Justified True Belief

(P1) Pain counts against God's existence only if it is gratuitous. + Almost nobody thinks pain by itself is evidence against God. The serious versions of the objection say so outright, and they name the extra ingredient they need. (1) Pain with a point is not evidence against a good God. - Picture a parent pinning a screaming two-year-old still for a vaccination, or a surgeon breaking a badly set bone so that it can heal straight. Neither one is a monster. The pain is real, and it is doing something. - So the question is never whether there is pain. It is whether there is pain that accomplishes nothing whatsoever. (2) The word for pain that accomplishes nothing is "gratuitous." - Gratuitous pain is pain God could have prevented without losing some greater good, and without having to permit some evil equally bad or worse. That is the objector's own definition and the standard one in the literature, and it covers pain of every kind, felt by any creature capable of feeling it. - In plainer words, it is pain that does no work. A dentist's drill hurts and earns its keep. The same drill run on a healthy tooth for ten minutes, for no reason anyone could name, would be gratuitous. - Notice how much that definition gives away before the argument even starts. It admits that suffering can be justified, and then rests the whole objection on the claim that this suffering is not. (3) The reasoning runs by a form called modus tollens. - Modus tollens goes like this: if the first thing were true, the second would have to be true; the second is not; so the first is not either. If it rained last night, the driveway would be wet. The driveway is bone dry. It did not rain. - Applied here: if animal pain counts against God, that pain has to be gratuitous. Show that it is not gratuitous, and it does not count against him. - A deductive argument works like a chain, and if every link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. The links do not have to be certainties, only more plausible than their denials, which is a fairer bar than proof and still a real one. (4) The two sides carry different burdens. - No Christian has to name God's reason for any particular animal's pain. Naming it was never part of the claim, and demanding it loads the question. - The objector does not have to prove God impossible either, and the serious versions never try. The claim is that after careful looking, no justifying reason turns up, and that this is good evidence there is none. That is an inference rather than a proof, and in plenty of settings a perfectly good one. - Everything turns, then, on whether this is one of those settings. Think of a mechanic who cannot say why the engineer ran a wire the long way round. With the full schematic spread on the bench in front of him, his failure to find a reason tells him something. Without it, it tells him almost nothing. (5) A second version of the objection asks about the pattern of pain rather than its point. - It grants that some pain does work, and presses the arrangement instead: pain in nature tracks whatever keeps a creature alive and breeding, and a world with nobody steering predicts that pattern better than a world with a good God in charge. - That is a comparison of likelihoods rather than a charge of pointlessness, so the premise that answers it is (P4) rather than (P1). Both versions do need the same thing in the end: an estimate of what a good God would probably have arranged, and an estimate that comes out low. Therefore, the question the animal world raises is not whether animals hurt, but whether their hurting is pointless.

