The Singularity Complicates Axiological Theism
This is a short article in the long debate over whether we should hope God exists. It argues there are reasons -- lack of pointless suffering -- to hope we reside in a theistic world
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This short paper was an entry in a contest on how technological advances like artificial intelligence and technological singularities impact the philosophy of religion. This piece was rejected, but I still think it has value: it argues, against a recent critic, that there is a good reason to hope that we reside in a theistic universe (that God exists): God offers a metaphysical guarantee against pointless and gratuitous suffering. Enjoy!
The possibility of a technological singularity—where technological development turns on itself, thereby accelerating technological progress in extraordinary ways—has implications for debates in philosophy of religion, specifically in the axiology of theism literature. This is a recent area in the philosophy of religion that, instead of focusing on the evidential and rational implications of belief in God, the focus has shifted to whether it would be good—for specific individuals, every individual, or even the world as a whole—if (the theistic) God existed, and how that impacts if we should hope God exists[1].
To situate the debate a bit, recent arguments by philosophers Penner and Arbour[2] and Licon[3] hold that the existence of God would be good provided it afforded individuals a metaphysical guarantee against gratuitous suffering—suffering that God allows that is necessary to prevent even worse suffering, or which is necessary to bring about an even greater good. The gist of these arguments is that should God exist, then we can be assured that apparently gratuitous evils are, in fact, morally offset. To be justified, they must either prevent even greater evil, or bring about an even greater good[4]. This looks like a strong pro tanto moral reason to rationally hope God exists, where rational hope entails that God existing would be desirable and is at least an epistemic possibility[5]. As Licon explains,
[If] we had a button that when pressed would eliminate all gratuitous suffering from the world (while leaving everything of value intact), it is difficult to imagine that anyone, except perhaps sociopaths, would think that they lacked a strong moral pro tanto reason to press it. But if theism is true, then the implication would be ipso facto the same as pressing the button[6].
Some philosophers, though, are not moved by this argument. They hope God doesn’t exist for similar reasons. As Kahane explains, speaking specifically of this guarantee against gratuitous suffering,
I don’t want horrors such as the holocaust to be written, so to speak, into the very fabric of the universe. I don’t want a world in which such horrors occur to be the best, or even good enough—and for all the many ways in which they could have been avoided to be even worse (or no better)[7].
The idea is that to hope God exists, thereby ensuring a safety net against gratuitous suffering, is to hope that the world must contain such suffering as the only or best avenue by which to prevent even greater suffering or bring about a greater good. It implies there are no better, less awful, avenues for God, or whomever, to achieve those desired moral ends without having to allow suffering like genocide, the Holocaust, and so forth.
Circle back to the concrete possibility of a technological singularity. Such a possibility raises the real question about whether we are in a technologically simulated environment[8], and the evils and horrors we experience are (at least somewhat) metaphysically ephemeral similar to what we experience while having a bad dream or a nightmare—seemingly horrific until we awake to discover it was merely a dream. The possibility of radical error is hardly new to philosophy, or even to philosophy of religion[9]. However, the difference here is that a technological singularity, in light of recent developments in artificial intelligence, though in its nascent stated, makes such a scenario far more concrete than a mere epistemic possibility. If such technology is a concrete possibility, then it is a concrete possibility that we are currently in something like a simulated environment that is seemingly real, but metaphysically ephemeral and lacking the moral standing like the events in a nightmare such that,
when we wake up from a nightmare: the terrible sufferings which had beset us and which had seemed so real, simply dissipate in the light of day, vanishing into nothingness and insignificance. For all we know— I thought—this is exactly what will happen with all our suffering[10].
If we were trapped in a simulation where our suffering had the same metaphysical significance of a nightmare, then one would still have a reason to hope God exists, as a metaphysical backstop against gratuitous suffering, despite the critique offered by Kahane. This is because God would be a metaphysical guarantee against gratuitous suffering[11], but where that suffering isn’t ‘written … into the very fabric of the universe,’ just as nightmares aren’t written into the fabric of the universe either. The lesson here is to realize that how one should think about the rationality of hoping God does or doesn’t exist hinges on how a metaphysical guarantee against gratuitous suffering from theism is cashed out. The concrete possibility of technological singularity has profound implications for debates in the axiology of theism and for hoping God exists.
[1] Kraay, Klaas J. (2021). The Axiology of Theism. Cambridge University Press
[2] Myron A. Penner and Benjamin H. Arbour (2017). Arguments from Evil and Evidence for Pro-theism. In Klaas Kraay (ed.), Does God Matter? Essays on the Axiological Consequences of Theism, pp. 192-202
[3] Jimmy Alfonso Licon (2021). Aspirational theism and gratuitous suffering. Religious Studies 57 (2): 287-300
[4] Daniel Howard-Snyder and Frances Howard-Snyder (1999). Is Theism Compatible with Gratuitous Evil? American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (2):115 - 130
[5] The issue is more complicated but ignore that: Martin, Adrienne M. (2013). How We Hope: A Moral Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press
[6] Licon (2021, 293)
[7] Kahane, Guy (2021). Should Atheists Wish That There Were No Gratuitous Evils? Faith and Philosophy 38 (4): 460-483
[8] Nick Bostrom (2003). Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):243-255
Dustin Crummett (2021). The real advantages of the simulation solution to the problem of evil. Religious Studies 57 (4): 618-633
[9] Gabriel Citron (2015). Dreams, Nightmares, and a Defense against Arguments From Evil. Faith and Philosophy 32 (3): 247-270
[10] Citron (2015, 270)
[11] Jimmy Alfonso Licon (forthcoming). Should We Hope Apparent Atrocities Are Illusory? Exploring a Puzzle in Moral Axiology: dialectica
Hi Jimmy. Some comments:
If a cruel slaveowner says “You might as well accept a beating with the wrench, since if I do that to you, then I won’t have to stab you with the knife”. And then the slave says okay to the beating, in order to avoid the stabbing. So, the pain from the beating prevented a worse pain, from the stabbing. But I take it that the beating isn’t thereby non-gratuitous. After all, the cruel slaveowner is the asshole who set up the system in which if the beating hadn’t happened, then the stabbing would have happened.
Or suppose the slaveowner says “You can marry and live the rest of your life with the woman you love, in the best slave shack in the state, but you first have to eat this shit in order to earn it”. Suppose the slave thinks this is a fantastic trade: a little bit of suffering for an enormous amount of good. The goodness of the good far surpasses the badness of the bad. Even so, the shit-eating isn’t gratuitous, I take it, because the slaveowner is the one who set up the cruel rule in which the only way to the great life was to eat shit.
Similarly, I have wondered about gratuitous sufferings in the Problem of Evil context. I understand that an instance of suffering S1 is supposed to be non-gratuitous if it was “necessary” to prevent an even worse suffering S2, or obtain a greater good G. But what’s the modality here? God’s the dude who sets the rules of the universe. If the rules say “If S1 doesn’t happen, then S2 happens/G doesn’t happen”, and God’s responsible for that rule, and the universe could have existed with life, consciousness, and even Miles Davis and Beethoven but without that rule, or similar shitty rules, then isn’t S1 gratuitous?