The
thesis for this piece is that it would be good for there to be an
eternal God. This will not seem controversial enough to merit
cloudspace for most believers, and unbelievers may think it equal in
interest to how many angels could dance on the head of a pin if
angels there were. The question of the intrinsic value of eternal
persons is, admittedly, largely a conceptual etude. It is, however, I
think of some interest that the proposition can be established with
relatively little machinery. It is, in fact, a fairly easy theorem of
intrinsic value theory, and depends on almost nothing in the way of
theology. For example it ignores any good thing that God might do for
human beings.
In
my book Hope
to God, (https://scribl.com/books/E9HZ8/hope-to-god the argument gets only two paragraphs.
Although the chief burden of the book is to argue that hope for the
existence of a good God is reasonable, this argument only seeks to
establish that the existence of an eternal God (or gods) would be of
value, and so at least worth wishing for. Here are the two
paragraphs:
In addition, the
existence of God guarantees the eternal existence of consciousness
and thought. There have been many philosophers who believe that
consciousness, or such particular states of consciousness as
pleasure, are all that is valuable in the universe. Even if they are
not right about this, surely some kinds of consciousness are
valuable. This is not a difficult idea to grasp. It is a better thing
that Jill have a long and happy life instead of being killed by
lightning at age three.
We have good
scientific reasons for believing that the career of human
consciousness and thought will come to an end in the cosmologically
near future – in several million years to be very optimistic.
Extraterrestrial thought may last longer. Life may not yet start to
evolve for billions of years in some star system just now forming.
Eventually, however, the universe will decay beyond the possibility
of thinking creatures. That God, and hence consciousness and thought,
will survive this would be a good thing. At least there will be some
consciousness left in the universe. This will be so even if God is
alone in his heaven, without angels or souls for company. I here
assume that God’s consciousness is desirable to himself. It is not
continuing and overwhelming pain. Traditional theology is not to the
contrary and no one would hope for a God who was in eternal agony.
Let
me go a little deeper than would be suitable for a book intended for
the intelligent general audience. I think the argument is pretty
solid, but it is always good to check for weak spots, and the
examination may turn up some other points of interest.
A
Nihilist Objection
Are
there any theories of intrinsic value on which no states or functions
of consciousness are valuable? One, although it is a theory of
intrinsic value only generously defined, is nihilism in the form that
absolutely nothing is intrinsically valuable.
Someone,
although not you, might briefly be attracted by the following
argument: “Nothing is intrinsically valuable because value is
always in the service of some interest or for some
further end.” This, of course, leads to infinite regress. Moreover,
if we do trace back back the interests or further ends it seems more
than likely that we will run across persons and their consciousness
somewhere, e.g. “because it makes me happy” or “because it
satisfies her desire.” It is not, perhaps, that we will find only
persons and their consciousness, but we will certainly find at least
persons and consciousness.
The
nihilist might respond:
You
have shown, at most, only value for a
particular person, not intrinsic value of a universal or objective
sort. What is it to you or to me that it something is valuable to
God? You were supposed to show that God's eternal existence is an
intrinsic value, which must surely be a value we must all
acknowledge. All you have so far is a value that God acknowledges,
and to which we could be entirely indifferent. What need we care
about God?
This
egoistic (or at least subjectivist) nihilist is right, of course,
that he needn't care about God. He might even be mystheistic and wish
God ill. The anti-nihilist will point out here, however, that being
hated by someone is insufficient to defeat the claim of intrinsicness
on behalf of a value. Many philosophers have believed that pleasure
felt by any being capable of feeling pleasure is intrinsically
valuable and have not conceded defeat in acknowledging that some
people want some other people to feel only pain. There is nothing
logically impossible in putting yourself in simple, direct opposition
to intrinsic value.
Yet
in so arguing against the nihilist we have established at most the
consistency of the existence of intrinsic value that is not
universally endorsed. We have as yet no positive argument for
intrinsic value. To reach towards a positive argument, consider a
state of consciousness s
that A
considers more highly desirable than any other state that A
could be in at that time. s
has no future consequences for A
that A
considers undesirable. A
can and does get into s
without any effects at all on any others, now or in the future. It is
not even a state that others would object to, be offended by, or feel
any uneasiness about if they knew that A
was in s.
Wouldn't it be a good thing that A
should have s? If we could costlessly remove some obstacle preventing
A
from exercising a choice to be in s,
shouldn't we do so?
