The Problem of Animal Pain

A Theodicy For All Creatures Great And Small

T. Dougherty, Y. Nagasawa, E. Wielenberg, Y. Nagasawa, E. Wielenberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137443175
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Animal suffering constitutes perhaps the greatest challenge to rational belief in the existence of God. Considerations that render human suffering theologically intelligible seem inapplicable to animal suffering. In this book, Dougherty defends radical possibilities for animal afterlife that allow a soul-making theodicy to apply to their case.

1

The Plan of This Book

In this chapter, I provide some background that will aid the reader in following the argument of this book. This book is philosophical, yet very personal. I will state here some of the personal and professional background for the writing of the book (§1.1) as well as some of the epistemological assumptions (§1.2). I describe a core notion of the book: “expanded ‘bare’ theism” (§1.3, §1.4), the main hypothesis under scrutiny in this book.

1.1 Background

I taught this manuscript in a graduate seminar in philosophy of religion in the fall of 2013 (the names of the students are in the acknowledgments). I skipped this prologue. I wrote it primarily for myself as a sort of “backstory.” After having them read it at the end of the seminar, they all said that it was very helpful and should be included in the book. They are all very good and smart people, so I have followed their advice. And upon reflection, it now seems clear to me that they were right. Having just re-read the entire manuscript from beginning to end, it is clear to me that though the ideas to follow in this chapter were guiding all I wrote, I was not as explicit there as I could have been. One option was to skip this introduction and explicitly mention these guiding ideas at each point in subsequent chapters, but to be so meta so much of the time would severely clutter the first-order material. Thus, I highly advise that you do not skip this chapter, but, on the contrary, read it very carefully if you are interested in the theme and argument of this book, for keeping it in mind as you go will help avoid misunderstanding and frustration.

When I saw the call for proposals for this series, I interpreted it as, in effect, a call to write down and defend crazy stuff one would otherwise not dare to write. That’s not what it was, of course, but it was close enough for me to believe I had just the right project. I do not deny for a moment that many of the ideas I will put forward in this book will strike the average reader as a bit far-fetched. However, I wish to mitigate that in at least two ways. First, I will try to situate those ideas in a context in which they won’t seem so strange after all.¹ I will even try to affect a gestalt in which what at first seemed crazy now seems obvious when looked at from the right angle. This context will include neglected ideas from the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially in the Eastern Church. Documenting these sources would be a monumental task, but my thinking on these matters has been most deeply influenced by Eastern Orthodox thought. Some of these ancient and Eastern ideas will be somewhat familiar to readers of this book, such as the “soul-making” theodicy pioneered by Saint Irenaeus, the 2nd century Bishop of Lyons who led his church during the persecutions of Marcus Aurelius. Thus sometimes the soul-making theodicy is called the “Irenaean Theodicy.” Irenaeus’ ideas were promoted most prominently in the 20th century by John Hick’s (1966) watershed Evil and the God of Love. Other ideas, such as deification/theosis and the redemption of animals and, indeed, creation as a whole, are less well-known. Some ideas that are a standard part of Eastern Christianity are long-forgotten or neglected in the West. I hope to recover those ideas and present them in a compelling way and to extend them in ways that, though truly radical, are also in a way quite natural. I only wish I could do full justice to this tradition by documenting the hundreds of sources that influenced me. A volume on the history of these ideas would be easy to produce and quite beneficial. Their inclusion in this volume, however, was not an option.

As Hick points out, the Irenaean picture is very different from the Augustinian one. Though Augustine may have considered the Fall a “felix culpa” it still didn’t play anything like the role attributed to it by Irenaeus. For Irenaeus, the struggle is the point of creation, or, rather, the first stage of creation. (The idea that we should expect creation to proceed in stages is of immeasurable importance.) One could be forgiven for thinking that the ideal creation according to Augustine consists in stasis after initial perfection. For Irenaeus, nothing could be further from the truth. We need trials and tribulations to become what God wants us to be. What we become at the end of tribulation is what we were meant to be all along: Saints and Martyrs.

Another father important to the East is the 6th/7th century theologian Maximus the Confessor. One of his key ideas – and he is far from the only eastern father to hold such a view – was called “theosis” or “deification.” The basic idea is that because God the Son took upon human nature fully (the hypostatic union: Jesus Christ is “fully God and fully man”) the human and the divine are inextricably bound together, and the eschatological, soteriological destiny of humans is to be taken up into the divine nature. But theosis doesn’t end there. It ends up expanding to encompass the redemption of all of nature. I want to bring these themes from Irenaeus and Maximus together and expand them. I will defend the thesis that a class of animals (to be discussed later) will not only be resurrected at the eschaton, but will be deified in much the same way that humans will be. That they will become, in the language of Narnia, “talking animals.” Language is the characteristic mark of high intelligence. So I am suggesting that they will become full-fledged persons (rational substances) who can look back on their lives – both pre- and post-personal – and form attitudes about what has happened to them and how they fit into God’s plan. If God is just and loving, and if they are rational and of good will, then they will accept, though with no loss of the sense of the gravity of their suffering, that they were an important part of something infinitely valuable, and that in addition to being justly, lavishly rewarded for it, they will embrace their role in creation. In this embrace, evil is defeated.

A movie scene that nicely captures part of this picture is in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. In the last movie, The Return of the King, toward the end, the coronation of Aragorn is depicted. After his coronation, he walks through the ranks, all bowing to him. Then he directs attention to the principle hobbit protagonists. He praises their courage, and all bow to them in respect, including the King. At that time, without for a moment downplaying the gravity of what they have been through (one is exhausted from their exhaustion by that point), it seems that they would not change what they have been through.² They embrace their role in the story, and in so embracing it, the evil of Sauron is defeated in a way greater than the military destruction of him and his forces.