(P2) Most animals may react to injury without feeling anything. + The writhing, the fleeing, the crying out: all of it is behavior a nervous system can produce whether or not anyone is home behind it. Telling behavior apart from feeling is the hardest question in the whole subject. It is also the least settled, and it is unsettled for the overwhelming majority of animals alive. (1) Detecting damage and feeling damage are two different processes. - Nociception is a nervous system's detection of injury and the response it triggers. Your own hand comes off a hot pan before you feel a thing. The spinal cord ran that move by itself, and the sensation arrives a beat later. The withdrawal and the hurt are separate events, and the withdrawal came first. - The felt side has a name too. Philosophers call it phenomenal consciousness, meaning that there is something it is like to be the creature in question. There is something it is like to be you right now. There is something it is like to be a dog waiting at a door. There is plausibly nothing at all it is like to be a thermostat. - Think of it this way: a robot vacuum backs away from a staircase every single time. It has sensors, it has a goal, it changes course. Nobody thinks it is frightened of the stairs. (2) Very simple nervous systems produce surprisingly clever avoidance. - The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is about a millimeter long and has exactly 302 neurons. It learns to avoid the smell of bacteria that once made it sick. A human brain has something on the order of 86 billion neurons, roughly 285 million times as many, and the worm still manages the trick. - Rats whose spinal cords have been surgically cut off from the brain will still learn to hold a hind leg clear of a shock. That learning is happening in a length of cord with no brain attached to it, and nobody on any side of this debate thinks a length of cord is a subject of experience. (3) Where the line falls between the two is genuinely unsettled. - Researchers who work on invertebrate consciousness are candid that there is no agreed method for settling whether an insect feels anything, and no consensus on the answer. That is simply the state of the field, and over the past two decades it has moved toward wider attributions of feeling rather than narrower ones. - A minority of philosophers of mind go further. They argue that the question is not merely open but unanswerable, because our concept of felt experience has no settled application outside the human case. - Honesty requires the point to cut both ways. It is a good reason not to be confident that a wasp suffers. It is not a proof that a wasp does not, and treating it as one is the same mistake pointing the other direction. (4) The arithmetic of the objection depends entirely on where that line falls. - Of roughly 1.5 million described animal species, well over ninety percent are invertebrates, meaning animals with no backbone, and most of those are insects. Count individual creatures rather than species and the imbalance is wider still. - So the staggering total the objection adds up is made overwhelmingly of beetles, mites, worms, and flies. Whether any of them feels anything is precisely what has not been established, in either direction. Therefore, the size of the animal world's suffering cannot be read off the number of animals in it, because most of those animals may be reacting without feeling anything at all.

(P3) The pain animals do feel is not the self-aware suffering humans know. + Vertebrates feel pain, and no honest treatment says otherwise. What they appear to lack is the thing that turns pain into the particular horror it is for us. (1) Human suffering is made largely of knowing. - Ask anyone who has waited on a biopsy result. The worst stretch is often the week before treatment starts, when nothing hurts yet at all. What hurts is knowing. - The distinction is between feeling pain and grasping that you are the one in pain, that it was you yesterday, and that it will still be you tomorrow. Call that second thing self-aware suffering: pain taken up into a creature who knows that the life being damaged is its own. Strip it away and what is left is bad, but it is not the same thing. (2) A creature can hurt without being able to think of itself as hurting. - A dog with a cut paw yelps and limps and licks the wound. It does not lie awake the night before a veterinary appointment. It does not spend the drive over rehearsing what is about to happen. - The deer does not know that it will die. The fish on the line is not contemplating its own mortality. Their pain is real, and it is confined to the moment it occupies. (3) Some animals plan and remember far more than was once thought. - Scrub jays that hide food go back for the perishable items first and leave the durable ones, as though they keep track of what they stored, where, and how long ago. That is a genuine result, it has held up, and it should make anyone cautious about drawing this line too confidently. - Chimpanzees and orangutans have been recorded setting a tool aside for use hours later. One captive chimpanzee gathered stones in the quiet of the morning to throw at visitors in the afternoon. (4) Even passing the mirror test is not holding your life together as a story. - In the mirror-mark test, a mark is placed where an animal can only see it in a mirror. If the animal touches the mark on its own body rather than on the glass, it has connected the reflection to itself. Chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, magpies, and a small reef fish called the cleaner wrasse have all passed some version of it. - The wrasse result is disputed. Critics argue the fish was scraping at what looked like a parasite on another fish rather than recognizing itself, and that argument is not over. - What none of it yet shows, the mirror results and the scrub jays alike, is a creature holding its own life together as a single story, with an ending it can see coming and dread. That is the capacity (P3) turns on. Researchers who argue for wide animal consciousness say so themselves: the richer kind of self-awareness is poorly evidenced outside our own species. (5) Saying animal pain is different is not saying animals do not matter. - Scripture is not squeamish about the difference. Jesus tells frightened disciples that not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Father, and then draws the conclusion they need: "you are of more value than many sparrows" (Matthew 10:29-31). The comparison only works if the sparrow is genuinely noticed. He gives them a graded picture rather than a flat one, which is exactly what (P3) claims. - The righteous man cares for the life of his animal (Proverbs 12:10). Israel's law rested the ox on the Sabbath along with everyone else (Exodus 23:12) and forbade muzzling it while it worked (Deuteronomy 25:4). - If anything, the picture is a merciful one. Whatever else follows, an animal is spared the dread, the anticipation, and the knowledge of its own death that make human dying what it is. Therefore, animal pain is real, and it is not the self-aware suffering the objection asks us to picture when it invites us into the animal's place.

