can't be themselves!  It is unjust to ask this of anybody!

RICK:  I understand and sympathize.  I don't doubt that following the objective moral law in this area is very hard for those attracted to the same sex.  Perhaps it can be a comfort to them to realize that following the objective moral law tends to be hard for everyone, though the "hardness" manifests itself in different ways.  Ethics asks hard things of people.  It calls some to be martyrs, to endure death and torture rather than follow the crowd.  It calls us all to learn self-control, to suppress natural desires and bring them under the control of reason, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do.  Restraining sexual desires in particular is notoriously difficult, and yet we are all called to self-control.  It takes little imagination or empathy to consider all the ways in which, not just homosexuals, but lots of people have to struggle hard to control and redirect sexual desires that would lead them down paths most of us would recognize as harmful or unethical.  It is notoriously hard to "do the right thing" sometimes.  We should sympathize with each other, but we have no rational basis to conclude that something must be OK to do simply because it is very hard not to do it.

ALBERT:  All your answers are glib and cold and meaningless.  You can't possibly understand what homosexuals go through because you aren't a homosexual.

RICK:  I may not be a homosexual, but I am a human being, and I do have some idea of how hard life can be.  I recognize though, certainly, that I cannot really know, experientially, fully what it is like to walk in someone else's shoes.  But that doesn't prove that my ethical beliefs are incorrect.

ALBERT:  Yes, it does!  Since you can't know what it's like to be me, you can't tell me my feelings are invalid.  I'm telling you that I know, from personal experience, that a good God could never demand that homosexuals suppress their homosexual impulses.  It would be too cruel.  You can't understand that, but you have to believe it, because I am telling you from my own personal experience.

RICK:  But how do I evaluate your personal experience?  You claim to have experience that proves that homosexual acts cannot be unethical.  But I cannot have that same experience, so how can I verify whether or not it shows what you think and claim it shows?

ALBERT:  You don't have to verify it!  You just have to accept it!  I'm me, so I get to testify to my own personal experience!  You don't get to say anything about it!  You just have to accept what I'm telling you.

RICK:  But that would be irrational.  Just because you have personal experiences and have interpreted them in a certain way, that doesn't prove that you might not be interpreting them wrongly.  I can't just accept your point of view without critical analysis.  That would be to believe things without sufficient evidence, which would be dishonest.

ALBERT:  No, it would not be dishonest.  It is the only just, the only compassionate thing to do.  If you respect me, you will accept my personal testimony about myself without question.

(Again, this is a hugely oversimplified and unrealistic conversation, of course.  For a somewhat closer approximation to a real conversation, though still fictional, see here.)

Rick is right not to accept Albert's personal testimony uncritically, despite Albert's attempts to persuade him that compassion requires him to do so.  While we ought to be compassionate and empathetic towards people and the personal difficulties they struggle with, if we are interested in truth, we cannot accept conclusions without adequate grounding in the evidence.  As Rick noted, just because a person claims to have had some particular experience, it doesn't prove that they've really had that experience or that they've interpreted their experience correctly.  The simple fact that I am me doesn't make me infallible in the interpretations of my own experiences.  We all know that, if we are sufficiently self-aware.  People can often be misled by false interpretations of their own subjective experiences, especially if those experiences are tied to deeply-felt emotions or desires.  Again, just because my Latter-day Saint friend had some "religious experience," that doesn't by itself prove to me that they have rightly interpreted their experience to have given them infallible proof that the Book of Mormon is a revelation from God.  Very few of us, rightly, are going to become Latter-day Saints simply on the basis of such personal-testimony claims, which is why Latter-day Saints typically go on to tell people how to replicate that experience in their own lives.

Another example of an area where, today, we often run into the "personal experience proves everything" kind of argument is transgenderism.  "I'm a boy."  But you're a biological girl.  "I don't care.  I know I'm a boy."  On what basis do you claim to be a boy?  "I feel that I am a boy."  How do your feelings show that you are a boy?  What is your linguistic and philosophical justification for redefining the word "boy" to mean something different than it has meant in the past history of the English language, in Christian theology, etc.?  And what do you even mean by "boy" now that you've divorced the word from its original objective meaning?  "Look, I feel that I am a boy!  So if you will be compassionate and respectful toward me, you will simply accept that I am a boy and not ask any further questions!  I'm me, so I get to define myself, and you simply have to accept it, or you're a hateful bigot!"  (Of course, not all advocates of transgender ideology are so belligerent, but the belligerence is common enough in such circles that I do no injustice in making it a part of what a standard conversation of this sort often looks like.)  The problem with this, of course, is that this appeal to personal testimony provides no real evidence--or, rather, no evidence that is sufficiently accessible to people in general.  Just because I testify that I feel strongly that I should be identified as the gender opposite my biological sex, it does not follow that that feeling is correct.  It takes little imagination to understand how one could misinterpret one's feelings in such an area.  Personal experiences and feelings are interpreted in light of beliefs and assumptions a person has, and so those interpretations may only be as true as the truth of those beliefs and assumptions.  Therefore, a claim of personal feelings cannot be used to trump critical questioning of beliefs and assumptions that may underlie the interpretations.

So a claim based on unreplicable personal experience cannot, by itself, prove a belief to be true.  However, it is also true that, because the personal experience is unreplicable and out of the reach of the experience of others, claims based solely and completely on such experiences are impossible to directly disprove.  Sometimes the argument is made that because they cannot be disproved, that amounts to a good reason to accept them as true.  "I claim to have seen God!  You can't prove that I haven't seen God, so you have to accept that I have!"  But not being able to disprove something is simply not the same as proving something to be true.  If I can't disprove that elves exist, it doesn't follow that that in itself gives me good reason to believe that they do.  Again, testimonies of personal experience, when this is all we have, leave us not with proof or disproof but at an impasse.  We simply cannot know whether the claims based on the experience are valid or not.  The only rational position, then, is to be agnostic on those claims.

So does that mean that we must always be agnostic with regard to anyone's claims based on personal experience?  No.  If all we have is personal experience to go on, we would have to be agnostic, but we very often have more than that to go on.  With regard to Latter-day Saint claims, for example, we can investigate those claims at many points, as the claims touch on history, philosophy, theology, etc.  My primary reason for rejecting the claims of the Latter-day Saint worldview is because I have found them to fail philosophically and theologically.  I believe Latter-day Saint claims about God and other matters are falsified philosophically; they fail to stand up to logic.  Also, I believe I have positive reasons to believe in the truth of historic, Catholic Christianity, which entails the falsehood of the foundation of the Latter-day Saint worldview (the conviction that Joseph Smith was a true prophet, etc.).  If, having concluded that Catholic Christianity is true on the grounds of various solid evidences, I am confronted with an argument based on Latter-day Saint personal testimony, I will simply respond that, while I can't directly disprove claims based in such personal testimony, yet the mere claims do not prove themselves, and I can indirectly disprove them based on their incompatibility with other things I have reason to believe to be true.  If the Latter-day Saint protests that he knows his personal experience proves the Latter-day Saint worldview, and that I have to just accept that because I can't possibly know what he's experienced, I will reply that I have no good reason to think that he cannot have misinterpreted his own personal experience, and I have good, positive reasons coming from other sources to believe that, in fact, in this case, he has done precisely that.  If he insists that it is disrespectful of me not to accept claims based on his personal experience, I will reply that it is not a matter of respect or disrespect; it is a matter of intellectual honesty.  If a person believes he is being disrespected simply because his claims, even claims based on unreplicable personal experience, are not uncritically accepted, he needs to reconsider whether his requirements for "being respected" are actually reasonable ones or not.  We deserve to be respected as human beings, but no human being can justly claim to deserve to have everyone accept his own ideas without critical analysis.  This is not a genuine requirement for the respect we are owed as human beings.

With regard to homosexuality and transgenderism, I think the same analysis holds.  A homosexual may claim to have personal experiences that prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that homosexual acts are not unethical.  If I question this claim, he may object that I am in no position to judge his subjective, personal experience.  I must reply that while it is true that I cannot directly disprove his claim, the mere fact that he claims it falls short of proving it true, for I have no reason to believe that he is an infallible interpreter of his own personal experience, and it is clear to me that there are many ways a person might be mistaken about the real meaning of their own personal experiences.  Ironically, there are plenty of personal testimonies from people out there who admit to having interpreted their own personal experiences wrongly at various points.  So it would be intellectually irresponsible for me to accept claims based merely on such personal experience as if they proved themselves.  And, in the case of homosexuality, I believe I have good, solid reasons to believe that Catholic Christianity is true, and Catholic Christianity tells me, among many other things, that homosexual acts are unethical.  Therefore, I have good reason to believe they are unethical, and this evidence is not trumped by mere claims based on unreplicable personal experiences.  With regard to claims based on transgender experiences, again, I am not going to accept claims simply because they are made, without any good reason to think they are actually true, and the mere fact that a claim is rooted in someone's unreplicable personal experience does not constitute sufficient reason to believe that it is true.  I am going to evaluate that claim in light of everything that I know from history, science, philosophy, theology, etc.

What About the Lucy Argument?

An argument for trust in claimed personal experience might be made based on the sort of reasoning famously laid out in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.  In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, four children--two brothers and two sisters--go to stay for a while at the home of an old professor.  The youngest sister, Lucy, stumbles through a doorway into another world inside an old wardrobe.  When she comes back and tells her siblings about the experience, they don't believe her.  They are very uncomfortable, because Lucy has always been honest before, and they begin to fear that she might be developing some kind of insanity.  They finally decide to go and talk to the professor about her, but he surprises them by suggesting that they accept her word along with the existence of the other world she claims to have discovered.  He points out that everyone accepts that she is an honest girl, and he rules out insanity by observation of her behavior, and so he deduces that the most likely explanation is that she is telling the truth.  (You can find this conversation in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, chapter 5.)

Lewis makes a fascinating argument here, and one that, I think, has a lot of value and validity.  In the story, Lucy's siblings suffer under a preconceived bias without any real foundation--that there cannot be other worlds occasionally accessible through things like old wardrobes--and they use that bias as a basis to reject an exceedingly credible eyewitness testimony.  The professor points out the absurdity of calling into question the honesty or the sanity of a person well known to them merely on the basis of a felt need to preserve unwarranted assumptions about reality.  It is very easy for us to let our preconceived biases affect our objectivity in analyzing arguments and evidence.  Instead of letting our prejudices determine which evidence we will allow to have its say, we should instead allow the evidence to stand judge over our prejudices--even if that means questioning deeply- and long-held, and even fundamental, assumptions about the nature of reality.

But saying that we should allow even deeply-held assumptions to be questioned by credible evidence, including credible evidence from eyewitnesses, is not the same as saying we should give an uncritical pass to all claims based on personal experience.  Some claims based on personal experience are going to be more reliable than others.  We have to look at the specifics.  In the case of Lucy, we have an honest girl, with signs of sanity, telling a very detailed story about specific incidents involving specific individuals that occurred in a specific world with a specific name which she got into by going into a specific wardrobe, etc.  Lucy's siblings really had no reason to disbelieve her story, for they had no basis for their assumption that such a thing was impossible.  Given the incredible specificity of Lucy's story, there was no plausible explanation for her account beyond the possibility that she was deliberately lying, subject to some form of insanity (vivid, detailed hallucinations, etc.), or that she really had the specific experiences she related.  Given that her siblings knew her well and had strong reasons to believe her an honest person and not insane, and given that they had no real reason to disbelieve her story, no matter how counter-intuitive it was, the professor was right in pointing out that the best conclusion was to accept her story as legitimate.  (Of course, there might still be a question about how to interpret her experiences, but there was good reason to accept that, whatever the explanation, she actually had the experiences she claimed to have had.)

