Natural Evil: A Defense Sans Darwin

Sawyer Bullock
Dr. Paul Franks
PHIL 4813 01
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Natural Evil: A Defense Sans Darwin
Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken . . . by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs . . . A clearer case of a horrible case in nature, a natural evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self-evident that the natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to survive was an evil natural law and the obtaining of this law was sufficient evidence that God did not exist.

Arguments against theism based upon 'The problem of evil' take different forms depending upon the severity of the conclusion and the type of evidence being employed. Many critics feel that any evil whatsoever is evidence of God's nonexistence, others contend that the sheer quantity of evil in the world is problematic, and specific instances of horrific evil like the Holocaust are also held as direct examples of the absence of a loving or capable God. The opening quote from Quinten Reynolds is an example of an evidential argument: one such way that critics have formulated reasons as to why the existence of evil makes the existence of God very unlikely. Simply put, suffering creates a prima facie problem for the existence of a God who is all-powerful and all-loving. Paul Draper has stated that animal pain creates an epistemic problem for theism, in that a world independent of God (HI) is more likely given this data then a world given theism: P (O/HI) > P (O/Theism). This is because a world with no god (HI), it is expected for there to be excess pain and pleasure with no purpose or biological utility. Take for example evidence from the fossil record which show a natural history filled with colossal amounts of natural evil: what particular good can be thought of which outweighs the amount of pain suffered by trillions of organisms over millions of years?
In light of this paleontological evidence, many Christian thinkers have presented theodicies and defences from the position of theistic evolution. For those unfamiliar, it holds that [most] religious teachings about God are compatible with current widespread scientific understanding about biological evolution. Accordingly, accounts have been given of how God's designing the universe to move from chaos towards order – and in doing so bring humanity from the evolutionary process – are goods which necessitate the extinction of weaker species. However, modernity's darling has had some of its blemishes exposed. Many of Darwin's predictions about the fossil record have simply not matched, numerous mental faculties have seemingly no way of being produced by natural processes, and Christians face seriously unpalatable implications for their faith if Adam and Eve were not literal people. Without going into detail, there are more than enough reasons as to why an intellectual can seemingly be warranted in not embracing this form of macro-evolution with open arms. Skepticism of Darwinism is not exclusively held by Ken Ham – though, thankfully, sharing in his skepticism does not necessitate being chums.
The purpose of this essay is to give a response to the evidential problem of natural evil – specifically that of animal pain – without employing a Darwinian theodicy. Gratuitous evils in nature and human history will not be discussed in this paper, nor why evils happen in the first place. Instead, the problem of the sheer amount of animal pain and suffering in the world (regardless of earth's age) is the topic of contention. The solution is epistemically modest but wholly provocative. Instead of giving reasons why God would allow so much animal pain to exist, it will be shown that there are not good reasons to believe that such pain exists. This small defense for skepticism acts like a pin-pick at the base of the problem of animal pain; deflating the critic's claim and replying that animals may not experience the amount of pain and suffering as presupposed in the evidential argument. This Cartesian stance has been held by the likes of Descartes, Leibnitz, C.S. Lewis, and a contemporary model from Michael Murray's Nature Red in Tooth and Claw will be primarily examined here.
The question which this discussion revolves around is of how bad animal pain and suffering actually is? There is clearly a non-equivalent similarity between the pleasure and pain experienced by humans and non-humans alike, however animals are neuroanatomically and neurophysiologically quite different from humans – and it is possible that this results in a qualitative difference concerning non-human suffering. The question is not whether animals feel pain, but if their pain is morally relevant. Before this can be properly examined, the working assumptions of the neo-Cartesian positon must be revealed.
Many current neo-Cartesian defenses are built upon metaphysical foundations laid by Descartes, Aquinas, and Aristotle. In Aristotelian psychology, mental capacitates are divided as the sensitive, imaginative, and intellectual powers of the soul. Sense and imagination are related in that they deliver awareness of empirical 'particulars', while the intellectual powers grant the ability to be aware of universals, apperception, and other abilities. The Aristotelians attribute all three powers to humans but only sensitive and imaginative powers to animals. These latter powers are labelled as 'corpeal powers', meaning they are performed by the corpeal organs of the physical senses and the brain. In Meditation 6, Descartes also argues that sensation and imagination are not part of one's essence – as they do not require 'thought' – and instead that these powers inhere in a corpeal substance to which the soul is connected:
For brevity's sake I here omit the other reason for denying thought to animals. Please note that I am speaking of thought, and not of life or sensation. I do not deny life to animals since I regard it as simply in the heat of the heart; and I do not deny sensation, in so far as it depends on bodily organ.

