Why Animal Suffering is still a Serious Problem for Christians: A Reply to Hart

I recently posted a video critiquing capturingchristianity’s take on the problem of animal suffering. In that video, I argued that Cameron’s responses are impotent in response to a properly stated abductive argument from evil. Recently, Cameron let me know on facebook that one of his writers (Seth Hart) responded to my video on Cameron’s website.

Imagine my puzzlement, then, when I opened up the article and found that nothing I said in the video was cited in the article. A few of the topics I brought up in the video were referenced, but I honestly had a hard time reconstructing exactly how the article was meant to be a response to my specific points. It seemed more like the author’s personal contribution to the general debate, which largely brought up new points that neither I nor Cameron nor Alex mentioned in any of our videos. Nevertheless, since this is billed as a ‘response’ we might as well see how it fares as one.

The first point I responded to in the video was Cameron’s assertion that atheism (in my video I focused on naturalism rather than atheism) no better predicted animal suffering than theism. In my video, I made a few points in response to this. First, there is in fact something about the bare content of each of these hypotheses that leads the naturalist to make better predictions; namely, that on theism reality is fundamentally good, loving, and caring, and so we have positive reasons to think that God would not allow the widespread suffering and languishing of animals. On naturalism, reality is indifferent, so we at minimum lack this positive reason to expect that there will not be horrific animal suffering.

In what seems to be a response to this point, Hart calls the reason I offered ‘the best response I have seen” but suggests that Cameron’s two theodicies can give us reason to expect suffering on theism. Of course, I never denied that the theist could use theodicies to explain the data (in fact, I explicitly acknowledged this). However, two points are in order:

First, at this point in the video Cameron was challenging the idea that there is even a prima facie problem for theism relative to naturalism. Clearly, what I said establishes that there is. If there was not, there would be no need to offer theodicies.

Secondly, the correct way to evaluate the success of a theodicy is using the weighted average principle (WAP), as pointed out by Robert Adams and Paul Draper [1]. This principle can be stated as follows, where ‘e’ is the evidence, ‘t’ is theism, and ‘a’ is the theodicy:

Pr(E|T) = (Pr(A|T) x P(E|T&A)) + (Pr(~A|T) x P(E|T & ~A))

In regular language, WAP says that successful theodicies are those which account for the data well and are independently likely stories on theism antecedently. The problem is that, as I pointed out, Cameron did not even come close to justifying either of the two key terms in the above equation in his video. Cameron did not explain why animal soul-building is antecedently likely on theism, nor how it explains the data we see. This latter point is especially crucial because, as far as I can tell, if anything T conjoined with A ought to lead us to expect that we observe suffering in animals insofar as that suffering allows for soul-building that exists in a defeat relationship with that suffering. Clearly, this does not lead us to expect the primarily biological role of pain and pleasure in animals, the extremely high rate of languishing of animals over hundreds of millions of years, or particularly horrific (and indeed soul-destroying) suffering. Note that the kind of world we should expect on theism need not be one ‘totally devoid of suffering’ as Hart suggests, rather, it would be one in which suffering plays a primarily moral, constructive role in the world (and where horrific suffering is minimized).

The second point I made was that when we take into account the background evidence about evolution, the naturalist makes better predictions than the theist (not equally good predictions as Cameron suggested). Hart concedes that I am correct that evolution is part of the background evidence. However, he suggests that the evolution of conscious beings specifically is more likely on theism than naturalism, since on theism evolution is directed towards the actualization of conscious beings. He provides no argument for this. Nevertheless, I actually agree that higher consciousness is more likely on theism than on naturalism (see an upcoming post). The problem with this argument is that this is a separate piece of data. What I was considering in that video is what the probability of animal suffering was, not the probability that higher conscious beings would emerge via evolution. Hart himself raises this response, but he has a rebuttal:

“The issue with this response is that it is not apparent the theist needs to explain anything more than the existence of creatures capable of suffering in order to account for suffering itself. Given that most theists accept some form of indeterminism regarding free will, all the theist must do is extend this freedom to nonhuman creatures in order to provide a sufficient account for suffering’s origin in such organisms. This is not an ad hoc move by theist given that freedom must have evolved sometime during our evolutionary history. Perhaps, given Plantinga’s transworld depravity and the truth of some version of the best-of-all-possible-worlds (one entailing the reality of embodied, conscious creatures), suffering is, in fact, a certainty. Perhaps not. Perhaps there are, instead, good reasons for God preferring our world over one without suffering or with a lesser degree of it (as outlined above). Given the above points, judging the likelihood of animal suffering on theism or naturalism proves to be a remarkably difficult task.However, one could argue the conjunction of these myriad points (transworld depravity, virtue cultivation, etc.) renders suffering not only plausible on theism but, perhaps, even likely. In any event, the naturalist assumption of better predicting suffering is, at best, unwarranted.”