This is far different from the situation of the Latter-day Saint testimony I described above.  In that case, we would need to ask some further questions.  How well do I know the Latter-day Saint I am talking to?  Although it is charitable to assume honesty when reasonably possible, it would be foolish to ignore the fact that people often lie.  I can't just discount that possibility out of hand if I do not know how trustworthy a particular person is.  And there are degrees of lying.  Sometimes people lie outright, fully consciously and calculatingly.  Other times, there is a fair amount of self-deception going on, more or less consciously.  With a relative stranger (like a missionary coming to my door), I don't typically have the personal background necessary to evaluate levels of trustworthiness.  Also, in the case of the Latter-day Saint testimony, as well as lots of other kinds of "religious experience," there is often quite a lot of interpretation going on between the actual experience and a person's conclusions or beliefs based on that experience.  With Lucy, there was hardly any.  She either had those experiences or she didn't.  But a Latter-day Saint might really have a kind of deep, emotional experience when praying, and she might honestly and with strong conviction be persuaded, for whatever reason (background biases, expectations, etc.), that that experience means that the Book of Mormon is true, and yet she might quite easily be wrong in that interpretation.  It would be good to know more details about the exact nature of the particular experience a particular person is telling us about.  With Latter-day Saints, in my experience, it often comes down to a kind of feeling of joy or peace, perhaps accompanied by a strong sense of conviction that the Book of Mormon is true.  It is easy to see that an experience like that is highly ambiguous in itself and could be due to any number of factors, and that the leap from such an experience to a specific propositional claim like "The Book of Mormon is a revelation from God" is quite a large one, and not necessarily well warranted.  It is easy to imagine how people around the world might have similar experiences but interpret them differently based on different religious backgrounds, etc.  A person need not be insane or dishonest to be fooled by such an experience into thinking they know more than they actually do.  So it makes sense to take claims in this kind of context, generally speaking, with much, much more of a grain of salt than Lucy's siblings should have taken her eyewitness testimony.  Although both cases involve claims based on unreplicable personal experiences, the specifics of the cases are vastly diverse and the responses called for are very diverse as well.

The same can be said with regard to personal-experience-based claims connected to homosexuality or transgenderism.  If a person tells me that, as a homosexual, they can tell from their feelings that being asked to control and redirect homosexual desires is too much to ask for, so that it is impossible that there could be a God who would ask that, this claim seems to be based on very subjective and ambiguous evidence.  How difficult does a task have to feel like in order to constitute objective evidence that an objective moral law from God would not require it?  I find it interesting that people who would not balk at being asked to die, and even possibly to endure torture, in order to defend their values and do what they think is right, think that the difficulty involved in being asked not to engage in homosexual acts is "too much" to such an extent that they think that constitutes objective proof that such an ethical requirement cannot exist.  I am not aware of any objective argument that can show me the upper limit of what the objective moral law of God might ask of a particular person.  If, upon receiving such a reply as that, the homosexual responds by saying, "Well, of course you can't understand, you're not homosexual!  No one can understand me but me!  You'll just have to take my word for it that my experience constitutes a valid basis for such an objective argument," I'm going to have to answer that I cannot accept that claim as constituting sufficient evidence to abandon my entire Christian worldview and adopt their view on the ethicality of homosexual acts.  There is far too much subjectivity and room for error here.  Even if the person I am talking to is being perfectly honest, how do I know he is not leaping to his conclusion in a way similar to my Latter-day Saint friend--taking an ambiguous, though deeply-felt, emotional experience and jumping to an unwarranted conclusion based on it, a conclusion lacking in an objectively solid foundation and perhaps influenced by preconceived biases, assumptions, strong desires, etc.?  So I really have no basis to agree with my homosexual friend's conclusion based simply on what he perceives his personal experience to be telling him.  And, also similarly to the Latter-day Saint case, I have strong evidence coming from other sources telling me that his interpretation of his personal experience is incorrect.  I have good reason to believe that Catholic Christianity is true, and that worldview tells me that homosexual acts are unethical.  The personal-evidence-based claim of the homosexual can no more overturn that than can the personal-evidence-based claim of the Latter-day Saint.

Intellectual, Emotional, and Pastoral Considerations Regarding Personal Testimonies about the Ethicality of Homosexual Acts

I am going to conclude all of this by pasting a portion of a conversation I had with someone recently regarding these sorts of issues, and specifically regarding claims of personal experience having to do with homosexuality.  The conversation was useful, I thought, in bringing out some important points on these topics both on the intellectual level and on the emotional/psychological/pastoral level.

This is very interesting and crucially important, I think.  My conversations with you and with others expressing similar convictions has made me think about this a great deal in recent times. . . .  A couple of thoughts: 

1. It is very understandable that our emotions will accompany our reason as we think about these sorts of issues, issues which deeply impact our worldviews, our practical lives, our sense of identity, our feelings about social justice, etc.  It’s wholly appropriate for our emotions to be involved; it would be un-human to exclude them or assume they would be excluded.  In dealing with these issues, both the emotional side and the intellectual side have to be addressed. . . .  It’s a hard balance to properly respect and respond to the emotional aspects while at the same time not allowing those aspects to cripple the ability to deal with the intellectual issues thoroughly and effectively (or vice versa).  It’s something we think about a lot.

2. An important question is what role emotions have to play in informing or making intellectual arguments.  What weight should emotion have in our reasons for believing things?  There are pitfalls to avoid here.  On the one hand, we want to take the concerns arising from our emotions seriously and not neglect important things they have to say to us.  On the other hand, we don’t want to allow our emotions to give us an excuse not to deal honestly and thoroughly with the intellectual issues.  Sometimes reality might be painful and difficult, and I might need to choose to endure some pain in order to truly question my beliefs and assumptions and allow myself to be challenged by reality.  I might have to come to conclusions that are greatly painful and hard for me.  But if I care about reality and don’t want to try to escape into a false fantasy world where I feel safer, I have to learn to take that journey despite the difficulties--at least as much as I can.

3. Following #2, emotions cannot be regarded as immune from questioning or criticism.  I think there is a temptation that some people give in to these days (I think it is a bit of a fad these days) to think that if they feel very, very strongly about something, and that something is very deeply personal to them, that that exempts them from having to question those emotions, or to allow others to challenge them.  Questioning beliefs tied up with those emotions is often seen as a kind of personal attack and offense, and that sense of offense functions as a kind of screen against questioning and criticism.  This is dangerous, because it makes people feel a kind of justification for exempting themselves from questioning deep-seated, strongly-felt, and strongly-held-and-valued assumptions.  But this is a sure recipe for maintaining unjustified beliefs and prejudices.  If we want reality, we cannot exempt even our deepest beliefs and feelings from critical questioning.  These days, it has become popular in some circles to feel this way especially about moral issues and feelings.  A lot of people feel that if they have beliefs or feelings about moral and social issues they care deeply about, that somehow the depth of those feelings and the importance of the concerns justifies exempting those assumptions from critical questioning or challenge, as if allowing those assumptions to be questioned is a kind of betrayal of the moral convictions.  But moral convictions are only valid if they are based on truth, on reality.  They must be well-founded in the evidence before we have reason to take them as valid moral convictions.  So they cannot be exempt from questioning--at least not if we care about truth and reality.

4. So simply feeling strongly that homosexual acts should be OK, or being greatly concerned for social justice for homosexuals, do not in themselves prove that homosexual acts are ethical.  We also have to keep distinct different questions.  For example, it could possibly be true BOTH that homosexual acts are unethical AND that homosexuals have been treated unjustly and unlovingly in society.  If homosexuals have been treated unjustly, it does not necessarily follow that homosexual acts are ethical, and we cannot use the former as an argument for the latter (or at least I don’t see how the former actually proves the latter).  We can’t let our feelings about social justice cloud our judgment about the actual merits of arguments and evidence.  Also, being personally involved in this question does not, in itself, provide a reason for coming to a certain conclusion.  If I am homosexual, much might be at stake for me personally in the quesiton of whether or not homosexual acts are unethical.  This shouldn’t be minimized on an emotional level, but, at the same time, it cannot be used to provide a shield against crtitical questions.

5. One possible intellectually-meritorious argument that I could see arising out of the strong, personal emotions regarding homosexuality would be the one you have alluded to--the concern, as you put it, that “it’s wrong to suppress a natural part of life.”  I’ve addressed that in some of my earlier responses . . . but it’s an important objection that shouldn’t be dismissed too quickly.  I think the argument, if we articulate it out, goes something like this:  “God would not have made the world such that some people have a natural proclivity towards homosexuality and then also have forbidden homosexual acts in his moral law.  His moral commands would be at odds with what he created, and it would be inherently wrong for there to be a moral requirement to suppress a natural part of our created identity.”

I’ve addressed some of this in earlier responses.  For one thing, the situation we are currently in, where people are required by morality to suppress their desires in a painful way, is not the ideal state of creation, but is rather a part of the world in a fallen state.  As to why God would allow the Fall to occur, or in general to allow evil and suffering to happen in the world, this leads to the discussion of the problem of evil which we’ve looked at elsewhere.  In this fallen state of things, morality and our desires often conflict, and doing the right thing is often very difficult.  Most people recognize and accept this fact, that morality often asks hard things of people, and we often praise people for doing the right thing at great personal cost to themselves.

Can any objective argument be made showing that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good God would not have done what the Catholic worldview says he has done, in creating this world, allowing the Fall, commanding what he has commanded, etc.?  Can it be shown that it could not be the case that the objective moral law of God might require people with homosexual orientation to have to work to redirect their desires in the area of sexuality and not do what comes most naturally to them?  Perhaps an objective argument can be made here which rises above only the protests of feelings (which aren’t to be taken lightly, but also don’t necessarily constitute an objective argument) or is not mired in subjectivity and unquestioned assumptions, but I have not yet seen such an argument so far as I can tell.  But I’m open to such an argument being shown to me.

In making such an argument, we must also keep in mind the complexity of the issue and all the many factors involved.  We must recognize and give full credit to the great practical, psychological, and emotional difficulties of following Catholic teaching (in the area of homosexuality, but also in many other areas), but there are many other factors to remember as well.  We should note, for example, that while sexuality is often bound up with other aspects of human relationships, relationships can exist without sexuality, and there might be ways in which many of the needs of homosexuals and others can be at least partially met by other kinds of relationships that don’t involve sexual acts.  There is much to think about in that area.  While we don’t want to underestimate the difficulties of living Catholic teaching, for homosexuals and others, we also don’t want to overestimate them, in the sense of painting a more dire picture than is actually the case or overlooking ways in which the difficulties can be assuaged to some degree.