If understood correctly, Descartes is saying that while it might be true that animals perceive a wide range of sensations, they are entirely unable to reflect on these first-order mental states and thus evaluate them as pleasurable or not.
From this Cartesian ontology, Michael Murray provides a few more distinctions- namely between access consciousness verses phenomenal consciousness. Access consciousness is that held by any sentient creature from recognizing an external state of affairs which bear upon the mental states dictating their bodily movements. A deer has sensory access to x (recognizing a predator), which results in them doing y (fleeing the predator). Comparatively, phenomenal consciousness is the personally subjective nature of experience and the qualitative element of sensory awareness, part of which is consciously reflecting upon one's experience in a first-person manner instead of accepting stimuli without higher thought. Knowing these distinctions, it can then be conceived for something to be in a state of access consciousness without necessarily also being in a state of phenomenal consciousness. An easily relatable illustration could be the experience of driving in a state of mental 'autopilot': not being aware of driving phenomenally, all the while being aware in the access sense of the road (shown by the fact that one would appropriately respond to any unanticipated or unusual interruptions).
Armed with these distinctions, Murray gives four proposals of distinctions between human and non-human consciousness, which if true have the moral significance to defend a neo-Cartesian explanation of animal pain. The first proposal is built upon the previously mentioned distinction:
Many nonhuman creatures are conscious inasmuch as they are alive, awake, and have sensations. These creatures have mental states that give them perceptual access to features of their environment in a way that allows them to make the requisite discriminations necessary for psychological control over their behavior. Yet, unlike the sensory states possessed by humans, the mechanisms whereby these organisms have access to the world lack any phenomenal character whatsoever. There is an intrinsic difference between the sensory states of nonhumans and humans in this phenomenal respect.

Given this, the pain of animals is a sort of "blind pain", as they can have access to a harmful situation without a phenomenal sense of their perception. But what is required for mental state to be a phenomenally conscious state? Here the second proposal is given:
For a mental state to be a conscious state (phenomenally) requires an accompanying higher-order mental state (a HOT) that has that state as its intentional object. This HOT must be a thought that one is, oneself, in that first-order state. Only humans have the cognitive faculties required to form the conception of themselves being in a first-order state that one must have in order to have a HOT.

Notice that there is no grounding of the phenomenal access in the intrinsic difference in states of pain, but rather it is on the extrinsic features where the phenomenal is grounded: the creature's ability to 'step outside one's self' and give reflective judgement. This leads to the third statement:
Some nonhuman creatures have states that have intrinsic phenomenal qualities analogous to those possessed by humans when they are in states of pain. These creatures lack, however, any higher-order states of being aware of themselves as being in first-order states. They have no access to the fact that they are having a particular feeling, though they are indeed having it. Since phenomenal properties of states of pain and other sensory states are intrinsic to the states themselves, there is no difference on this score between humans and other creatures.

