Common Mistakes about God and Suffering | Prof. Robert Koons

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was streamed for Texas State University on September 24, 2020.

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About the speaker:

Robert C. (“Rob”) Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 33 years. M. A. Oxford, Ph.D. UCLA. He is the author or co-author of four books, including: Realism Regained (Oxford University Press, 2000), and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics, with Timothy H. Pickavance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). He is the co-editor (with George Bealer) of The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-editor (with Nicholas Teh and William Simpson) of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge, 2018). He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, on defending and articulating Thomism in contemporary terms, and on arguments for classical theism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	God is Almighty, why didn't he create a world full of happiness and devoid of pain?
0:08.0	And obviously he didn't do that.
0:10.0	And so what's, you know, what's the explanation?
0:13.0	I think that this question has a mistake, really, that it's based on, and that is it assumes a particular view of God's goodness or of God's
0:22.8	righteousness, you might say, in a sense. So in other words, it presupposes a philosophical
0:28.1	theory that we call utilitarianism, that a good agent always acts to maximize happiness and
0:34.7	minimize pain. So it assumes that what God is fundamentally about is
0:38.8	aiming at some global outcome. That is what he really cares about. It's not so much individual
0:44.0	people as just the total quantity of happiness and of pain out there in the world. And that's
0:49.9	not the Christian perspective. That is, a Christian point of view, God is not a utility maximizer,
0:57.6	a happiness maximizer. He's rather a god of love, the word in the Greek is agape. That is, he cares
1:04.9	about individual creatures, not about aggregate quantities of happiness or unhappiness.
1:14.3	He loves us as individuals, not merely as parts of the whole.
1:19.2	And so the first question really is focusing too much on what the whole world is like and assuming that God is a happiness maximizer, and that's just not the case.
1:24.3	So it's based on a false, I think, presupposition about the nature of God. Now that
1:29.3	raises then a second question or second, I think, misconception, which is, well, if God cares
1:34.3	about us as individuals, he loves us as individuals, and he sees suffering and pain and disease
1:42.0	occurring, why, if he's all powerful, doesn't he just intervene to relieve the suffering of these individual creatures that he loves?
1:49.0	And I think that's a fair question. Why doesn't he do that if he's loving and if he's all powerful?
1:55.0	Well, the simple answer to this question is that God is the creator.
2:00.0	So he's created a world containing creatures, both animate and inanimate, with their own intrinsic
2:06.6	natures.
	...

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