I don’t think this response gets close to hitting the mark. Firstly, while I agree that higher conscious beings existing is more likely on theism than naturalism, I do not agree that the particular types of conscious beings we see (with their peculiar capacity for suffering, moral characters, cognitive impressiveness) are more likely on theism than naturalism. Indeed, I think the fact that the conscious beings we observe are so unimpressive and capable of so much suffering is far more probable on naturalism than theism for some of the reasons I mentioned in my video (but also stay tuned for an upcoming post). Secondly, including that conscious beings exist that are capable of suffering in our background does not predict anything about the particular distribution or quality of suffering that we see. That conscious creatures exist that are capable of suffering is compatible with their being very high rates of flourishing, no extremely horrific suffering, and suffering only for moral reasons. And, it is precisely the extremely high rates of languishing, horrific suffering, and biological pain in the animal kingdom that is unexpected on theism, for reasons I outlined briefly in my video and that Paul Draper has covered in greater lengths elsewhere [2].

Hart suggests that positing that animals have some kind of libertarian free will helps the theist. This is a suggestion that Cameron never used and succumbs to the same point I made about theodicies earlier: the theist is free to suggest them, but we have been given no reason to think they work. Indeed, I find it hard to see why God would care about libertarian free will in lower animals when any kind of indeterminate free will they have would be morally irrelevant (since most if not all animals do not understand morality) nor do I understand how this is meant to predict the data we see. Hart tries to utilize Plantinga’s free will defense, but of course that defense is littered with problems and is irrelevant to an evidential argument from evil anyways (since it’s a defense, not a theodicy) [3].

As far as I could tell, the points I just covered above are the only arguments brought up in Hart’s response that come close to engaging the points I made. Hart does make a few other points that as far as I can tell are just new arguments of his own. They do not relate to anything Cameron said. First, Hart suggests that ‘naturalism’ has no clear definition. Naturalists do define naturalism differently. Theists also define theism differently across and within traditions. This isn’t a reason to think we can’t pick particular definitions and plausibly compare hypotheses. Hart also suggests that the concept of ‘adaptation’ in biology is a problematic, ‘explanatorily vacuous tautology’ and that adaptations require a kind of non-natural, teleological realism to be intelligible. Hart elaborates on this point in a comment on facebook wherein he suggests the following:

“I challenge whether evolution can consistently be added as background knowledge for both naturalism and theism. If evolution is a non-natural process included in the background knowledge, the probability of naturalism given any phenomenon is 0% since it would entail a contradiction. Thus, we might have to remove Darwinian evolution from the background knowledge.”

According to Hart’s biography, he believes that terms like ‘adaptation’, ‘organism’ and ‘fitness’ all entail the existence of God. All of this is, of course, a totally novel argument from evolution to theism. Perhaps this is meant as a response to my suggestion in the video that evolution is more probable on naturalism than theism. Sure enough, if the probability of evolution on naturalism is 0%, naturalism is in trouble. However, I find this to be a remarkable claim that was not given any sort of comprehensive defense in the article being discussed (by the author's own admission). Hart links to another one of his articles and suggests that this argument is defended 'at length' elsewhere. Since I mean this to be a quick response for now, I will perhaps take up this argument another time and note that, for now, it strikes me as enormously implausible and unmotivated.

I conclude that Hart's article does nothing to defeat the kind of abductive argument from animal suffering I discussed in my video. I am still not sure how much of a response the article was even intended to be, given that it did not really substantively engage with my primary points. Nevertheless, I hope my response will be of value for those interested in this argument, and that people will utilize the resources I have linked to learn more about it.

[1] Adams, R. M. (1985). Plantinga on the Problem of Evil. In J. E. Tomberlin & P. Van Inwagen (Eds.), Alvin Plantinga (pp. 225–255). essay, D. Reidel Pub. Co. 

Draper, P. (1989). Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists. Noûs, 23(3), 331. https://doi.org/10.2307/2215486

[2] Draper, P. (1989). Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists. Noûs, 23(3), 331. https://doi.org/10.2307/2215486

Draper, P. (2017). God, Evil, and the Nature of Light. In The Cambridge companion to the problem of evil (pp. 65–84). essay, Cambridge University Press.

[3] Daniel Howard-Snyder, a theist, has an excellent piece critiquing Plantinga: http://faculty.wwu.edu/~howardd/mackieandplantingaonlogicalproblem.pdf. I also recommend Adams: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/MIDDLE-KNOWLEDGE-AND-THE-PROBLEM-OF-EVIL-ROBERT-Adams/07f88b5f7bf43d7ef0f5b80353800b9a99aba50e?p2df