But could these states of painful characteristics be intrinsically evil whether or not the agent has phenomenal access to the mental states? Not quite. Like the second proposal, a defender may respond that without the higher-order access there is nothing containing intrinsic moral disvalue in the perception itself. This does not entail that the circumstances of why the agent is in the circumstance may be evaluated, as the moral value is different for pain produced by medical surgery versus masochistic pleasure (this will be addressed later). Further, the critique of this third formulation leads to perplexing conclusions. If mental states of which one is unaware can be intrinsically evil, so too it can be thought that certain mental states can be good regardless of one's recognition. However, this can lead to odd conclusions. For example, consider the good of possessing mental states of beholding things that are beautiful- regardless if one has access to those mental states. If so, it could then be seen as good to take a dog to an art gallery and allow the dog to have such intrinsically good mental states regarding beauty- even though the even though the animal is not able to have such states. Granted, this is a bit different than the circumstance of scratching a dog behind its ears, where it does have access consciousness to the sensation. But, if mental states are intrinsically value-laden it seems wholly appropriate to take the dog to the art gallery regardless of it can even access at any level the sensations which it is having. In most circumstances a dog enjoys being scratched and can communicate this quite clearly, but it would be an invalid inference to assume from this alone that the dog is also necessarily reflecting upon its pleasurable sensations. The neo-Cartesian stance is that painful and pleasurable mental states are not intrinsically good, and therefore the good of harmonious human-animal interaction (taking the dog example) is not simply dependent upon the case that the animal enjoys the interaction or has the sensory ability to feel pleasure- compared to say insects or jellyfish.
A second objection could be that this neo-Cartesian view formulation seems to require that all non-human creatures lack higher-order access to their sensations. It would seem that this is not a necessary feature of being non-human and that God could have creatures with such higher-order access. So, does the neo-Cartesian position entail this? Not at all. Even if an animal did possess such access to their pain, it would still lack evil if the animal did not view the pain as undesirable. This state is very similar to experiences of humans with either a damaged or absent prefrontal cortex: having reported a familiar awareness with pain but at the same time claiming it not to be unpleasant. It is claimed to indeed feel the same regardless of the fact that it is no longer undesirable. Furthermore, animal experiences could also function this way in lacking a negative phenomenal evaluation. This leads to the final neo-Cartesian principle:
Most nonhuman animals lack the cognitive faculties to be in a higher-order state of recognizing themselves to be in a first-order state of pain. Those that can on the occasion achieve a second-order access to their first-order states of pain nonetheless do not have the capacity to regard that second-order state as undesirable.


This version of the neo-Cartesian argument can be summarized as such:
A mental state is only morally relevant when it is consciously given, in the first person, a moral evaluation such as desirable or undesirable.
Labelling a first-order mental state requires a higher-order mental and phenomenal access to one's surroundings.
Non-humans either lack the cognitive faculties necessary for higher-order states and phenomenal access or they do possess such faculties but do not regard their first-order mental states as undesirable.
Therefore, non-human mental states are not morally relevant.