At any rate, there is much to think about here.  It can be very difficult to ask these kinds of critical questions, and we must do so with great care and sensitivity and empathy.  At the same time, again, if we are concerned not only with validating our feelings but also with making sure our beliefs are in accord with reality, we have to ask these questions. We cannot consider such questions off limits on the grounds that they are too personal, too painful, offensive to a person’s sense of identity, etc.

And one more short snippet:

This is another form of the objection we discussed above, and, again, I think it is a very important one that can’t be easily dismissed.  But it must be looked at with all the complexity it truly involves.  Again, most people recognize that morality, or even just prudence, tends to ask us to suppress or redirect natural desires, to deny ourselves things we have a natural inclination towards.  Take dieting, for example.  It’s a very hard thing to do, because in order to eat right and healthily we often have to fight against our natural inclinations, and this is a very difficult thing to do, especially for people who really enjoy eating and get a lot out of it.  I take that very seriously, being a person myself who really enjoys eating and looks forward to it.  Eating for me is kind of an oasis that eases the difficulties of life, and it really means a lot to me (even though that might sound kind of strange to someone who doesn’t feel this way, I am quite serious).  A friend of mine has a child who was recently diagnosed with celiac disease.  And the child has Down’s Syndrome, to make it worse.  She has to avoid her favorite foods now, and her parents will enforce this.  If I had that happen to me, it would be very, very difficult.  But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be the right thing to do, and that’s my point.  We can’t necessarily easily reason from “this will be really, really difficult and asks me to suppress and redirect strong and important natural desires, leading to great difficulties in life” to “I can’t possibly be required by morality or prudence to go down this path.”  And I could add a ton of other examples of all sorts, as I know you could as well with your creativity, intelligence, and empathy.  We could write a large series of books just listing the situations in which we would both agree that people are morally or prudentially required to suppress or redirect natural desires in a way that is very painful and difficult.  So why, then, should we think it so easy to assume that homosexuality must get a pass on this, must be exempt from all these other examples?  It is not evident to me that that case can be made objectively.  Another thought:  Even if, in some cases, we have to suppress or redirect our natural desires, there are more or less healthy ways of doing that.  I’m sure there are plenty of very ineffective and unhealthy ways of trying to suppress homosexual desires.  I’m sure there are plenty of ways of suppressing or redirecting other kinds of desires as well that are unhealthy and ineffective.  I’m sure there are different ways of dieting that are more or less psychologically healthy or unhealthy.  We should obviously pursue the most healthy ways possible when we are called on to deny ourselves something we want very much.  And we have to be careful to define words like “healthy” too.  Does “healthy” mean “living happily, feeling fulfilled, etc.”?  Perhaps, in that case, sometimes morality and prudence require us to live less-than-fully-healthy lives.  We might have to sacrifice some goods and sources of contentment in order to pursue things of greater value--like forgoing an adulterous relationship to respect spouses, or controlling not eating the things we want in order to take care of our bodies.  On the other hand, if we define “unhealthy” to acknowledge we might have stress from living life, and we focus more on more specific kinds of unhealthy states of mind, we might find we can redirect our desires to a great degree without being “unhealthy.”  In short, we have to ask specific questions and look at definitions, nuances, and complexities in these kinds of things if we will avoid making question-begging arguments.

For a larger dialogue on homosexuality and transgenderism, see here.  For a short article discussing how current "woke" culture tends to commit the error discussed in this article, while also making some positive and valid points, see here.

ADDENDUM 2/24/22:  Someone might argue, against my argument above, that we are required by justice and charity towards others to have a "judgment of charity" with regard to the personal testimonies and actions of others, meaning that we should give the best interpretation possible to what a person says and does--we should assume good motives like honesty, compassion, etc., rather than bad motives like selfishness or dishonesty.  And going along with that, it might be argued, we should have a kind of "judgment of respect" regarding what other people say about their own lives.  Since I am me, surely I have the right to define myself.  If I decide that I want my name to be Horace, that's my call, not anyone else's.  You don't have the right to say, "I don't like the name Horace, so I'll name you Frank instead."  I get to choose my name, not you, because I'm me.  Similarly, if I make some kind of personal-testimony sort of claim, such as those discussed in the article above, everyone has an obligation to take my word for it and believe it simply because I'm me and other people are not.

I agree that it is right, practically speaking, to adopt a "judgment of charity" about people.  But we must distinguish between a practical stance and an actual intellectual opinion.  It might be charitable for me to assume you are an honest person until I have clear evidence to the contrary, but that doesn't mean I really know that you are an honest person or have a basis for an intellectual claim about that.  If I don't know you very well, I may have no basis to have any clear opinion regarding your tendencies towards honesty or deception.  I will have to be agnostic on that as a propositional claim.  My "judgment of charity" is not so much an intellectual opinion or propositional claim about you as simply a practical attitude.  That is, I will treat you practically as if you are an honest person until contrary evidence arises.  (And even in terms of a practical stance, this will be limited.  For example, if I don't know someone, I'm not going to decide suddenly to let them babysit my kids simply on the basis of a practical "judgment of charity."  That would be foolish, because, intellectually speaking, I really don't know how trustworthy they are.)  So a "judgment of charity" of this sort, while it might make me inclined not to raise questions about the validity of your personal-experience-based claims unless I have a need to, will not give me any basis to avoid such questions if something important hinges on the trustworthiness of your claims.  Certainly, I'm not going to adopt a whole system of views on things like the ethicality of homosexual acts or the truth of the Latter-day Saint worldview simply on the basis of practical trust rooted in a "judgment of charity."

It's similar with a "judgment of respect."  It's one thing to allow you to decide your name.  Surely you have that right because you are you, and I shouldn't try to usurp it.  But you don't therefore have a right to demand that I believe whatever you want me to believe or do whatever you want me to do, no matter the seriousness of the consequences or the intellectual merits of your claims, simply on the basis that your claims are rooted in your own personal experience.  Certainly you should be considered an important witness, and even a primary witness, to your own personal experience.  But it doesn't follow from that that respect for you requires me to accept claims based on dubious evidence or ignore evidence to the contrary, or make seriously important decisions without asking further questions or looking for further evidence or analyzing your claims more closely.  Again, practically speaking, when I can I should defer to your own statements about yourself and not adopt a challenging attitude to them unnecessarily.  But that doesn't mean I should adopt an intellectual position that goes beyond what is truly warranted by the evidence.

Philosophical Thoughts on Free Will, Foreknowledge, and Predestination

This article follows up on my article outlining Catholic teaching on free will, grace, and predestination.

The Nature of Free Will

There are two areas of philosophical confusion which, in my observation, tend to make it difficult for people to understand Catholic teaching regarding issues surrounding free will, grace, and predestination.  The first area of confusion has to do with the idea of free will itself.  There is a tendency sometimes for people to focus so much on the freedom of the will that they forget that the will is not completely unpredictable and uncontrollable.  They cannot see how the idea of free will is compatible with the idea that God knows the future and even plans the future.  In Catholic theology, the entire future unfolds, down to its last detail, exactly according to God's foreknowledge and plan (the plan of "predestination").  If that is so, many wonder, how in the world can we really have free will?  For (it would seem) if God infallibly knows everything I am going to do in the future and even has planned everything I am going to do in the future in some way, then it is impossible for anything to happen differently than God knows and has planned, and so I can't make any different choices than the ones God knows and has planned for me to make.  So I would seem to have no free will at all.  So how can Catholic theology hold together free will, foreknowledge, and predestination?

At least part of the answer is that while, of course, coercion, force, certain psychological conditions, etc., can override or circumvent the will and so limit or remove its freedom, there are ways in which the will can be moved and directed which don't override or destroy freedom.  It can be helpful here to distinguish between "necessity" and "certainty."  As with many words adapted to abstract, philosophical use, people don't always use these words in the same way, so we don't want to be so rigid in our use of these words that we can't recognize differences of meaning in how we and others use them and so end up getting into meaningless, semantic fights.  Nevertheless, in some philosophical/theological circles, these words have been used in a way that can be helpful at capturing an important distinction.  We can think of the will being moved "necessarily" or "with certainty but not necessarily."  For the will to be moved necessarily is for the will really to be obliterated by having its options removed, so that the person willing can really only do one thing and it is impossible for him to do otherwise.  For example, say you want me to eat a cucumber.  It so happens that I hate cucumbers, so it is not going to be easy to get me to eat one.  You might attempt to get me to eat a cucumber by forcing me to eat one necessarily, removing my options and so circumventing my will.  You could tie me down and force the cucumber down my throat.  Or you could use a supercomputer to take over my brain and force my body to eat the cucumber.  Etc.

On the other hand, it is possible to move the will with certainty but without necessity, without removing legitimate options and thus circumventing and destroying the act of free choice.  Going back to the cucumber example, you might get me to certainly, yet freely, eat the cucumber by using persuasion, which involves appealing to my motives so that I freely alter my choice.  You might offer me $1,000 to eat the cucumber.  If you did that, I would certainly eat it (all other things being equal).  I would still hate the taste of the cucumber, but my distaste for cucumber would lose the battle with my desire to win $1,000.  If I really hated cucumbers and wouldn't do it even for $1,000, you could offer me $1,000,000, if you happened to have that kind of money on hand (and were that bizarrely obsessed with getting me to eat a cucumber for some reason).  In a case like this, you have performed an action that caused me to do something you wanted me to do, and made it certain I would do it, but without any overwhelming or circumventing of my will.

This can happen because acts of will, while free in some ways, are not arbitrary or groundless.  This is evident both from the law of causality as well as from a simple psychological examination of how the will actually works.  The law of causality does not allow that something can come from nothing.  If an effect occurs, it must have a cause sufficient to explain the effect.  The only alternative to this would be to have something coming from nothing.  But "nothing" is nothing and so does nothing.  It has no reality, and so cannot originate anything or exert any energy or activity to cause anything to happen.  It cannot be the explanation for why anything happens.  So if anything happens, if anything in reality undergoes change, some cause must have effected that change.  If there is anything in the universe that cannot explain itself, it must be explained by something outside of itself and not by "nothing."

And with regard to the psychology of willing, consider for yourself how you make choices.  When I examine the activity of my own will, I see this basic pattern:  1. I am aware of various states of affairs that could come about or be brought about.  I call these my "options."  2. My mind begins to examine its own desires.  What do I like?  What do I dislike?  What do I want to happen?  What do I not want to happen?  3. As this process continues, I recognize that, among the things I have some desire for, there are things I want more than other things.  In other words, I find that I have "preferences."  I prefer some states of affairs to other states of affairs.  Out of the complexity of my views, ideas, and desires, my mind attempts to sort out what I truly prefer to have come about or to bring about, all things considered, in that moment.  4. Finally, I am successful at determining my true preference in the current situation, and I settle on that preference.  This act of my mind settling on a preference is what I call the act of "choice."  5. Then, if what I have chosen is to perform some action, my body (or my mind) responds to the act of choice by performing the action (or at least attempts to do so).

