The Problem of Suffering and the late 18th century Enlightenment

Stephen Viccio

 

 

I.                    The Impact of Newton’s Principia on the European Zeitgeist

 

-          Newton’s Principia (1660) spawns a method for proving the existence of God: the argument according to design; the clockwork universe

-          Newton’s Proof of the New Cosmology and Its Imact on religious belief

-          Theism: Newton himself believed that God could intervene in history.

-          “You need to wind the watch.”

-          Deism: rational Christianity: the clockwork universe

-          The Universe is set in motion by a first cause and everything that will happen is linked by a causal sequence to that first cause.

-          God conceived the History of the Universe in its entirety, set it in motion at the beginning of time, but cannot intervene in its progress.

-          “deus abscondidas”

-          Atheism

-          People were still  burned at the stake for renouncing their belief in God.

 

II.                  Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697)

 

-          the return of Manicheanism: a Roman religion (3rd and 4th c. A.D.) which explained the existence of evil as the result of a grand struggle between opposing deities of light and dark, good and evil.

 

III.               G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716)

 

-          Leibniz discovered the calculus independent of Newton.

-          Discourse on Metaphysics (1686)

-          Theodicy (1711): theos + dike= God + justice

-           The Queen of Prussia asked Leibniz to solve for her the problem of innocent suffering, and Leibniz spent ten years writing Theodicy.

-          Theory of optimistic determinism

-          When the ultimate chain of cause and effect is unraveled, all suffering will be revealed to be an aspect of  greater good.

 

IV.                Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733)

 

-          popularization of Leibniz’s optimistic determinism

-          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.

 

V.                  Responses to The Lisbon Earthquake (November 1, 1755 at 9:30 a.m.)

 

-          20% of the city, 50,000 people killed: the most destructive natural event Europe had ever seen

-          Gabriel Malagrida (1789-1761)

-          John Wesley (1703-1791)

-          Sabatiano de Carvalho, the Marquis of Pambal

-          Moslem clerics at the Mosque at Al Mansur in Rabat

-          Others

 

 

 

VI.                Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake” (begun in November, 1755 and finished in January, 1756) and Candide (begun the day after the poem was completed and finished in 1758.)

 

-          the poem

-          Rousseau’s response (August 18, 1756)

-          Voltaire’s Candide (published 1759)

-          Voltaire’s “Theist” in his Philosophical Dictionary (1759)

-          A person who believes in a benign creator, but has no idea how God acts.

 

VII.             David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (written in mid 1760’s, published posthumously in 1779)

-          The participants in the dialogues (Philo, Cleanthenes, Demea, Pamphilus)

-          Slices the clockwork universe to shreds

-          The existence of the universe: a happy accident

-          Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789)

-          A Return to the Watch Metaphor

-          Thomas Hardy’s Ironic alternative: the anti-version of  pope in “The Convergence of the Twain”: lines on the loss of the Titanic.

 

 

 

The Problem of Evil (Adam) (class discussion)

 

Why would an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God make a world with a great deal of evil in it?

 

How would each of the authors we have studied this semester have responded to this question?

 

Homer’s Odysseus (trouble)

 

The Book of Job

 

Human Nature and The Catholic Church (Chaucer)

 

Macbeth and Shakespearean Tragedy

 

The church’s answer:

-          The Eden myth (the tree of knowledge, Man’s first disobedience and the Fall)

-          God bestowed freedom of will on his creation so that we coulld possess the opportunity to achieve dignity and grace. We were created sufficient to stand but free to fall.

-          Original sin (Adam) but possibility of atonement (Christ)

-          Last Judgement: everything will be sorted through and justice meted out.

-          St. Augustine (426 A.D.)

-          Othodox Catholicism

-          Evil entered the world through Satan’s free will, but evil will finally be destroyed.

 

Late 17th and early 18th century skepticism

 

Deism- (see Pelagainism, Socinianism)

 

-          rational Christianity, natural religion, philosophical idealism, systematic idealism

-          effort to justify submission and benevolence without recourse to theological sanction

-          a secular, social ethic defensible by reason: universal and scientific without revelation

-          confidence in reason after Newton’s Laws of Motion and Locke’s new Epistemology (tabula rasa)

-          the ravages of religious warfare of the 17th c. encouraged thougthful people to be skeptical about the path of religion, and of the clergy in particular

-          If God is the remote clockmaker, what is man’s role?

-          Man should accept his role in the operation of this deterministic universe

-          That means accepting social forms, the rational arrangement of society, common sense

-          See Franklin’s Science of Virtue

-          Still, how can we accept the presence of evil in a divinely planned universe?

 

17th Century  Responses to the Problem of Evil:

 

1.       Manichaeism (revived by Pierre Bayle (1697))

-          the problem of evil is insoluble from a Christian perspective.

-          God vs. the Devil: evil has always been part of the universe.

-          God is not omnipotent.

1.       Blaise Pascal’s Pensees (1670)

-          evil is evidence of man’s radically flawed nature.

-          Our faulty vision does not allow us to see God’s justice.

2.       Leibniz (1710)

-          optimistic determinism

-          When the ultimate chain of cause and effect is unravelled, evil will be found to be the cause of greater good.

3.       Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury

-          optimistic moral rationalism derived from God

4.       Bernard Mandeville (1715)

-          man’s inherent depravity; most virtue is vice.

5.       Bolingbroke (1720’s)

-          sensible men could reach all the truth they need by studying natural religion without clergy

6.       Pope (1733-34)

-          whatever is, is right

-          our lowly scale of sense prevents us from seeing disaster as caused by general law

7.       Rousseau (1755)

-          Man brings misfortunes upon himself:

-          Overcrowding in the city heightened the destructiveness of the Lisbon Earthquake.

8.       Marquis de Sade

-          Evil exists; God is omnipotent and malignant.