(C1) Therefore, animal pain carries far less moral weight than it appears to carry. + (P2) and (P3) come at the same thing from two directions: how many creatures are suffering, and how much any one of them suffers. (1) The tally shrinks in two ways at once. - Start with how many creatures belong in the tally at all. Reacting to injury is not the same as feeling it, and most of the animals being counted are ones nobody can yet say feel anything (P2). - Then take the ones that plainly do feel. What they lack is the self-aware suffering that carries the greatest moral weight (P3). - What has not shrunk is whether animals matter. They do, and the texts quoted in (P3) say so. (2) None of this licenses cruelty. - A person who concluded from (P2) or (P3) that he may treat a dog however he likes has drawn exactly the wrong conclusion, and has broken a command besides. - Level of awareness bears on how bad a given episode of pain is. It does not hand anyone a permission slip to cause it. (3) What survives still needs an answer. - Millions of vertebrates are torn apart, starve, and drown every day, and they feel it. Nothing in (P2) or (P3) explains that away. - (P4) through (P6) do not try to explain it away either. They answer it. Therefore, the weight of the animal world's pain is a great deal less than it looks, and what remains of it is genuine.

(P4) Stable natural law is required for embodied creatures to act at all. + A world where creatures do anything at all has to be a world where doing a thing has predictable results. That requirement turns out to be expensive. (1) Free action requires a world that behaves the same way twice. - You can throw a ball to a child because gravity is boring. In a world where fire warmed you on Monday and froze you on Tuesday, no creature could learn anything, plan anything, or choose anything, because nothing it did would connect reliably to any outcome. - The name for this reasoning is a natural order theodicy. • A theodicy is an attempt to say what reason God might actually have for permitting some evil. It aims higher than a mere defense, which only has to show that some reason is possible. The natural order theodicy says the reason is the stability itself. (2) The same physics that makes a body livable makes it breakable. - A body soft enough to feel a hand laid on it is soft enough to be torn. A digestive system that can pull nourishment out of food can also absorb poison. Nobody has described a way to build the first without the second. - Rock hard enough to hold a mountain up is hard enough to crush what it lands on. The property is one property. (3) Predation is the other side of speed, hunger, and sight. - The eyes and legs that let a deer outrun a wolf are the eyes and legs that let the wolf run down the deer. It is the same equipment, issued to both. - A creature that has to eat is a creature that can starve, and in a world of finite food, some of the eating is going to be of each other. (4) Suspending the laws case by case would eat the regularity it interrupts. - The obvious repair is to leave the laws alone and have God step in whenever a creature is about to be hurt for nothing. But the stepping in is not free. A world where fire burns except when burning would injure something is a world where nobody can find out what fire does. - Rare exceptions are a different matter, and Christianity has always held that God works some. What the repair needs is exceptions as a standing policy, and a standing policy of exceptions is not an exception at all. It is the rule, wearing a disguise. - Think of a referee who reverses every call that would cost a player the game. After the third reversal there is no longer a game being played, only a series of decisions. (5) The bill for a stable world is real. - A law-governed world does not come free. It costs a great deal, and no theodicy makes that bill disappear. - What can be said is that the cost was plausibly worth paying, because the alternative on offer is not a gentler world. It is a world in which no embodied creature could act at all. - Think of a city that wants its people to be able to get places. It builds roads, and roads produce collisions. Nobody excuses a collision by pointing at the road. The point is that there is no version of getting around town that leaves the roads out. - That is also the limit of what (P4) claims. It says why the possibility of animal pain is built into a world like this one. It does not say why this creature was burned in this fire, and it never pretended to. Therefore, the regularities that make animal pain possible are the same regularities that make animal life possible, and they cannot be separated by any means we can describe.