Is this not how the action of choosing goes for all of us?  We can see, then, by looking at it, that the act of choice is not arbitrary or outside a nexus of causation.  My choice flows from my preference.  My preference is what I most desire or value in that moment.  (And I would add that, when I am thinking of "desire" here, I don't mean mere non-rational instinct, but what my rational mind values.)  And what I desire is a product of many, many things--my personality, my beliefs and values, all the circumstances that exist around me and inside of me at the time of my choice, the earlier circumstances that led to those circumstances, all my previous experiences, the entire previous history of my life, my DNA, the choices of my parents, the choices of their parents, the entire history of the universe, etc.  At the moment of my choice, I choose what I prefer, and the desires, values, beliefs, ideas, etc., that determine what I prefer do not spring out of nowhere.  They are what they are because of prior causes.  This is why you can cause with certainty, but without will-circumventing necessity, that I will choose to eat that cucumber.  This is why, if you happened to know everything about me and all the circumstances affecting my choice at any given moment, you could always predict with 100% accuracy what I would choose.  This is why, if you happened to have control of all the causal factors in the entire universe, you could ensure that I would always choose what you wanted me to choose.

Now consider God's relationship to the creation.  God is the First Cause, the Source of all reality.  There is no being in the universe that does not derive from him.  There are no chains of causes in the universe which do not ultimately trace back to his action.  And God is also omniscient, or all-knowing.  There is nothing in all of reality which he does not know thoroughly.  If that is the case, then it cannot be otherwise than that the history of creation will unfold according to God's perfect foreknowledge and plan.  When God created the universe, he knew exactly what he was creating, and he created exactly what he wanted.  And he knew everything that would result from that creation down through the entire chain of universal history from beginning to end.  He knew all the free choices that all creatures would make.  He knew all the free choices he himself would make as he would continue to interact with creation as its history continued to unfold, for he knew himself and his own preferential tendencies perfectly as well.  So God could not have created the universe without, at the same time, perfectly knowing and planning its entire history, down to the smallest detail.  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it (#308), "[t]he truth that God is at work in all the actions of his creatures is inseparable from faith in God the Creator."

And none of this is in any way inconsistent with free will, for God's foreknowledge and predestination, understood in this way, do not at all overwhelm, obliterate, or circumvent anyone's free choices.  Just as you did not obliterate my free will when you offered me money to eat the cucumber, neither does God obliterate free will when he creates a universe and ordains a history in which he knows I will choose all the things I will choose in my life.  (See here--and particularly time index 17:00-20:53--for a helpful discussion of this same issue by Bishop Robert Barron.)

The Problem of Evil

All of this leads us to the second major problem a lot of people have with Catholic teaching in this area.  Even if I can see how God's foreknowledge and predestination are consistent with the freedom of my choices, yet if all of this is so, why does God's plan involve so much evil?  Why did he choose to create a world in which so much sin and suffering happen?  Why not create one where everyone makes only right choices and is always happy?  When we think of the will as outside of God's control, this can provide a kind of smokescreen, to an extent, against this second objection.  Why all the sin and suffering?  Well, God can't really do anything about it, because he can't control free will.  (Of course, this gets God off the hook from responsibility for evil only by removing his sovereignty as God, but people often don't press these sorts of things to their logical conclusions.)  But if God can control free will, if it is not outside the effects of his plan and foreknowledge, then how could God justifiably create a world in which all this sin and suffering happen?

I won't attempt to give a complete answer to this question here, because I have already dealt with it in a separate article to which I will refer you.  Sometimes this objection is expressed in terms of feeling like God is somehow still violating my freedom by exercising such absolute control over the history of my life.  I think this thought partly stems from a failure to fully recognize how different God's relationship with us is from our relationship with other creatures.  If you were to somehow gain absolute control over my life such that my entire life history became subject to your knowledge and plans, I would complain that you had violated my "free space," for no creature from outside of myself should have that kind of control over me, and you could only have gotten that kind of control by somehow conquering me from without and subjugating me illicitly.  But I make a mistake if I then transfer that feeling to my relationship with God.  God is my Creator.  His control over my life does not result from any kind of illicit conquest or manipulation or invasion of my "space."  His control arises from the fundamental fact of who he is and who I am.  The one who creates my fundamental essence and my entire world cannot but be the source of all that I am and cannot fail to exercise a kind of ownership and control over my life and my world that no mere creature could ever have.  It is his prerogative, and no one else's, to know fully and to determine the course of the universe's history and my history.  To complain about God's plan governing my life is like complaining against my mother for giving birth to me.  "If my next-door neighbor tried to give birth to me, I should be very upset!  So how I can tolerate you having given birth to me, Mom?"  Well, by the very nature of our relationship, my mother has a kind of role in bringing me into existence that my next-door neighbor can never have (unless, of course, my next-door neighbor happens to be my mother).  My mother's unique role is not a usurpation, but a natural and fully appropriate relationship.  And so is God's unique role in my life as my Creator and the one whose plan governs my life history.  

I talked above about how God's complete knowledge of and control over the factors that determine my choices make it so that I will choose precisely and only what God wants me to choose.  But does that mean that God wants me to choose to sin?  If a person should choose to commit a mortal sin, rejecting fundamentally a right relationship with God, and end up in hell as a result of this, was it God's will for this to happen?  The answer is: yes and no.  God hates sin and suffering.  He does not take delight in either of these things.  But he sees that the overall good of the universe, that which brings about the greatest overall goodness and happiness, is best achieved by allowing certain evils to occur.  So his design for the history of the universe was not set simply on stopping me from committing any sin or experiencing any suffering.  He saw that the best way to set up the universe was to ordain a set of circumstances such that it would come about that I would, at times, commit sin and experience suffering.  He did not produce sin in me (for sin is a negative thing, like darkness, rather than a positive being, like light), but he set up the world such that he knew the result would be that I would sin and that suffering would come to me--not because he delighted in the idea of my sin and suffering, but because he knew that allowing these things would bring about a greater good.  And this extends to all the sin and suffering in the universe, even to mortal sin and hell.  So God did not want me to sin, per se, but he wanted to create a universe in which I would be freely permitted by him to sin because he knew that this universe would be the one suited to accomplish his perfect purposes.

A Brief Note on Various Philosophical and Theological Schools of Thought

How does what I've said above relate to different philosophical schools of thought regarding the nature of free will?  There are two positions, broadly speaking, which are typically discussed--libertarianism and compatibilism.  I often find that there are ambiguities in terms of how these positions are defined that make it difficult to identify with either of the labels.  For example, sometimes the libertarian view of free will is defined as the idea that "it is possible to choose otherwise at the moment of a choice," and compatibilism is defined as the idea that "the will is free if, at the moment of choice, a choice is made according to one's own mind and will, voluntarily, even if it is impossible to choose otherwise because the will is determined by the strongest desires of the person."  But the phrase "able to choose otherwise" is ambiguous.  Are we talking about the ability of my mind to actually make choices between various options--that is, my ability to use my rational mind to settle on preferences?  Or does "able to choose otherwise" imply the idea that there is no certainty in choosing--that, at any given moment of choice, there is an absolute possibility that various choices might happen such that there can be no knowledge in principle about what choice will actually be made until the choice is actually made?  "Ability to choose otherwise" in the former sense is an idea that makes perfect sense and is an essential component of what it means to make an act of will.  "Ability to choose otherwise" in the latter sense is logically absurd (because it implies that totally uncaused events happen for no reason, thus denying the law of causality) and, far from being an essential component of the idea of a free act of the will, it is completely incompatible with how willing actually takes place.  It turns an act of will, which is really the act of a rational mind settling on a preference, and turns it into something fundamentally different--a totally random event which is independent of everything that comes before it (and therefore, absurdly, independent even of the person making the choice and any act of that person) but which produces actions and events in the world.

If we define "ability to choose otherwise" in the former, rational sense, then I could identify my position as libertarian.  But if we define "ability to choose otherwise" in the latter, absurd sense, then I would be inclined to say I am a compatibilist.  The libertarian view, taken in the absurd sense, is incompatible with Catholic faith, because it implies a fundamental incompatibility between the Catholic doctrine of free will and the Catholic doctrines of divine foreknowledge and predestination (not to mention that by obliterating the law of causality it destroys the very rational fabric of reality itself).

What about the various Catholic schools of thought pertaining to free will, grace, and predestination--in particular, Bañezian Thomism and Molinism?  I think that my account of free will above is consistent with any of the accepted Catholic schools of thought.  It doesn't take sides in the details of the disputes between these schools.  For more on my views regarding the Bañezian-Molinist dispute, and in particular how I understand Molinism, see here, here, and here.  All the historic, approved Catholic schools of thought agree on the fundamental theological points of Catholic doctrine regarding free will, grace, and predestination.  Here is how Catholic philosopher Alfred J. Freddoso describes the traditional Catholic teaching on free will and predestination and how both Bañezian Thomism and Molinism agree on this teaching:

According to the traditional doctrine of divine providence, God freely and knowingly plans, orders and provides for all the effects that constitute the created universe with its entire history, and he executes his chosen plan by playing an active causal role that ensures its exact realization. Since God is the perfect craftsman, not even trivial details escape his providential decrees. Whatever occurs is specifically decreed by God; more precisely, each effect produced in the created universe is either specifically and knowingly intended by him or, in concession to creaturely defectiveness, specifically and knowingly permitted by him. Divine providence thus has both a cognitive and a volitional aspect. By his pre-volitional knowledge God infallibly knows which effects would result, directly or indirectly, from any causal contribution he might choose to make to the created sphere. By his free will God chooses one from among the infinity of total sequences of created effects that are within his power to bring about and, concomitantly, wills to make a causal contribution that he knows with certainty will result in his chosen plan's being effected down to the last detail. 

This much is accepted by both Molina and the Bañezians. They further agree that it is because he is perfectly provident that God has comprehensive foreknowledge of what will occur in the created world. That is, God's speculative post-volitional knowledge of the created world -- his so-called free knowledge or knowledge of vision -- derives wholly from his pre-volitional knowledge and his knowledge of what he himself has willed to do. Unlike human knowers, God need not be acted upon by outside causes in order for his cognitive potentialities to be fully actualized; he does not have to, as it were, look outside himself in order to find out what his creative act has wrought. Rather, he knows 'in himself' what will happen precisely because he knows just what causal role he has freely chosen to play within the created order and because he knows just what will result given this causal contribution. In short, no contingent truth grasped by the knowledge of vision can be true prior to God's specifically intending or permitting it to be true or to his specifically willing to make the appropriate causal contribution toward its truth.

For more, see my problem of evil article, and my predestination article this article follows up on.  To see arguments relative to the deeper, most fundamental philosophical issues involved in all of this, see my case for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity in general here and here.

Published on the feast of St. Raymond of Peñafort.

Moral Objections to the Bible and Christian Theology, and the Problem of Evil

The following is a selection from my book, Why Christianity is True.

The Bible, Morality, and the Problem of Evil 

One objection that is often leveled against Christianity is that the Bible, and Christian theology, contain immoral elements in them.  For example, the Law of Moses commanded that people found within Israel worshiping false gods should be stoned to death:       

If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the Lord thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing his covenant, and hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded; and it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in Israel: then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.  At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death.  The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put the evil away from among you.  (Deuteronomy 17:2-7) 

According to the Bible, God commanded the Israelites to invade the land of Canaan and kill the Canaanites: 

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them. (Deuteronomy 7:1-2) 

But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: but thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. (Deuteronomy 20:16-17) 

The Bible talks about people being punished in hell (see Revelation 20:10-15).  The Bible says that wives are to submit to their husbands (see Ephesians 5:22-33; 1 Timothy 2:8-15).  How are things like this consistent with a good system of ethics?

