A Glass King: Notes Toward Theodicy as a Modern Problem, Or: Modernity as Theodicy
Theodicy is, in the words of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, “the defense of the highest wisdom of the creator against the charge which reason brings against it for whatever is counterpurposive in the world.”[2] As such, modernity was, we are arguing, an age characterized by numerous attempts to acquit God from the evil that is present in the world. In this sense I also want to turn around and suggest that theodicy is a uniquely modern problem and thus distinguish it from the problem of evil in general. One way to put it, to anticipate slightly, God was seen as saving us from evil before theodicy; with theodicy it is God who must be saved—either from Himself or from a world that hates or doubts Him.[3]
In this process, however, the particularly theological character of the problem of evil changed into theodicy, and in the attempt to vindicate God the theological character of the explanations was lost by a process of immanentization as the discourse of theodicy migrated into science, economics, and politics. In the opening line to his seminal essay “Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics,” Gordon Bigelow for example remarks that “Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and theodicy of our contemporary culture.”[4] I mean to analyze his claim ultimately not just by taking it analogously, namely that science, economics, and politics serve similar functions that theodicy previously discharged. They certainly do this. Rather, the claim can be pressed further, and a genealogical link that connects these loci historically can be established.
The claim that theodicy is a particularly modern problem has, as one would suspect, an enormous array of ground-clearing to do to make its case. We do not have the space here to go into such detail, so a suggestive case study must serve as the initial beachhead for our thesis. So we do not lose the forest for the trees, in essence in modernity the expectations placed upon codification and the creation of a system more and more tended to completion as the capacities of humankind were believed to be able to see the whole as one, seamless picture; but this codification more and more needed a capstone at its apex to hold the whole comprehensive system together (paradoxically the more comprehensive, the more fragile).
The claim that theodicy is a particularly modern problem has, as one would suspect, an enormous array of ground-clearing to do to make its case. We do not have the space here to go into such detail, so a suggestive case study must serve as the initial beachhead for our thesis. So we do not lose the forest for the trees, in essence in modernity the expectations placed upon codification and the creation of a system more and more tended to completion as the capacities of humankind were believed to be able to see the whole as one, seamless picture; but this codification more and more needed a capstone at its apex to hold the whole comprehensive system together (paradoxically the more comprehensive, the more fragile).
And so, God was transformed into a piece of this puzzle—whether one wants to call this “God of the gaps” or “ontotheology”—and sat like a glass king both majestic in supremacy and waiting for the slightest change in pressure to break apart. Yet, this does not break the tradition as a whole. Our notions of God can often serve as barometers measuring a transition or set of transitions that occurred in theology and its social conditions over time.[5] This is important because “[v]irtually every contemporary discussion of the theodicy question is premised … on an understanding of ‘God’ overwhelmingly constrained by the principles of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical theism.”[6] “Theodicy” as we often understand it today, and the pictures of God involved, were simply not under consideration in the same way in pre-modern texts,[7] and to overlook this simplifies theological history to the point of distortion.
To start, then, we must find evidence that can reinterpret theodicy as a particularly acute concern in the modern period. To do this, though, one must overlook typical textbook accounts on the nature of what constituted modernity. This can be done in at least two ways.
The first is to suggest that the demarcation “modernity” itself constituted a theodicy. One might point, for example, to Jules Michelet—who was one of the primary intellectuals responsible for coining the term and periodization of “The Renaissance,” in a series of lectures given in 1840 at the College de France, and was a full-fledged participant in the French struggles of the State against the Church. As a young historian, Michelet saw the middle ages as a “period of light and creativity,” as the historian Jacques le Goff puts it. But, after the death of his first wife in 1839, the tone changed completely. The middle ages are now full of “gloom, of obscurantism, petrification, and sterility.” With his lectures at the College de France, the middle ages are abandoned as a wasteland, and “we have come to the Renaissance through the phrase ‘return to life’ … thus we come into the light.”[8]
To start, then, we must find evidence that can reinterpret theodicy as a particularly acute concern in the modern period. To do this, though, one must overlook typical textbook accounts on the nature of what constituted modernity. This can be done in at least two ways.
