Why God would not send his sons to Oxford: parenting and the problem of evil

Imagine a London merchant deliberating whether to send his ten sons to Oxford or to Cambridge. Leafing through the flyers, he learns that, if he sends the boys to Cambridge, they will make “considerable progress in the sciences as well as in virtue, so that their merit will elevate them to honourable occupations for the rest of their lives” — on the other hand, if he sends them to Oxford, “they will become depraved, they will become rascals, and they will pass from  mischief to mischief until the law will have to set them in order, and condemn them to various punishments.” Never doubting the truth of these predictions, he still decides to send the lads to Oxford, and not to Cambridge. “Is it not clear, according to our common notions, that 1) this merchant wants his sons to be wicked and miserable; and 2) that, consequently, he is acting in a way that is contrary to goodness and to the love of virtue?”

This is not an excerpt from a Cambridge undergraduate prospectus. It is a version of the problem of evil: the age-old question of how an all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful God could permit the presence of evil in the world. It was formulated in the early eighteenth century by Pierre Bayle, a controversial French philosopher living as a refugee in Rotterdam.

The basic argument is as follows: it’s as rationally impossible for a good father to have knowingly, lovingly and wilfully sent his sons to this depraved version of Oxford, as it is for God to have committed mankind to a fallen state and a corrupted earth. Being God, he must have known with perfect foresight that, if he placed Adam and Eve in a paradise where they would be tempted, they would succumb to this temptation; being God, he was perfectly able to prevent the moment of the Fall; being God, he was obliged by his own goodness to prevent it. Nevertheless, says Bayle, the evidence suggests that he did not. Ergo, we must either throw reason out of our considerations altogether, and love God blindly and submissively in the face of all evidence against him; or we must conclude that God intended man to suffer; that evil is the work of God. (Or even: that God does not, cannot, exist).

Portrait of French writer and philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) by Louis Ferdinand Elle the Younger, circa 1675. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Thinking these things, today, may not strike us as so outrageous, but to the readers of the time, a more obscene argument was hardly conceivable. The element of comparison, especially, was sensitive: Bayle adamantly and obsessively drew parallels between God and a variety of bad fathers, heartless mothers, wicked stepmothers, and cruel kings. Imagine, for instance, a mother who has given her daughters permission to go to a ball, and then discovers that they will necessarily “succumb to temptations and lose their virginity there”. If she nevertheless allowed them to go dancing, would this not prove that she was acting rather as “an irritated, cruel stepmother” than as a loving mother, just like the merchant of London would act irresponsibly, and even wickedly, in sending his sons to that supposed bastion of depravity: Oxford?

But surely, one might object, that’s not true for the human condition. Yes, there is evil; yes, there is suffering — but that’s not all there is. Can’t we justify God’s creation by pointing at its better, brighter side?

Bayle bites the bullet. First of all, he argues, if God is infinitely good and wise and powerful, then even the smallest grain of misfortune is incompatible with the nature of the divine being. Second, and more importantly: there is much more evil and suffering than there is goodness and happiness in the world. This is true quantitatively, since “history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race”, as well as qualitatively, since “one hour of misery contains more that is bad, than there is good in six or seven comfortable days.” (Bayle suffered from terrible migraines.) This is philosophical pessimism in the highest voltage, though it did not yet receive that label: in fact the terms ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimism’ were coined a few decades afterwards, as a direct result of Bayle’s discussions.

These days, the problem of evil still features in theological and philosophical discussions, but it is often seen as antiquarian, no longer a central topic for a secular age. Unlike Bayle and his contemporaries, ‘we’ of the modern, Western world don’t tend to see natural disasters as a form of ‘natural’ evil; we see it as bad luck. Even moral evil is sometimes reduced to genetics or circumstances; criminals are conditioned by genes or traumas; who is ultimately responsible for anything? And yet it seems that Bayle’s ideas have made an inadvertent comeback in recent years, in a philosophical context that is apparently wholly different, and at the same time, strangely related. This is the debate on anti-natalism: whether having children is morally permissible.

This may seem like a topic that couldn’t be further away from the problem of evil, but in fact the two problems are more closely related than appears at first sight. After all, the traditional problem of evil is essentially an attempt to address an ethics of creation: how could God be justified in creating a being destined to experience suffering? Bearing this in mind, it is perhaps not so surprising that Bayle uses the example of bad parenting in order to make his point. God should be the perfect parent, and a perfect parent would not create a child knowing that it would suffer (either a little or a lot). One might go further: on this line, a perfect parent would decide not to (pro)create.

At this point, the step from the problem of evil (ethics of creation) to the problem of parenting (ethics of procreation) is smaller than it seems. This becomes clear if Bayle is compared to another, more recent philosopher: David Benatar, who provoked widespread outrage by arguing that procreation is never morally permissible; that it is true for every person that it would have been better never to have been.

Bayle could not have agreed more. Both philosophers (who share a talent for footnotes as well as for pessimism) argue along similar lines in order to make their highly controversial points. Both agree that there is more suffering in the world than there is happiness to compensate. The sheer evidence of our own experience — we have all seen or heard of people suffering unimaginable hardships, cruelties, or diseases — should be enough to prove the point that it is infinitely better not to create a being susceptible of such misfortunes. If this evidence does not convince, both argue that even the smallest possibility of such suffering (or, indeed, of any suffering) should convince a truly responsible prospective parent, whether human or divine, to desist from creating. We may take risks in our own lives: we are never justified in placing such risks, and their consequences, on another person, even if — especially if — that person does not yet exist.

It is a temptation, when confronted with philosophers such as Bayle or Benatar, who challenge the most fundamental assumptions of their respective age, to dismiss their arguments as absurd or heretical or contrary to common sense. This was an insufficient response to Bayle; it is an insufficient response to Benatar. The problem of evil will and should continue to haunt philosophy, humanity, and religion, in whatever shapes and guises it still has in store for us. It is the test of every age if we can take it seriously.

Headline image: View of Oxford city from South Park, east Oxford. Photo by Kamyar Adl. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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