Christianity is ultimately all about love.  Love is at the heart of everything.  It is at the very heart of reality, where the Three Persons of the Trinity experience perfect blessedness and delight as they love each other and experience the divine beauty in each other.  God himself is love (1 John 4:8).  Creation is the overflow of God’s love, as God chooses to fill up the nothingness with the divine beauty in order to enjoy the expression of it and to share it with the creatures he creates.  The purpose of our life, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”  It is in loving God and being loved by him that we will find our ultimate happiness.  When God himself came into the world as a human being, what he did is sacrifice his life for our salvation in an astonishing act of love to his Father and to us.  According to Scripture, the entire moral law can be summed up in the two great commandments to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself” (See, for example, Matthew 22:34-37).  St. Paul says that “love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:8-10).  The Bible is full of beautiful exhortations to love our neighbors, to love our enemies, calls to social justice (think of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets), calls to fairness and equity among all, etc.  Some of the most beautiful passages advocating compassion are in the Law of Moses (Exodus 22:21-25; 23:1-12; Leviticus 19:9-18, for example), and many more in the prophets, in the New Testament, etc.  The only person who, in the Old Testament, is called “a man after God’s own heart,” is David, who is portrayed as a unique person and ruler because of his caring and compassion.  Instead of wiping out his rivals to the throne from a previous dynasty, for example, as most rulers would have done, he treats them with compassion and love.  (See, for example, his treatment of Mephibosheth in 2 Samuel 9).  Jesus overturns common ideas about leadership by calling for true leaders to be servants seeking the good of others. 

But Jesus called them unto him, and said, “Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.  But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your servant; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your slave:  Even as the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  (Matthew 20:25-28) 

In the very section cited above where St. Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22-33], he tells husbands that their leadership should consist of their willingness to give up their lives in service to their wives.  In light of all of this, how are we to understand the seemingly “harsh” passages of Scripture and the more “negative” doctrines within Christianity, such as the doctrines of judgment and hell?

When evaluating moral issues, it is crucial to be rational and to question all assumptions.  This is true when evaluating any issue, but it especially needs to be pointed out when we talk about morality, since moral points of view tend often to be bound up with strong emotions, and it is easy for people to stubbornly insist on certain moral ideals or views based on strong feelings without necessarily having any actual evidence to back them up.  But strong opinions without the questioning of assumptions is a good way to end up with one’s beliefs being rooted not in truth but in the prejudices of the zeitgeist.

Earlier in this book, we discussed the value of intuitions in the quest to know truth.  Intuitions, in which category I am including moral feelings, can sometimes be manifestations of the subconscious mind processing evidence and coming to conclusions.  But intuition can also simply reflect prejudices or preconceived assumptions with no basis in the evidence.  In the case of moral concerns about certain biblical passages or Christian teachings, I think there is often a mix of both of these things going on.  It is important, therefore, to not let our moral sense come into competition with our reason.  Morality should evoke strong feelings in us, but such feelings are never an excuse for putting our rationality to sleep by refraining from rigorously questioning our assumptions.  In this case, however, I think that our moral concerns about such things as the destruction of the Canaanites stem from well-warranted moral feelings, at least to some significant extent.  Again, Christianity is all about love and strongly emphasizes love and compassion, so if we are looking at things from a Christian point of view, we should feel concern when something seems contrary to love and compassion.  It is to our credit when we feel such concerns.  They should drive us on to a deeper understanding of how certain doctrines and passages could be understood consistently with the central characteristics of the Christian worldview.  But, again, at the same time, we must be willing to look at our moral intuitions with a critical eye.  If we have reason to believe that Christianity is a divine revelation, then we should be willing to have our intuitions challenged and sometimes corrected by God’s revelation rather than stubbornly insisting on our preconceived intuitions and pitting them against God’s revelation without letting them be challenged.

We should also keep in mind that, if we have good reason to believe that Christianity is true, as I think we do, we should be very careful to vet objections to Christianity.  If we come across something that seems hard to account for, such as how the destruction of the Canaanites could be consistent with love and compassion, we should not jump too quickly to the conclusion that there is an irreconcilable contradiction and jettison the Christian worldview.  Certainly, we should not ignore such concerns, but we should also make sure we have examined things from all angles and that we really have a solid foundation in the objective evidence before we draw the conclusion that we have a successful objection to Christianity.  We need to show that we have ruled out all other possible and plausible alternative understandings.

In addressing this concern, it is also important that we are aware of the role that worldview beliefs play in moral evaluations.  Morality doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  It is the practical expression of a worldview.  Different worldview beliefs are going to lead to different ethical systems.  If something doesn’t make sense from an atheist point of view, for example, that doesn’t mean that it won’t make sense from the point of view of the Christian worldview.  (Or vice versa, for that matter.)  If we judge Christianity to fail in some moral way because we are looking at the moral issue from an atheist point of view, we will be begging the question if we are attempting to use the moral objection as an argument against the Christian worldview (or vice versa).

Let’s begin to address our moral concerns by laying out some principles that are a part of or that follow from the Christian worldview that can shed some light on the issues.  We’ve seen several of these principles argued for in earlier parts of this book. 

1. God’s experience/viewpoint constitutes ultimate reality.  The viewpoints of created beings are limited, not encompassing the whole of reality.  God is the “universal consciousness” who sees all of reality.  As God sees things, so they are.  To exist, ultimately, is to be seen/experienced by God.  Therefore, God’s viewpoint constitutes the true standard of ethics.  What God experiences as good is objectively good, and vice versa.  God’s values are the objective values. 

From my limited point of view, my happiness seems more valuable than other people’s happiness, because I directly experience my feelings but not the feelings of others.  This is why it is possible for beings like us to be selfish or self-centered.  But, in reality, other people are just as real as I am, and their feelings are just as real as mine.  A fully-encompassing, universal, unlimited viewpoint will see/experience everyone’s feelings equally.  We must measure the accuracy of our ethical views against the universal, all-encompassing ethical viewpoint – which is God’s viewpoint.  To the extent that our view disagrees with God’s, it is out of accord with reality.  And a viewpoint that does not value things according to their real value is going to be seen negatively by a more accurate viewpoint, because it will have skewed priorities.  It will value some things too highly and other things not highly enough.  And this skewed attitude is likely to result oftentimes in skewed outward actions as well, since we will be acting at least partly on a distorted view of reality in the area of ethical values. 

2. Since God’s viewpoint/experience constitutes the objective, fully accurate, and complete viewpoint/experience, the happiness of God will be of supreme value objectively.  God is the universal consciousness; all conscious experience is a part of his overall conscious experience.  My limited point of view has reality and value only insofar as it is a sliver of universal reality.  And, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, it is really only an infinitesimal sliver.  My consciousness is like a point on an infinite graph, while God’s consciousness is the infinite graph itself.  So while my happiness has value in its own sphere, it is how things appear from the objective, universal point of view which really matters ultimately.  In other words, if things are good as they appear to God, they are objectively good, and so if God is happy, that is what ultimately matters.  My happiness matters ultimately only insofar as it is relevant to God’s happiness.  The more I see reality with objective accuracy and completeness, the more I will see things this way.  Therefore, God’s happiness is the Supreme Good.  It is the fullness and source of all good.  Apart from God, there is nothing ultimately but evil and misery.  The ultimate happiness of all beings consists in loving and enjoying God, because he is the Supreme Good. 

3. God is omnibenevolent.  That is, he loves the happiness and hates the suffering of all beings.  Since God is the universal consciousness whose experience encompasses all experiences, God is the ultimate empath.  It is therefore psychologically impossible for God to delight in the suffering of any being, and he must naturally love happiness in any being and desire all beings to be happy.  (And so should we, since we should value things according to their true value, and that is defined by how God views them.)  God also values life, and so therefore should we.  However, we should recognize, per #2 above, that God and his happiness are of supreme and infinite value, while we and our happiness are nothing in comparison, since we are simply points on the infinite graph, as it were.  God is infinitely more valuable than we are; and yet, in our own sphere, we do have great value, and God values and sees as good our happiness, and so should we.  There is a balance here:  We must see and value the happiness of limited beings, but we must also see the value of various beings in proportion to their level of being, or the level of their conscious awareness and capacity to experience happiness and suffering.  And we must recognize God’s infinite superiority in that respect to the whole created world put together. 

4. Moral goodness consists in loving and valuing what is good, and what is “good” is that which produces happiness.  Since God is the Supreme Good, moral goodness consists ultimately in loving God.  Moral evil consists in turning away from good and the Supreme Good.  Moral goodness leads to happiness, of course, while moral evil leads to misery.  (When I say that moral goodness ultimately consists in loving God supremely, I should note that I don’t mean to imply that people must necessarily be aware of this on a conscious level or able to articulate it.  The Catholic worldview allows that there can be people who may truly love God in their hearts but who may not be aware consciously that they are loving God or be able to articulate that.  It is possible, for example, for a person to profess atheism but still love God in their hearts through intellectual ignorance or confusion.  But if a person truly, in their heart, is in opposition to the Supreme Good, they are on a path that will lead to ultimate misery.) 

5. God is a Trinity in which the three Persons who are fully God share and enjoy the infinite beauty of the divine being and are infinitely happy in that enjoyment.  God created the world as an extension of that inter-Trinitarian love and happiness.  In creation, God spreads his beauty into the nothingness and gives it life and goodness, thus expressing his beauty in a unique way and sharing it with the creation and created beings.  The purpose of our existence, then, is to reflect and to enjoy the beauty of God, to be happy in his happiness. 

6. In his complete viewpoint and infinite wisdom, God sees that it is better for the overall good to allow some evils to happen in his creation.  God allows both moral evil (sin) and suffering to occur, but only to the extent and in the form that he deems justifiable in connection to the overall good.  There are two things we must remember here: 

1) While we have value in our own sphere as far as we have existence, we are nothing in comparison to God in terms of being and value.  Therefore, set in the balance, the suffering of limited beings is nothing in comparison to the happiness of unlimited being (God).  If allowing the suffering of limited beings promotes the happiness of unlimited being, that allowance is morally justified, because morality is ultimately all about promoting the overall happiness of reality.  And God allows suffering only to the extent that it does indeed promote the overall happiness – the happiness of God and the happiness of all those who, by grace, will be brought up to share in the divine life, in God’s experience and happiness. 

2) God is just.  That is, he always treats everyone and everything according to its actual value.  God is not unjust to allow creatures to fall into sin or to experience suffering, for goodness and happiness are a part of God’s own life.  Creatures, who exist in their own sphere but who, in their own nature, infinitely lack God’s life, do not have any ownership or claim over goodness and happiness.  Rather, their natural lot, without God’s grace (the unmerited gift of the divine life), is to fall into sin and suffering, for, without God’s divine life, that is all that there ultimately is.  God is being, goodness, knowledge, wisdom, power, and happiness.  When he is taken away, the hole that is left consists of emptiness, evil, ignorance, foolishness, weakness, and misery.  Creatures do not have a right to the divine life – to God’s goodness and happiness.  God does not owe it to them to prevent them from falling into sin and suffering.  So he is not unjust when he does allow these things to happen in view of the overall, universal good. 