(P5) Removing predators would replace faster deaths with slower ones. + Every animal dies. Take the predators away and the deaths do not stop; they only take longer. (1) The alternative to being eaten is not living forever. - The objection tends to compare predation with nothing at all. The real comparison is predation against the other ways an animal in the wild comes to an end: infection, injury, parasites, cold, and the long decline of not getting enough to eat. - Measured against those, being killed by something faster than you is the short version. (2) A population with no predators eats through its food and then collapses. - In 1944 the United States Coast Guard put twenty-nine reindeer on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea, a place with no wolves and no bears. Nineteen years later there were about six thousand of them, a two-hundredfold increase, and the lichen they lived on was essentially gone. - Then came one exceptionally hard winter. By the next census there were forty-two animals left, forty-one of them female and one male, with no calves anywhere on the island. Nothing had hunted them. That was the entire problem, and the herd never recovered. - A predator-free world is not a world without mass death. It is a world where mass death arrives as famine. (3) Not every kill is quick. - Some deaths by predator are appalling and slow. A pack can start feeding on an animal that is still alive, and Darwin's own example of pointless cruelty in nature was a cat playing with a mouse. Nobody who has watched a wildlife film needs to be told that predation is not gentle. - What being caught actually feels like is another matter. Seized by a lion in 1844, the missionary David Livingstone described "a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening." He compared it to a mouse going limp after the first shake of a cat, and guessed it was a mercy given to every animal taken by a carnivore. Physiology now has a name for it: stress-induced analgesia, the blunting of pain under extreme threat. - (P5) is about populations rather than individual episodes. Across a whole population, the deaths predators cause run shorter than the deaths that replace them when the predators are gone, which is a comparison between two bad arrangements rather than a defense of one good one. (4) Removing predators is something wildlife managers now spend money undoing. - Wolves were returned to Yellowstone in 1995, some seventy years after the last of them had been killed off, into a park where elk had browsed the streamside willows down hard. In parts of the park the willows, the beaver, and the songbirds recovered afterward. - Ecologists genuinely disagree about how much of that recovery the wolves caused, since drought, bears, hunting, and elk simply moving elsewhere all played a part. The case should not be pushed harder than the data allows. What is not in dispute is that the predator-free arrangement was failing on its own terms. (5) A geologist made this case in 1836. - More than twenty years before Darwin published, the geologist William Buckland argued that death by a predator is on balance a mercy. It subtracts from the total pain of dying, it cuts short disease and slow decay, and it holds numbers within what the land can feed. - He was writing natural theology, the attempt to argue for God from the study of nature, and that genre has gone out of fashion. The reasoning does not depend on it. The reindeer on St. Matthew Island had never heard of Buckland, and it made no difference to how they died. Therefore, the predation the objection finds hardest to accept is, inside a world of finite food, on the whole the gentler of the deaths actually on offer.