The first is to suggest that the demarcation “modernity” itself constituted a theodicy. One might point, for example, to Jules Michelet—who was one of the primary intellectuals responsible for coining the term and periodization of “The Renaissance,” in a series of lectures given in 1840 at the College de France, and was a full-fledged participant in the French struggles of the State against the Church. As a young historian, Michelet saw the middle ages as a “period of light and creativity,” as the historian Jacques le Goff puts it. But, after the death of his first wife in 1839, the tone changed completely. The middle ages are now full of “gloom, of obscurantism, petrification, and sterility.” With his lectures at the College de France, the middle ages are abandoned as a wasteland, and “we have come to the Renaissance through the phrase ‘return to life’ … thus we come into the light.”[8]
Yet, the view of the Renaissance as the emergence of humankind’s awareness to take responsibility to eliminate evil, is typically attributed to Jacob Burckhardt. “To exaggerate slightly,” writes one commentator, “Burckhardt was one of the authors of modernity as a literary device.”[9] “In the Middle Ages” he wrote, “both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half-awake beneath a common veil” wrote Burckhardt. “The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible. … Man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such.”[10] Man, and not God, is responsible for evil—and for its defeat.
Hans Blumenberg and Odo Marquard each in their own way thus characterize modernity as theodicy. “Where theodicy is, modernity is; where modernity is, theodicy is” wrote Marquard.[11] Blumenberg links the medieval scholastic theological movements of nominalism and voluntarism with the alien God of the gnostics and thus sees in modernity a second battle with Gnosticism: “The Gnosticism that had not been overcome [in the early Church] but only transposed returns in the form of the hidden God and his inconceivable, absolute sovereignty.”[12] This radical emphasis on omnipotence swallowed the goodness of God, and made both God and the world unreliable at their very cores. Linking Gnosticism with late medieval theology allows Blumenberg to make another move, and note that theodicy, while about justifying God in the face of evil, is actually more about the absolute declaration that this world is good at its roots. In other words, while theodicies on the surface justify God, their ultimate goal is actually to justify the world. In this sense theology is an abortive attempt at theodicy in that it misunderstands its own true task.
This allows Blumenberg—an atheist—to paint the rise of science starting with Copernicus as not just relieving us of the darkness of the middle ages, but as a grand and necessary theodicic myth replacing the old theologies of East and West.[13] With Copernicus’ new heliocentric model of the solar system making better sense of the old Ptolemaic layout, along with the rising realization how science can lead to man’s understanding of order “Copernicus will aim to … relieving the Creator of the reproach that it is the object [of God’s creation] that actually confuses cognition, rather than [human] cognition that fails when faced with its object. Seen in this way, the modern age begins with an act of theodicy.”[14]Indeed this is a trend I think many of us can recognize in many heroic representations of the often Messianic nature of science today, especially at a popular level like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson.[15]
On the other hand, theodicy can be recovered as a forgotten theme saturating modern thought. In Susan Neiman’s wonderful book on terrible things Evil in Modern Thought she notes that her “book began as the study of an interesting topic [that is, theodicy] strangely neglected in the historiography of philosophy.” She wanted to trace how the problem of evil shifted and changed in modernity. What she began to find, however, was that her studies “soon threatened to explode all [the] confines [of typical explanations for the essence of modernity].”[16]
Hans Blumenberg and Odo Marquard each in their own way thus characterize modernity as theodicy. “Where theodicy is, modernity is; where modernity is, theodicy is” wrote Marquard.[11] Blumenberg links the medieval scholastic theological movements of nominalism and voluntarism with the alien God of the gnostics and thus sees in modernity a second battle with Gnosticism: “The Gnosticism that had not been overcome [in the early Church] but only transposed returns in the form of the hidden God and his inconceivable, absolute sovereignty.”[12] This radical emphasis on omnipotence swallowed the goodness of God, and made both God and the world unreliable at their very cores. Linking Gnosticism with late medieval theology allows Blumenberg to make another move, and note that theodicy, while about justifying God in the face of evil, is actually more about the absolute declaration that this world is good at its roots. In other words, while theodicies on the surface justify God, their ultimate goal is actually to justify the world. In this sense theology is an abortive attempt at theodicy in that it misunderstands its own true task.