But how does the allowance of evil contribute to the overall good and greater universal happiness?  There are certainly aspects of the answer to this question that God knows and we do not.  Certainly, we do not know all the reasons why particular evils are allowed in particular situations (see #9 below).  But, having said that, I believe we can make some headway in answering this question.  We have seen earlier in this book that an aspect of God’s knowledge/experience of himself must be an awareness of what I tend to call his “notional opposite” or “conceptual opposite.”  That is, God’s awareness of his fullness of being, power, knowledge, wisdom, goodness, and happiness, involves his awareness of the concepts of emptiness, weakness, ignorance, foolishness, evil, and misery.  Just as a full awareness of the concept of light inherently involves an awareness of the concept of darkness, or an awareness of the concept of up inherently involves an awareness of the concept of down.  The Beatific Vision – the full experience of and enjoyment of God that is the destiny of redeemed creatures – therefore must also involve an awareness of these concepts.  In his plan for creation, then, God allows evil (sin and suffering) to occur in certain ways and to certain degrees because he knows that doing so will facilitate and contribute in an important way to the revelation and knowledge/experience of himself and thus to the happiness of the universe.  He enjoys his own glorious beauty and perfections, and he gives and shows himself to us, partly by the narrative of history in which evils are allowed that contrast with and reveal aspects of God’s glory and goodness and show how he is able to overcome and fill up evil with his goodness.  Since the allowance of such evil contributes to the overall good and happiness, it is morally good and justifiable for God to choose to make such an allowance.  And he is doing no injustice to anyone in making such an allowance, as we have already seen and will see further below, and so there is no moral objection that can be made on the grounds of justice.  We must also remember the infinitesimal-ness of limited beings and their value in comparison to God and the value of the divine being.  The very greatest possible suffering of a limited being, while very great and important in its own sphere, yet is infinitely outweighed by the happiness of God.  And therefore it is possible for the suffering of limited beings to be allowed in order to further the infinite good of the universal happiness of Being in general. 

7. The human race is in a fallen state as a result of the sin of our first parents.  No one but our first parents is blamed for their sin, but the whole human race has inherited the consequences of that sin.  All human beings are born into the world cut off from God’s grace and thus subject to sin, ignorance, foolishness, weakness, suffering, death, and, ultimately, hell (the end state of rational beings outside of God’s grace).  This condition is called “original sin.”  Per #6 above, we can see that God was not unjust to allow the Fall of our first parents to occur, nor to allow their descendants to be born into a state of original sin.  No one is ever forced to sin, but it is part of our fallen human condition that, without God’s grace, we all freely choose it and thus incur the consequences of it. 

8. Since God is the Supreme Good and of infinite value, mortal sin (moral evil – turning away from God as our supreme end) is infinitely bad.  Without God’s grace, all human beings, in the state of original sin, will choose the way of mortal sin.  Mortal sin incurs negative consequences.  It incurs sufferings in this life, and, unchecked, it will ultimately incur the suffering of hell – the complete misery that is the logical end state of separation from God.  Suffering is both the natural and the moral consequence of sin.  It is the natural consequence, because rejection of the Supreme Good results naturally in supreme misery.  It is the moral consequence, because mortal sin deserves suffering as its just punishment.  The attitude of treating something less than its value deserves or contrary to its true value is an attitude displeasing to those who are aware of the true value of things.  For example, if I believe that human beings deserve to be treated with compassion and dignity, and I see someone treating a human being with cruelty and in a way that does not respect their dignity, I find such an attitude and action contemptible.  I find it displeasing and hateful.  I see that such an attitude does not deserve to prosper.  It is not fitting that it should prosper, for, by opposing something of real value, it rejects something good and therefore incurs the loss of that good, which entails suffering.  The desert of contempt and punishment increases according to the value of what is opposed or rejected or mistreated.  (For example, for most people, if mistreating a worm is seen as bad, mistreating a human being is seen as much worse, because human beings have greater value due to their having an increased capacity for happiness and suffering.)  Since God is of supreme, infinite value, rejecting or opposing God is an attitude deserving of supreme, infinite punishment – ultimately, hell. 

9. God brings about much good in the world and also allows much evil.  While we can understand the basic principles upon which God is acting (as described above), we do not have the vantage point adequate to evaluate the specifics of God’s actions and allowances.  In other words, due to our limited knowledge and point of view, we cannot determine precisely how the allotment of good and evil, happiness and suffering, reward and punishment, etc., should be spread about the world.  In the Book of Acts, we have a story in which the apostles Peter and James are arrested by Herod.  Peter is rescued from prison by the supernatural visit of an angel, but James ends up beheaded.  Why this difference?  Why did God rescue Peter and not James?  Why did God allow James to be beheaded but not Peter?  We simply do not know.  We know that God makes such determinations based on his own wisdom and justice, and that what he does is always best, right, and just.  This follows from the existence and nature of God for which we have argued in previous chapters.  But we do not have the knowledge to judge precisely what goods should be brought about and what evils should be allowed throughout the time and space of this world, for we cannot see the entire, universal pattern of spatial and temporal history and how all the parts of it fit into the overall narrative of creation. 

10. Although, in the Christian view, the overall condition of suffering and death that exists in the world is a result of the Fall, yet not all suffering is the direct result of mortal sin (or even what Catholics would call venial sin).  One of the most dramatic examples of this is the suffering of infants and animals, who are incapable of moral attitudes and actions.  However, while infants and animals do not commit personal sin, yet they are still creatures and not God.  They do not own or deserve the goodness and happiness of the divine life.  If God has allowed both of them to experience the suffering of being separated from the divine life, and in particular has allowed them to partake of the fallen condition of this world and the sufferings that are a part of that, he has done nothing wrong or unjust or incompatible with his values or omnibenevolence.  Infants, while not personal sinners, yet are a part of the fallen human race.  They are inheritors of original sin and are thus born apart from God’s grace and subject to the conditions of the fallen human condition.  Without the intervention of grace, they will eventually grow into mortal sinners, and, even as infants, they not unjustly suffer many of the consequences of being part of a fallen world, including pain and death.  While, like all evils, this is a terrible thing, it is not unjust on the part of God to allow or to bring about in his providence.  Animals, while not being inheritors of original sin, yet are bound up with humans as part of the created, fallen world, and God has allowed them too, and not unjustly, to experience the sufferings that are a part of that lot.  Again, we must remember that God only allows or brings about suffering to the extent that he sees it as necessary for bringing about the greater overall good. 

11. God has brought salvation to the human race through the atonement of his Son, who has taken upon himself our sin and suffering and absorbed it into himself so as to overcome our sin and our fallenness and restore to us the divine life.  In doing this, he illustrates both the seriousness of sin and the just punishment/consequence it naturally and morally incurs, and also his infinite love and mercy. 

12. While God allows many evils to occur and often to go without evident punishment in this world, yet, in the end, God will bring about the ultimate victory of good and the ultimate defeat of evil.  Justice will be fully done.  No evil or good will go unaddressed in the long run, in the overall scheme of things. 

13. God is in complete control of the universe.  As the source of all reality and the origin and determiner of all the factors that have influence in reality, God, as Creator, is the one whose ultimate plan is carried out in everything that happens.  We do indeed have free will, but it is not independent of God or outside the causal influences of the universe over which God has control.  Therefore, when evil occurs, it does not take God by surprise, but he deliberately has allowed it to occur because he knows it will help to bring about the greatest overall good.[1] 

14. We should keep in mind the unique relationship God has to the universe as its creator, owner, and ultimate governor.  Even in the human sphere, in order to understand a person’s actions, we need to understand the role or position they play in a situation.  For example, on a personal level, a human being might forgive something done against them by another person.  But if that same human being also has the office of a judge within the society’s legal system, he may have an obligation to assign a certain punishment to a certain crime.  This does not necessarily mean he is less forgiving or compassionate.  As a judge and not simply a private person, he has to be concerned, in the case, not only about his own personal feelings and responses to the situation but also what should or should not be done or tolerated with regard to the overall good of society as a whole, for which he has some responsibility in connection with his authoritative office.  The same sort of thing would be true of other individuals with authority, such as lawmakers or police officers.  If this is true on the human level, how much more will it be true when we are talking about the Supreme Governor of the universe?  It is God’s responsibility to make all the ultimate judgment calls with regard to what goods to promote, what evils to allow, what punishments to enact, etc., in all the different circumstances that occur in time and space, for the overall good of universal reality.  If we recognize that we should not blame a just human judge or lawmaker for lack of empathy if, for the overall good of society and weighing all relevant factors into consideration, she decides to enact or enforce a penalty against someone in society because of their actions, how much more should we be careful not to judge God for a lack of empathy or compassion should he choose to enact some particular punishment or allow some particular evil, even if that punishment or that evil seems harsh or severe to us based on our limited level of awareness or knowledge?  Again, given our level of awareness compared to God’s, humble trust in God’s judgment is the rational attitude, provided we have good reason to believe that God exists and that he has the nature that Christianity says he has – points we have argued for thoroughly earlier in this book. 

15. We must be adequately nuanced with regard to biblical interpretation.  According to the Catholic faith, the Bible is the Word of God and is without error.  More specifically, Catholic theology teaches that whatever the authors of Scripture intended to affirm has been affirmed by the Holy Spirit and is therefore true.  This means we can trust and should follow Scripture, but it also highlights the complexity of biblical interpretation.  Authorial intent can be complex.  There are different genres of writing that have different connotations (poetry vs. history, for example).  Humans write fiction and non-fiction, for another example.  If you don't understand the genre, you are going to get very confused as to what a particular author is intending to claim about reality.  In order to properly interpret Scripture, we must use all the tools of correct translation and interpretation available to us, and we must look at the larger as well as the more local context.  In the Catholic view, God has made the Catholic Church the authoritative and reliable interpreter of Scripture, and so we must look to the Church's guidance for properly understanding Scripture.  One example of an important nuance when it comes to morality is to recognize that God gives different rules at different times to different people in different situations, because his revelation comes in the context of particular historical circumstances.  God never commands what is evil, but sometimes he regulates things that are not ideal.  For example, when Jesus was asked by the Pharisees why divorce was allowed in the Law of Moses (see Matthew 19:3-9), Jesus said that, although God hates divorce and it was not part of his plan for marriage from the beginning, yet he regulated and tolerated divorce among the Israelites because of, as he put it, "the hardness of their hearts."  That is, it was a kind of accommodation to their state of societal and moral existence at the time.  He did not approve it, but he did not fully address it either and he regulated it (to keep it within certain boundaries).  We should remember that, although the Bible is the Word of God, and so whatever it approves or advocates is advocated by God, yet sometimes God’s laws for humans are less than ideal.  What I mean is that when moral ideas are translated into laws for particular human beings and particular human societies, those laws will sometimes be a mix between moral ideals and realistic conditions.  Human lawmakers understand this.  Sometimes an imperfect or corrupt system is in place that cannot be immediately abolished by legislation.  In such a case, laws may be passed to bring conditions as close to the ideal as is reasonably possible.  Situations or actions may be regulated without necessarily being approved as ideal.  God sometimes does the same thing.  Recognizing that they are not always ready to understand a full ideal, he leads his people slowly and gently, guiding them incrementally towards the full ideal.  His commands might regulate what, in more ideal conditions, might be entirely abolished.  This is true throughout Scripture.  It is especially true when we are talking about the Law of Moses, which was an application of the moral law adapted to a particular people at a particular time in particular circumstances, and one of the purposes of which was to lead the people of Israel slowly and gently to a greater recognition of sin, salvation, and moral truths.  God makes such accommodations in various ways and to varying degrees in different circumstances as determined by his overall wisdom.  So while we look to God's law as a source of morality, we must interpret it with all proper nuances.  If we are going to make objections to biblical morality, we must make sure we are interpreting the Bible accurately.  Is a passage historical or more metaphorical?  If there is a divine command, does it reflect the divine ideal in its fullness or is it a product of applying divine values to particular, limiting circumstances?  Does the command apply at all times, or was it intended only to apply to a specific situation?  If something occurs in a narrative, is the event supposed to be understood as approved by God, or is the narrator relating an event that God disapproves of or about which the narrator is silent with regard to moral evaluation?  And so on. 