The
nihilist strikes a familiar note in responding:
s may be of
value to A, but that does not make it a value for the rest of
us. I deny that something's being a value for one and having no
effects on others makes it a value full stop. I recognize no “should”
such that I should bring about s, even costlessly. I have no
relation to A that logically requires me to acknowledge such a
“should.”
Perhaps
the nihilist is right about this. It will depend upon how thick the
concept of “logical requirement” is taken to be. (It may be
argued that he has the relation to A
that he denies.) What should be clear, however, is that the
nihilist's refusal to recognize intrinsic value is part and parcel of
a refusal to be involved with morality. It is not an argument against
morality or intrinsic value, but only an opting out of the project.
Perhaps our nihilist's position is proof against a moral objectivism
so imperious as to say that every rational person must accept a
specified morality. It offers nothing, however, against an
objectivism that contends that if you recognize the possibility of
morality, then such and so is going to be intrinsically valuable –
that is something that should be, other things being equal.
So
if we are willing to accept that some things are valuable in
themselves, that consciousness and mind should continue to exist
forever should be listed in that column, at least if the existence is
not undesired by the being or beings having it. (I do not take this
last clause to be sufficient to disqualify the value. An eternal
mind with a career of thinking great thoughts, unraveling
mathematical mysteries, or working out the history of the universe
might well be intrinsically valuable even if that mind, saddened by
its loneliness, had a slight preference for its own non-existence.
This observation smacks of perfectionism, to which I next turn.)
A
Perfectionist Alternative
Putting
nihilism aside, perhaps the most plausible value theory to reject all
states of consciousness and processes of mind as of intrinsic value
is an extreme form of perfectionism. Philosophical perfectionism is
not very closely related to the common expression “he is a
perfectionist,” typified by getting every aspect of a task just
right, often with a pathological expenditure of effort. The
perfectionism I will consider here is a theory about intrinsic value.
It is that some things are intrinsically valuable even absent an
effect on consciousness. Natural candidates include splendid
mountains, beautiful sunsets, and complex spider webs. Strong
contenders among artifacts include such grand human achievements as
Beethoven's Ninth, The Night Watch, and Cantor's Non-denumerability
Proof. Perfectionism declares these to be intrinsically valuable.
G.E.
Moore asked us to consider a beautiful planet that no one (no
sentient being) would ever perceive. Would reality be the better for
the existence of this planet? I, for one, would be willing to
contribute a few dollars if Moore were collecting on behalf of its
existence. I admit that I would do so, however, harboring some
concerns that the eye of the beholder-iness of “beautiful” might
possibly make this subscription irrational where there never would be
any eyes involved. Saving The Night Watch from a fire as the
last act of the last member of a dying humanity, would be a
perfectionist act.
Many
balk at any form of perfectionism. I think we must all reject an
extreme perfectionism that would contend that only the paradigmatic
perfectionist objects or processes are intrinsically valuable. That
there should be a DVD of a wonderful performance of Don Giovanni
may possibly be a good thing itself, but it is surely also good that
someone should experience it played. It would be nice to see Moore's
planet. In short, it seems impossible to deny that thinking and
experiencing by beings who can think and experience are at least
sometimes intrinsically good.
If
we have gotten beyond the all out attack on intrinsic value posed by
nihilism and the denial of goodness to any form of thought and
consciousness that might possibly be spun out of extreme
perfectionism, then to disqualify God's eternal existence from the
catalog of the intrinsic goods will have to make use of some specific
disqualifying property of God.
Objection
that God's Consciousness is Too Different
The
first one that comes to mind is that God is not a human being.
Perhaps morality is a human institution, created by and serving the
interests of we humans and no one else. We could whittle away at this
thesis by asking whether Neanderthals or Denisovans are included
within our moral circle. Some lower animals, especially your dog, we
accept accept as having partial moral standing, and we have no
difficulty in thinking that we would owe moral duties to space aliens
of the Star Trek sorts.
What
about conscious beings very, very unlike us, however? Perhaps as
they become more and more unlike us, we can doubt even that whatever
they have that comes closest to being like our consciousness should
really be counted as consciousness. We do not yet understand our own
consciousness very well, and the easy assumption that consciousness
would be pretty much the same thing everywhere may well be very
wrong. What we regard as being so important about our consciousness
may might be something rather particular to the way we evolved on
this planet.