Given this conclusion, the neo-Cartesian holds that currently there is not enough good reason to believe that animal pain is morally relevant. This position does not possess a high degree of epistemic certainty and a critic may still be warranted in dismissing these principles if the neo-Cartesian stance conflicts with something that critic holds more strongly, for example the belief that animals should be treated ethically. Is neo-Cartesianism left with disturbing ethical consequences? Some believe so. Take for example Robert Wennberg: "indeed if we cannot join those particular followers of Descartes who 'kicked about their dogs and dissected their cats without mercy' [. . .] then we must part company with those who would seek to construct a theodicy on a denial of animal pain." This criticism could be taken even farther, possibly attributing that the neo-Cartesian allows the mistreatment of anything which is incapable of labelling their situations as morally wrong. Then not only would animals be subject to arbitrary cruelty, but also the aforementioned persons with damaged or missing frontal lobes, along with young children and even individuals with various forms of mental and developmental disabilities. This serious criticism raises several issues which need addressing:
1) Does the endorsement of neo-Cartesianism actually imply that any treatment is morally permissible concerning things incapable of evaluating their first-order state?
2) If these incapable beings cannot suffer meaningfully, do all interactions with them become morally inconsequential?
3) Is it implied by neo-Cartesianism that certain cognitively-incapable beings lack any intrinsic worth?
Once more it is worth calling again attention the degree of certainty which the neo-Cartesian position is being presented. The neo-Cartesian does not have to claim to know or accept that nonhumans never experience states which are intrinsically evil. They only have to retain the possibility that this may possibly be the case. Consequently in not knowing if animals never suffer, it would not be permitted to act as if one did. The neo-Cartesian has no such knowledge for thinking that animals never suffer. Concerning (2) and (3), the Christian simply needs to provide a grounding of rights outside a creature's ability to perceive pleasure and pain. For this, they can look to Kant or the Bible for aid. Take your pick. Scripture clearly portraits the world as having value in being divine creation as well as humans having a divine mandate to steward and have dominion over the natural world (Gen 1:28). Notice that these claims of dominion are balanced by claims of stewardship; clearly not allowing for the disregard and disrespect of nature and its inhabitants. For this reason, animal abuse is wrong not because of the pain being inflicted, but because of improper stewardship. Furthermore, actions can be wrong regardless of whether the subject possesses awareness, for example, mocking a mentally handicapped individual. The individual may have no knowledge of being mocked, but under a Christian account of rights, that individual is still an image-bearer of God and possesses intrinsic rights. Without making a full presentation, it can still be seen that a neo-Cartesian positon does not entail (1), (2) or (3) but rather simply does not ground the axiological status of an action purely in its sensory properties.
If successful, a convincing case has been made for the re-embracement of Cartesianism amongst Christian thinkers. This explanation differs from other defenses of animal pain and suffering since the neo-Cartesian denies that there is good reason to even believe that there is such a problem. What benefit does it lend to the theistic evolutionist? According to some, not much. In his book concerning this very question, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?, Michael Ruse states:
. . . the Darwinian will have little time for the argument that the problem of physical evil does not extend down to the world of the brutes. Even if you accept that because of their intelligence, humans have a capacity for anticipating pain – including death – in a way that the animals do not, as a Darwinian you will still see human suffering on a continuum with the rest of the organic world . . . Human characteristics and features, adoptive or not, have a direct relationship with the characteristics and features of the animals. This is what Darwinian evolution is all about. (Emphasis added)

Regardless of whether the Darwinian will easily accept these defenses, the success of this paper does not rest upon it as the purpose was to provide an argument free from 'age of the earth' and 'origins of life' presuppositions- not entailments. The theist is not out of the woods yet concerning natural evil simply by adopting neo-Cartesianism. They are equipped to seriously dampen the apparent bonfire of morally-bad pain in the natural world, but they are not equipped on this view to give an account as to why death exists, why the natural world paradoxically survives on it, or why apparently unnecessary evils are present in the natural world. These topics require different tools. Hopefully motivated by the consolation found for the evils mentioned here, they will traverse onward to conquer more.



Bibliography
Creegan, Nicola Hoggard. Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: New York, 2013.
Descartes, René, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Murray, Michael J. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Quentin Smith, "An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws" International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 29, no. 3 (June 1991): 159-74
Rowe, William L. God and the Problem of Evil. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
Ruse, Michael. Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and Religion. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Thomas, Anton C. Pegis, James F. Anderson, Vernon J. Bourke, and C. J. O'Neil. Summa Contra Gentiles. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
Trigg, Roger. Pain and Emotion. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1970.
Wennberg, Robert N. God, Humans, and Animals: An Invitation to Enlarge Our Moral Universe. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2003.


Quentin Smith, "An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws" International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 29, no. 3 (June 1991): 159-74, emphasis in original.
Paul Draper, Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists (Blackwell Publishers, 2001) 182.
See Alvin Plantinga, Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
See Richard B. Davis and W. Paul Franks, Adam, Eve, and the Gospel

Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 2, 51, 49, 66-7 and 4-48.
Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 2. 80-82.
Descartes, Writings, 2. 54-5.
Ibid. 366.
Michael Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, (Oxford University Press, 2008) 52.
Ibid. 53.
Ibid.
Ibid. 54.
Ibid.
Ibid. 55.
Ibid. 56.
Ibid.56.
Ibid.
Roger Trigg, Pain and Emotion (Oxford: Claredon, 1970), 125-42
Richard Wennberg, God, Humans, and Animals (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 313-14.
Michael Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, (Oxford University Press, 2008) 69
132 Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?: The Relationship between Science and Religion. (Cambridge University Press, 2001) 132.