16. We must balance intellectual rigor with emotional sensitivity when dealing with moral issues (with all issues, but with moral issues especially because of their deeply emotional nature).  Although we can intellectually comprehend the principles that can help us to understand how God could be just and loving and still do or allow things that might be difficult for us to understand, still, we experience reality from a very different vantage point than God does (or than we ourselves will once we reach the Beatific Vision).  God sees the whole picture; we can only experience a tiny part of it at any one time.  While God sees, directly and intuitively, the overall pattern of how the goods and evils of the world weave together to form an overall beautiful tapestry, that tapestry as a whole is not part of our current experience.  We experience simply small (really, infinitesimal) fragments of this whole.  A symphony might contain discordant notes that contribute to the overall pleasantness of the piece when seen in full context, but which seem jarring, unpleasant, and pointless when viewed by themselves without that full context.  A small segment of a painting may appear baffling and ugly when seen by itself, whereas it would be seen as contributing to the beauty of the painting if seen in its full context.  I am reminded of a quotation from the Essay on Man by the great eighteenth-century Catholic poet Alexander Pope: 

Cease then, nor ORDER Imperfection name:

Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.

Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree

Of blindness, weakness, Heav'n bestows on thee.

Submit -- In this, or any other sphere,

Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:

Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow'r,

Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;

All Discord, Harmony, not understood;

All partial Evil, universal Good:

And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,

One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT." [2]

Although Pope uses strong and bold language here, he is not saying that evil is not evil.  Evil is truly evil, and yet it is only allowed because it is used to promote a greater overall good.  As St. Augustine put it, “For almighty God. . ., because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.” [3]  There is much that is harmful and wicked in this world, and thus is not “right,” and yet, in the overall scheme of things, it is right and just for God to have allowed these things to happen. 

However, to recognize this intellectually is a far cry from feeling it on an emotional level.  Although, when we see the whole picture upon arriving at the Beatific Vision, we will be full of joy, as God is, at what we see, yet, here, our experience is often one of pain and sorrow.  And that makes perfect sense.  It follows from this that, when we are dealing with the problem of evil, even when we find answers that are able to intellectually and rationally answer our objections, we will sometimes not feel emotionally satisfied.  We will still be troubled and baffled.  There is nothing wrong with that.  In fact, it is to our credit, for it shows that we share God’s values of love, compassion, valuing of human life, etc.  God himself, we recall, is the ultimate empath.  We should feel pain and even often horror at the evils in the world.  But, again, we must also be balanced and learn to distinguish between an emotional evaluation and a rational one.  The sufferings caused by the evils in this world are felt very deeply, and evil, as the hymn says, seems "oft so strong."  It is difficult, when one is the midst of experiencing great evil or suffering, to imagine how the allowance of such evils could be justified, or to see how any good could possibly counterbalance them.  Consider a novel as an analogy.  The characters in the novel, while in the midst of the apparent victory of evil (it is typical in a story for the power of evil to reach its greatest height, its victory apparently assured, right before the climactic "eucatastrophe"--as Tolkien called it--where good finally defeats evil), cannot imagine how evil could be defeated and good could possibly win.  (I think of Sam's great speech to this effect in The Two Towers movie.)  The end of the story is very difficult to conceive of from the vantage point of the middle of the story. 

Because pain and wickedness are felt deeply, and because of the difficulty of envisioning the end from the middle, it is difficult for people oftentimes to give an unbiased intellectual hearing to answers to the problem of evil.  It feels like a betrayal or a trivialization of the greatness of the pain to hear someone make an argument for how the allowance of such evils in the world could be justified, or how the allowance of evil leads to a greater good.  No matter how intellectually convincing such arguments are, on an intuitive and emotional level, they feel woefully inadequate to the reality. 

That is all very understandable, and yet, if we wish to get reality right, we must try to approach even this topic with sound, objective reason.  We must distinguish between what our feelings tell us and the intellectual merits of the arguments.  This is one place where the virtue of faith comes in.  Faith is believing to be true what one has good reason to believe to be true even when the appearances are against it.  I once heard the concept of faith illustrated by means of the idea of an airplane pilot flying through thick clouds.  The pilot's intuition, judging from the appearances out his window, keeps telling him that he is about to crash into a mountain, but his instruments tell him he is nowhere near the mountains and there is no danger on his current trajectory.  The pilot has to suppress his instincts and intuitions and trust his instruments.  (I have no idea if pilots actually experience situations like this, not having any experience with flying anything, but the analogy is still useful either way.)  That is how the virtue of faith works.  Our reason leads us to certain conclusions, and yet our instincts make these conclusions seem false.  We have to trust our reason over our intuitions and over the appearances.  But this can be very difficult, and we must be careful to give ourselves and other people what we and they need at the time.  The existence of evil poses intellectual challenges to the idea of God.  These challenges must be met by rational arguments.  But when people are in the midst of evil, they often need comfort, encouragement, pastoral care, and other kinds of personal and emotional support as much as or more than they need intellectual answers.  We cannot respond to the legitimate intellectual challenges by expressions of emotion or platitudes, nor can we properly comfort and encourage people simply by giving them intellectual answers to arguments.  Both of these have an essential role, but they must recognize their proper place. 

OK, with that foundation in place, let’s look briefly at a few examples of particular moral objections. 

1. The Destruction of the Canaanites.  In the Torah, God gives the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants.  A few hundred years later, he leads the Israelites, the covenant descendants of Abraham, out of Egypt and into the promised land.  As we saw from Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and 20:16-17, which we cited earlier, God commands the Israelites to go into the land and fight the inhabitants, wiping them out.  There are three reasons cited for the Canaanites’ destruction:  1. God has given the land to the Israelites.  2. The great wickedness of the Canaanites (see, for example, Genesis 15:16, Leviticus 18:24–25, and Deuteronomy 9:4–5).  Their society was full of much moral corruption, involving things like idolatry, sexual sins, oppression of the poor, child sacrifice, and many other evils.  God also makes it clear that he is not giving the land to the Israelites because they are any better than the Canaanites.  In fact, he warns them that if they behave like the Canaanites, they, too, will get wiped off the face of the land.  (See, for example, Leviticus 20:22–23; Leviticus 18:26–28; Deuteronomy 9:4-6; and Deuteronomy 28:63.)  3. God doesn’t want remaining Canaanite presence in the land to lead the Israelites into sin.  (See, for example, Exodus 23:32–33; Exodus 34:12–16; Numbers 33:55; Deuteronomy 7:3–4; Deuteronomy 12:29–31; and Deuteronomy 20:16–18.) 

The passages in which God commands the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites are very all-encompassing in terms of who is to be destroyed.  Deuteronomy 20:16-17, for example, says they should destroy “all who breathe.”  Was God’s command intended to be as all-encompassing as that, and did the Israelites actually understand and apply it that way?  There are indications that the command was indeed intended quite broadly, and that, at least sometimes, it was carried out in that way.  (See, for example, Deuteronomy 2:34; Deuteronomy 3:6; and Joshua 6:21.)  However, there are also exceptions, such as Rahab and her family (See Joshua 2:1–21, 6:17–25).  It is noteworthy that Rahab expresses recognition of and faith in the God of Israel, and she also rescues Israel’s spies.  That seems to show that the destruction of the Canaanites was not necessarily absolute, but at least partially dependent on the characteristics of the particular Canaanites in question. 

The command was specifically related to the promised land as well, suggesting that if particular Canaanites had left the land voluntarily, they would have exempted themselves from the destruction command.  The command did not imply an obligation to pursue them beyond the borders of the land. 

There is good evidence to think that the command to destroy included not just what we might call combatants, but also women and children as well – and also animals and even often inanimate objects.  It is as if the land was being completely purified of its former inhabitants.  Some have argued that the command to destroy “all that breathe” might have been hyperbolic, but the text does seem to indicate that, at least sometimes, the command seems to have been understood and applied pretty literally and to have included the destruction of women, children, and animals.  On the other hand, again, the example of Rahab indicates possible exceptions and raises questions.  If Rahab and her whole family could be spared because of her trust in God and rescuing of the spies, why would infants, who couldn’t possibly be on the side of Israel’s enemies, need to be destroyed?  Or animals?  The text never really addresses that question.  If I had to guess, I would say that the inclusion of infants and animals, as I mentioned above, had to do with a kind of complete cleansing of the land from the culture of its former inhabitants.  If the Israelites preserved anything from the former inhabitants, perhaps the concern was that it would cause them to follow in their footsteps (a concern which was proved quite justified in Israel’s subsequent history).  Also, the complete destruction of everything symbolized the complete renunciation of an entire culture that had fallen under God’s special curse.  Rahab and her family might have been excepted from this because her (and their?) explicit choice to throw in her lot with God and with Israel had the effect of separating her from the corrupted Canaanite civilization.  At any rate, the example of Rahab does show that the command to destroy was not absolutely absolute.  We could also add the example of the Gibeonites in Joshua 9, and the various times where Israel was allowed to preserve the animals and livestock from destroyed cities (Deuteronoy 20:14; Deuteronomy 2:35, 3:7; Joshua 8:2).  So it is difficult to say exactly how absolute the command to destroy “all that breathes” was intended to be or was in fact applied in specific situations. 