Few have explored some of the territory I cover here, fewer in analytic philosophy of religion.³ As the series name implies, this book is a report from the frontier. All I can do is send back a report and hope others get interested and move in to explore the territory further (as indeed some of the people mentioned in the Acknowledgements are doing even now). One of the most exciting things I discovered is that many people are doing research relevant to the problem I treat. It’s just that there is not a strong network connecting them.⁴ I hope this book contributes to greater networking among these individuals in general and especially between analytic philosophers on the one hand and applied ethicists, theologians, and scientists on the other. I think all three of the latter can benefit greatly from the tools of the analytic philosopher, and I think analytic philosophers can learn much about what matters and how to look at the big picture from them.

Of course, I didn’t start with a wholly untilled field. Just a few years ago, Mike Murray, sitting not very far from where I sit now in the Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion, perhaps in the same office, perhaps in the same chair,⁵ wrote Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (2008). Most of the ideas for the present book were formed well before that book was written, and I have quite a different take on the issue and quite a different aim and style in this book. However, he is due much credit for his pioneering work on this subject for analytic philosophers. Both because I am tilling parts of the same field (some of which overlap parts he plowed, others farther out in the field) and because the literature on this topic is quite small, I will be interacting with Murray quite a bit, both positively and negatively.

The greatest difference between my project and Murray’s is that Murray dismisses the possibility of a soul-making theodicy for animals with almost no consideration (125). I expect he is not alone in this. But why might this be? Are there really conclusive reasons against this possibility? Is there some set of necessary conditions for a soul-making theodicy to apply, which are clearly not met? One might be forgiven for thinking so. I will do my best to decrease the reader’s tendency to think so. My central project is to develop a new species of more radical soul-making theodicy I call the “saint-making” theodicy, since it focuses not just on the (very important) second-order moral virtues and character traits but, specifically, on the characters of a saint as conceived especially in Catholicism but is present in other forms of Christianity, certainly in Judaism, and perhaps other religions both theistic and atheistic.

The above constitutes generalities that help situate the reader, so that they can get the most from this book. In the next section, I discuss the general structure of my project. Analytic philosophy is characterized by prizing explicit logical structure and explicit appeal to logical systems. The good reasons for this are clear: It makes for clear and precise expression. There is another virtue in it: It makes it easy for the reader to identify where they disagree. It exposes the flaws, puts them front-and-center, rather than burying them beneath turgid prose. I confess that I cannot in this book meet many of the standards standard analytic philosophers will hope for. That is a necessary feature, for this poor author, of the pioneering, interdisciplinary work in a short book. Nevertheless, there is a formal aspect to the book, indeed, at work throughout it. It is a work of applied Bayesianism. My fundamental approach is one of probabilistic reasoning. This approach differs significantly from approaches that focus only on deductive reasoning. The next section of this introduction provides a brief but explicit treatment of the formal structure of my reasoning.

1.2 Epistemology

Throughout the book, I will be using some probabilistic vocabulary just for economy of expression and to make more (but not perfectly!) precise certain claims and relations. Thus, I want to introduce this vocabulary right away. I will use “Pr(A)” to express the probability of whatever is in the parentheses, in this case a proposition A. I will use “Pr(A | B)” to express the probability of A given B. This is called conditional probability. For example, Pr(A heart is drawn | A card is drawn from a shuffled, complete deck of cards) is ¼. The meaning of “given” is not perfectly clear. Relating conditional probabilities to the probability of conditionals is hard, but we needn’t go into that here.⁶ The intuitive notion generated by the card example will take us far. But not all conditional probabilities are so simple. Consider Pr(My wife will be disappointed | I forget to bring home salad). This probability is high but it is not obtained just from counting cases. Now consider Pr(I will be moved to tears | I hear Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion). This is also high, but involves presently ineffable or barely-effable knowledge. If you are to assign a value, you must have some second-personal knowledge of me.⁷ This affects but does not negate our ability to assess the probability in question.

Also, there are many different interpretations of probability.⁸ I think most of what I say here will work on almost any theory of probability. I do not, however, favor a “mathematical” interpretation of probability. I take myself to be employing a broadly “epistemic” and “evidential” notion of probability. Roughly, the evidential, epistemic probability of a proposition p on your total evidence E is a measure of how much “believability” E confers upon p. This is not an analysis, but merely a heuristic for understanding what I am saying. Because I am a staunch fallibilist (see Dougherty 2011b), I cannot accept any epistemic probability of either 1 or 0, thus I cannot accept a mathematical account of epistemic probability. Another reason is that I think that everything that an agent considers a metaphysical possibility should be given by that agent a probability greater than zero (infinitesimal probabilities are only a red herring here), which is not the case for mathematical probability (think of the probability of a real-valued random variable). Commonly, people give counterfactuals to explain epistemic probability, something like “The epistemic probability of p given E is how much a rational or properly functioning or otherwise ideal agent would give p if all the information they had was E.” There are well-known problems with this as an analysis, but, again, it is a helpful heuristic, and I have nothing more helpful (and short) to say.

Now I’ll discuss two notions about evidence and its influence.⁹ We will assume the positive relevance theory of evidence. Some people think there are fancy counterexamples, but they aren’t relevant to us even if they ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Plan of This Book
• 2  The Problem of Animal Pain
• 3  The Bayesian Argument from Animal Pain
• 4  Is There Really a Problem?: The Challenge of Neo-Cartesianism
• 5  There Is a Problem: The Defeat of Neo-Cartesianism
• 6  The Saint-Making Theodicy I: Negative Phase
• 7  The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase
• 8  Animal Saints
• 9  Animal Afterlife
• Concluding Summary
• Bibliography
• Index