(P6) The present state of creation is not its final state. + Christianity has never taught that the world as we find it is the world as it will be. The claim is old, it comes straight out of the text, and it changes what the fossil record is evidence of. (1) Paul says creation is not yet what it will be. - Creation "was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope" (Romans 8:20). The Greek word behind "futility" is mataiotes, meaning emptiness or frustration: a thing not reaching what it is for, like a field that will not hold seed. - The two details usually skipped are the important ones. Creation "was subjected," which is passive, so it did not drift into this condition; somebody put it there. And it was subjected "in hope," which means the condition was imposed with an end in view rather than suffered as a breakdown. (2) The prophets' picture of the end has no predation in it. - The wolf dwells with the lamb, the leopard lies down with the young goat, the lion eats straw like the ox, and "they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain" (Isaiah 11:6-9). - Whatever that language finally amounts to, and Christians read it in more than one way, it is offered as the future rather than as a lost past. The direction of the hope is forward. (3) Christians who have thought hardest about this have admitted they were guessing. - Nobody in the tradition claims to know what becomes of a wren. The most widely read Christian book on the problem of pain, published in 1940, gave animals a whole chapter and then admitted inside that chapter that the whole of it was guesswork with no authority behind it. - The honest position is that Scripture says creation will be liberated and does not say how far down the ladder that reaches. (4) Hope is not an explanation. - A promise about the end does not explain why there was pain at the beginning. That work belongs to the natural order and to the shape of animal death (P4, P5), and if those two fail, no promise will rescue them. - Making something up to a creature afterward is not the same as having had a reason for it, and the difference is worth keeping straight. - There is a third possibility, which philosophers call defeat: not paying a creature back for what it went through, but taking the suffering up into a larger good so that it becomes part of what that good is. Two friends fall out badly and are reconciled years later. The friendship afterward is not the friendship that would have existed had nothing gone wrong, and the injury is part of what it now is. Whether the promise in Romans 8 reaches animals in that way is exactly what nobody knows. - What (P6) denies is that the fossil record is the last word about the creatures in it. An objection that treats the present arrangement as final is arguing against a Christianity that does not exist. Therefore, the state of nature the objection points to is, on Christian teaching, a stage rather than a verdict.

(C2) Therefore, animal suffering does not make God's existence improbable. + The animal world does not give anyone good reason to think God is not there. That is the whole claim, and it is narrower than the one people usually hear. (1) The pain that remains is not gratuitous. - Pain counts against God only if it is gratuitous (P1). Three things stand in the way of calling what remains gratuitous: • A stable order whose regularities cannot be suspended case by case without destroying the regularity itself (P4). • A food chain that shortens dying rather than lengthening it (P5). • A creation ordered toward an end it has not yet reached (P6). - On top of those three, a large share of what the tally counted was never shown to be suffering at all (P2, C1). - Take them together and the "if" in (P1) has nothing left to fire on. - The step from the goods those premises name to the flat words "not gratuitous" is the hardest step in the whole case, and it is not self-evident. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest. (2) The case stands on two legs. - The first leg gives positive reasons why animal pain in a world like ours would serve a purpose (P4, P5, P6). The second denies that our failure to see a purpose in some particular case is good evidence that there is none. - Neither leg is asked to do the other's work. The positive reasons cover the arrangement. The limit on arguing from our own ignorance covers the individual episode that no arrangement was ever going to explain. - Think of a defense lawyer who both produces an alibi and shows that the eyewitness could not have seen the street from where he was standing. Either would help on its own. Together they cover different ground. (3) None of this is evidence that God exists. - Nothing in (P1) through (P6) counts toward theism, the claim that God is real. The work is defensive from beginning to end, and an objection that fails to make theism improbable has not thereby made it probable. - Whether God exists is settled, if at all, by everything there is. The arguments for theism have to be weighed against the difficulties, and the animal world is one item on a long list. - Nor does any of it claim to know God's reason for any particular animal's pain. An argument that claimed that would deserve the suspicion it got. - Nor does any of it say animals do not matter. The texts in (P3) rule that reading out. (4) Better evidence about animal minds would weaken the case considerably. - If the science settled that most animals possess rich, self-aware suffering that persists across time, (P2) would be false and (P3) would lose most of its force. Everything would then rest on (P4) through (P6) alone, and it would be a good deal weaker for it. - That is a real vulnerability, and it is a moving one, since work on animal consciousness has been expanding the circle rather than shrinking it. Saying so is not a concession made under pressure. It is what the state of the evidence actually supports. Therefore, the animal world is a real difficulty for Christian belief, and it is not a disproof of it. See also: CO / PoE: Intellectual PoE: Probabilistic Natural Theology: The Moral Argument