So what do we make of this, morally speaking?  First of all, I want to acknowledge the validity of the concern here.  Killing and death are terrible things, because human life is valuable, and because human happiness is valuable.  The killing of helpless innocents (such as infants) is terrible on an even deeper level.  These things are great evils that must be horribly displeasing to the eyes of a being who is omnibenevolent and who values human life.  So it would seem that a clear argument can be made here that such a being could never command such killing.  But we must be careful of a leap in reasoning here.  We remember some of our principles articulated above.  God hates evil (sin and suffering), but he chooses to allow it to happen to some degree because it is better, in the overall scheme of things, for some evils to be allowed than for all evils to be prevented.  This is a horrible thing, emotionally speaking, but it can be justifiable.  Such allowance of evil does not diminish the terribleness of the evil, but rather illustrates the incredible value of the good to be procured by the allowance of it (ultimately, the revealing of the God who is the Supreme Good and the source of all happiness and thus the happiness of all beings who are enabled to experience that Good).  We must also remember that God is not just a ”private person” in the universe.  He is its owner, lawgiver, and governor.  It is his role to take action to ensure that the best overall good be accomplished.  Even for humans, greater responsibility and authority often entails making judgment calls that can be hard, can seem harsh, and can lead to a degree of pain and suffering, as we discussed earlier.  How much more is this likely to be true when we are dealing with the Supreme Governor of all time, space, and eternity?  We must also keep in mind the fallen nature of the world as a consequence of the Fall of our first parents, and the sinfulness of humanity (as well as the particular sinfulness of the Canaanite communities).  We recall that sin is not a light thing.  Since God is the Supreme Good, rebellion against God is a matter of supreme evil.  It naturally incurs and justly deserves serious negative consequences.  With all of these things in mind, can we really show that the command to destroy the Canaanites was unjust?  What if God decided, in his infinite wisdom, that what was best for the overall good was to bring great calamities and judgments upon the Canaanites because of the sinfulness of their communities, and to use the Israelites as the executioners of these judgments?  Taking into account all the relevant principles and observations and the whole complexity of this sort of thing, can we really show or prove that God’s command was contrary to his infinite wisdom; his empathy and omnibenevolence; the value of love, compassion, human life, and human happiness; or his sense of and commitment to justice?  I don’t think we can.  And if we can’t, then this objection is answered, at least on an intellectual level.  Whether the answer is emotionally satisfying is another question.  As we discussed above, we should not always expect an emotionally satisfying answer to all the questions we might have of this sort, given our position in this world.  A fallen world and the things that go on in it will never be fully emotionally satisfying to us while we live within it, but that is not the same as having a rational objection that successfully disproves the Christian worldview. 

We should also recognize that some theologians believe that the story of the destruction of the Canaanites should be taken not so much as a historical text but as an allegorical text, where the “Canaanites” represent evil and sin, their destruction represents our personal battles against sin and vice in our lives, etc.  As we discussed earlier, discerning authorial intent in a biblical text can be complicated.  Why are we told the story of the destruction of the Canaanites in the biblical text?  Was the author intending to vouch for the historicity of everything he recorded?  Is the purpose to convey moral lessons (no doubt that’s at least part of the purpose) and not to make definitive, unquestionable claims about precise points of history that must be believed, or did the purpose include such definitive historical intent?  We must look to context, make use of all the tools of good biblical interpretation, and trust the guidance of the Church to discern the best answer.  In this case, personally, I don’t see any reason to jettison the more straightforward, historical reading of the text, and yet I cannot rule out categorically or definitively the opinion of those who take a contrary view. 

I’ll deal with some other ethical concerns below, but, as this is already becoming a very lengthy section, I will be a bit briefer, having articulated and illustrated the principles and methods involved in properly examining these kinds of questions in general already.  The reader can apply these principles and methods to all the various objections that are out there. 

2. The Command to Kill Idolaters in the Law of Moses.  As we saw above in our quotation from Deuteronomy 17:2-7, God, in the Law of Moses, commanded the Israelites to execute people caught worshiping false gods within the Israelite community.  Again, some might argue for interpreting this in a non-literal historical sense, but I think the law can be justified in its more literal form as well.  Idolatry is a great sin, because it involves turning away from the true God to other, false gods.  God is the Supreme Good, so to rebel against him is supremely bad.  If the act is done with full knowledge and full willful intent, it leads ultimately to hell.  But even apart from such complete ill intent, even if we assume mitigating circumstances or even complete innocent ignorance on the part of the perpetrator, the action, as an outward action, is still one that is seriously bad and scandalous.  (We're not talking here about good things that can be found in the various religions of the world, but beliefs and practices that involve a rejection of the Supreme Good and treating something that is not the Supreme Good as if it is.  This is idolatry in a Scriptural sense.)  This is especially true within a community like Israel, which had recently been separated from the nations by God in order to be a holy people in which God’s laws would be kept and proclaimed to the nations.  (Idolatry is always potentially scandalous, because it is oriented, by its nature, to leading people away from God.  In a pluralistic world, however, it can be in a way less scandalous because there is already a plurality of beliefs and practices in the culture.  In a society like ancient Israel, however, there was great potential for scandal.)  What if God, wanting to drill into the Israelites the importance of worshiping the true God alone and the dangers of idolatry, knowing their proneness to the latter, chose to put in his Law, intended specifically for this people at this time, a harsh penalty for defiant acts of idolatry among the Israelite community?  Can we really prove this to have been unjust, unloving, etc.?  Again, I don’t want to underestimate the seriousness of anything involving human death, suffering, killing, etc.  And yet, as we’ve seen, if we are going to be rational and deal with the complexities of reality instead of simply settling for un-evaluated and overly-simplistic emotional reactions, we’ve got to dive deeper than that.  And when we do such a deeper dive, I do not see that what we have here constitutes a successful intellectual objection to the Bible or the Christian worldview.

3. Hell.  Hell is the state of final misery incurred by those whose end state involves the permanent rejection of God with full knowledge and will.  We’ve discussed already why it follows logically as a natural and just consequence of the rejection of God.  And I think that what we’ve already said above about evil in general provides us what we need to deal with this subject as well.  However, there is an important difference, in that, while the other evils we’ve looked at have involved only limited and temporary suffering, hell, by its nature, involves permanent and complete suffering.  Some would argue that that makes it fundamentally different and inherently unjustifiable.  Temporary evils, however bad, yet come to an end, and the persons suffering them are redeemed and eternally happy in the end, while hell is, by its nature, eternal and leaves the sufferer ultimately unredeemed and miserable. 

While I grant that this is an important difference, I deny that it exempts hell from the kind of rational answer we’ve given to other instances of evil.  All the principles we’ve laid out above apply to hell as well.  God allows some beings to reject him finally and permanently and thus end up in hell.  He does so because allowing such a thing to happen is best for the overall good in all the sorts of ways we’ve discussed previously.  Why is God justified in allowing temporary evils?  Because, while the evil is evil in itself and in its own nature, yet its occurrence contributes to the greater universal good and happiness, and so its allowance is a good thing.  But how can hell contribute to the universal good and happiness when it involves beings suffering forever in an unredeemed state?  Their suffering is never converted into happiness.  That is true.  But the same principle still holds:  The permanent suffering of beings in hell is infinitesimal in comparison to the infinite happiness of God and the Beatific Vision, and so its allowance is justifiable because it contributes to this overall happiness.  When seen in itself, a temporary evil seems unjustifiable, yet when seen in the context of the whole, it can be seen how it can be allowed and yet the overall good be still perfectly good and beautiful – like how a story, overall, is made better and more perfect by the evils that occur in it, however displeasing they are in their own nature, or like how a piece of music can be made better and more perfect by means of discordant notes that, in themselves, are ugly.  Universal reality is, really and truly, better and more perfect because of the allowance of the evil, which doesn’t ultimately take away from that perfection but actually contributes to it.  It would be the same with hell.  Even though the suffering of those in hell is permanent, the allowance of this state of affairs does not take away from but contributes to the overall, perfect happiness of the whole, viewed from God’s point of view.  God and the saints in heaven will be 100% happy, not because they enjoy the suffering of the damned out of cruelty, nor because they are ignorant of or forgetful of that suffering, but because they see that suffering in its full context, in which it is infinitesimal in comparison to the happiness that is furthered by the allowance of it and so does not diminish one iota from that happiness.  This does not diminish the awfulness of the sufferings of the damned (or even of temporary sufferings); rather, it enhances our recognition of the infinite grandness and perfection of the good that is brought about by means of its allowance.  Hell is justified by the same sorts of observations used to justify temporary suffering:  The allowance of sin and suffering, as the notional opposites of God, is part of what enables God's glorious perfections to be fully seen and experienced.  The allowance of hell brings out very clearly and starkly the seriousness and horror of sin and the greatness of what God has redeemed us from, thus illuminating God's justice, mercy, power, and salvation, and contributing to our experience of God in the Beatific Vision.  If anyone ends up in hell, we can be sure that God saw that allowing that to happen was necessary for the procuring of the overall good.  We must also remember that no one ends up in hell except those who have chosen, with full willfulness and awareness, to reject the Supreme Good.  It is not something that is brought upon people involuntarily or in ignorance.

But, again, although I think the above constitutes a successful intellectual defense of the objection from hell, I do not claim that it always will be or always should be emotionally satisfying to us in this life, although it will be when we reach the Beatific Vision. 

4. Slavery, and the Treatment of Women.  These are, of course, two very distinct topics.  I wanted to mention them without dealing with them here, considering how long this section is already.  I would refer you to the two articles in the footnote for more on these subjects.[4]  In general, though, I would again recommend care in the questioning of assumptions.  For example, what if God decided to create the world in such a way as to give a higher level of authority to one gender or to another?  Let’s say that God gave to wives a higher authority.  For example, a husband and wife, in mutual respect and love, work together as partners to lead the family.  But a case arises in which, due not to pride or to lack of respect or anything like that but simply owing to the realities of life, the husband and wife come to irreconcilable conclusions about what the family should do in some significant matter.  In this kind of situation, let’s say, God has given to the wife a unique authority, which should be acknowledged by the husband, to cast a kind of "final vote" in such matters.  That kind of thing is certainly going to rub people the wrong way in our modern society, which puts a strong emphasis on egalitarianism between the sexes.  But, putting aside our emotional response and looking at the matter objectively and rationally, can we really prove that God could not have created things in this way?  We might have all kinds of ideas as to why we think this would or would not be a good idea, but, remembering that God has wisdom infinitely greater than ours and that he is the Governor of the vast complexity of the universe, can we really prove that God could not see this as something good and just to institute?  I don’t think we can.  I think the only way we can know if this is something that God would see fit to institute is to look at human experience, reason, and revelation to see if God has in fact instituted it.  I’m not suggesting that God has instituted any such thing, but simply using this hypothetical to illustrate the importance of recognizing and questioning assumptions in morality. 

Finally, I want to remind us of how we started this section – by describing how Christianity is centered on love and focuses on justice, love, compassion, and mercy.  It is easy to forget this when we’ve been spending time getting into the weeds of specific, difficult-to-process, harsh-seeming doctrines or passages of Scripture.  But these more difficult areas of Christian Scripture and thought are parts of a larger Scriptural narrative and a larger worldview which center on love and goodness, and which, while acknowledging and dealing with the great evils that exist in this world and all the complexities they bring with them, are ultimately bright with great joy and hope.

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[1] For more on this topic, see https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2019/02/predestination-grace-and-free-will-in.html.

[2] You can find the text of the Essay on Man, among other places, at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2428/pg2428-images.html.

[3] Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, #311 (footnotes removed), retrieved from http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p4.htm#V at 10:26 AM on 1/4/25.

[4] For the issue of slavery, see https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-bible-and-slavery.html.  See also the section on “Missions and the Treatment of Natives” found at https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2020/06/church-history-companion-unit-5.html.  (Also, just to whet your interest on this subject, see https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Eugene04/eugene04sicut.htm and https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm for a couple of historic, 15^th and 16^th century papal pronouncements having to do with the slavery of natives during the times of European exploration and colonization.)  For the issue of the treatment of women, see https://freethoughtforchrist.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-bible-and-catholic-theology-on.html.

Published on the feast of St. John of Damascus, a Doctor of the Church.