So
what if God's consciousness were very unlike ours? The tradition
assures us that we and God are importantly similar in that we were
made in the image of God. On the other hand tradition also tells us
that God is omniscient. That alone would make God's mind very
different from ours indeed – even if his omniscience did not extend
to all truths about the future. (See 6/15/14 “Is the Moving Now an
Illusion if God is Omniscient.)
Of
course eternal beings need not be very much like God of the
traditions. We want to be neutral so far as we can be with respect to
theology. So the best I think we can do is to conclude that insofar
as a eternal being shares what is the basis for value in our
consciousness (even if to a lesser or greater degree than we have
it), then it is, other things being equal, intrinsically valuable
that such beings exist.
Disqualifying
an Evil God
The
two paragraphs from my book manuscript, quoted so long ago now, had
one footnote. Wanting to presume little in the way of theology, I
considered the possibility of an evil god. I have already touched on
the problem of a sad eternal god. I suggested that a little sadness
would not necessarily make the eternal life of such a God negative
if, for example, there was great achievement (even if only mental
achievement) along with the modest sadness. Terrible sadness and
other negative states of consciousness would be disqualifiers.
An
evil god is, of course, could not be farther from our religious
traditions, although the Canaan genocides of the Book of Joshua must
be read with very substantial pro-Israelite sympathies to believe
that the God so described was omnibenevolent. In evaluating the
intrinsic value of the eternal existence of evil gods, I will not be
concerned with gods that actually do bad things. We are imagining a
god in the distant future when there may be no physical reality to do
anything bad with. The focus is on the existence of consciousness and
thought and so the question is whether evil thought or a wicked
thinker is enough to turn the survival of conscious thought from
intrinsically good to bad or indifferent.
This
seems to me difficult because what makes consciousness in general
good and what makes evil thoughts bad are different sorts of things.
This shows up in a debate about guilty pleasures of the mind.
Consider a favorite pleasurable fantasy of yours that you would just
as soon no one ever suspected you harbored. Suppose that there is no
possibility whatsoever that this fantasy will ever affect your
behavior. There are at least three schools of thought on the value of
your fantasy.
One,
which we might call the hedonist view, is that it is all to the good.
Pleasure is pleasure, and a pleasure that hurts no one gets full
credit. The second view is that the pleasure you get must be balanced
against whatever features the fantasy has that encourage you to keep
it secret. If realization of the fantasy would violate the rights or
harm the interests of others or it is simply not a fantasy in which
an ideally virtuous person would indulge, then that counts against
the value of the fantasy as a state of your consciousness. Whether
it has positive net value depends upon the balance of the positive
value of the pleasure against the moral negative. That you are
“balancing” two things that may be quite different is a
conceptual problem, but we do seem to come up with judgments in the
end when we “weigh” very different things, whether it is
intellectually defensible or not.
The
third position on guilty mental pleasures is that the pleasure makes
the whole worse. To motivate this, let me briefly leave pure
consciousness and consider the case where you cause an injury to
someone, perhaps by making a cutting remark. If you take pleasure in
your victim's discomfort (Schadenfreude)
, that, plausibly, makes things worse. For all you Schopenhauer fans, :
“To feel envy is human, to savor schadenfreude is devilish.” (On
Human Nature.) But the intuition here is not simply that it is not
only that it shows you to be a worse person, but that the taking of
pleasure in another's pain is itself intrinsically bad – and the
more pleasure is taken, the worse it is. Your pleasure is multiplied
by minus one.
If
the last of these positions is the correct one, it is going to be
difficult for the eternal existence of a thoroughly evil god to be
value positive. A god who thinks only evil thoughts, perhaps
relishing the extinction of all life and imagining the suffering he
would cause were there only some creatures around to torture, would
be intrinsically disvaluable no matter how much enjoyment he got from
so thinking. If, of course, such thoughts came to him only
occasionally, and he was otherwise occupied in thinking beneficient
thoughts or doing proofs or composing symphonies, (perhaps the
“Thousand Year Symphony”), then accounting would come into play
and he might net out positive.
On
what I have, too simply, called the hedonist position, a happy
eternal will be value positive no matter how vile its thoughts. The
middle position, where vileness of a thought is subtracted from
pleasurableness, value or not will depend upon the numbers.
So
the proposition that the eternal existence of consciousness in deity
form is intrinsically valuable does need a footnote for the evil god
case for all but the guilty pleasures hedonist. If we take up the
issue, as I do in the book, as part of the larger question whether we
should hope for the existence of God, the clincher is that no one
would hope for an evil god.
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