This allows Blumenberg—an atheist—to paint the rise of science starting with Copernicus as not just relieving us of the darkness of the middle ages, but as a grand and necessary theodicic myth replacing the old theologies of East and West.[13] With Copernicus’ new heliocentric model of the solar system making better sense of the old Ptolemaic layout, along with the rising realization how science can lead to man’s understanding of order “Copernicus will aim to … relieving the Creator of the reproach that it is the object [of God’s creation] that actually confuses cognition, rather than [human] cognition that fails when faced with its object. Seen in this way, the modern age begins with an act of theodicy.”[14]Indeed this is a trend I think many of us can recognize in many heroic representations of the often Messianic nature of science today, especially at a popular level like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson.[15]
On the other hand, theodicy can be recovered as a forgotten theme saturating modern thought. In Susan Neiman’s wonderful book on terrible things Evil in Modern Thought she notes that her “book began as the study of an interesting topic [that is, theodicy] strangely neglected in the historiography of philosophy.” She wanted to trace how the problem of evil shifted and changed in modernity. What she began to find, however, was that her studies “soon threatened to explode all [the] confines [of typical explanations for the essence of modernity].”[16]
Now, it isn’t unusual for an author who wants to sell copies of their book to think that their new approach to things can redefine their field of inquiry, but in this case Neiman seems to be on to something. She, for example, aims her sights in particular on the notion of modernity as a turn to epistemology, or theories of knowledge. To be sure epistemology was very important to the moderns like Descartes, Locke, and Kant, and yet Neiman argues this aspect was subordinate to broader concerns, chief among many was their wrestling with evil and suffering. Considering some recent but lesser known reevaluations of the traditions in philosophy and theology, Neiman’s thesis gains a lot of ground.
That Descartes is seen as primarily interested in epistemology stems largely from a tradition of thought that reads Descartes through Malebranche.[17] Ultimately, however, Descartes as arch-epistemologist was solidified in the 19thcentury by Kuno Fischer, who set up interpretive categories that now litter philosophy 101 textbooks everywhere: he identified philosophy in the 17th century as primarily concerned with epistemology, whereas earlier works were focused upon metaphysics. The picture of Descartes the modern epistemologist that Fischer completed from the earlier efforts of Hegel and others, in other words, “excised philosophy of its theological and religious underpinnings”[18] So, instead of the earlier Platonist vs. Aristotelian dichotomy, the division of the new philosophy is now between rationalists and empiricists, with Descartes of course representing the former, and Locke the latter.[19]
Zbigniew Janowski, in his work Cartesian Theodicy, [20] however, points to something similar to Neiman’s claim. Theodicy as a theme is not radically separate from epistemology, but in fact envelops it and gives it a grander meaning. Evil and suffering are in fact ultimately about our knowledge of the world. For evil and suffering shatter our trust in the world, surely, but even further they shatter the very mechanisms by which we form trust in the first place. For Descartes, the classic question “whence evil?” is transposed to: “whence our deceptions?” The Meditations as such, are a spiritual exercise and a theodicy.[21] Though perhaps absurd to us today, for Descartes the Evil Genius is “not a thought experiment but a threat.”[22]
That Descartes is seen as primarily interested in epistemology stems largely from a tradition of thought that reads Descartes through Malebranche.[17] Ultimately, however, Descartes as arch-epistemologist was solidified in the 19thcentury by Kuno Fischer, who set up interpretive categories that now litter philosophy 101 textbooks everywhere: he identified philosophy in the 17th century as primarily concerned with epistemology, whereas earlier works were focused upon metaphysics. The picture of Descartes the modern epistemologist that Fischer completed from the earlier efforts of Hegel and others, in other words, “excised philosophy of its theological and religious underpinnings”[18] So, instead of the earlier Platonist vs. Aristotelian dichotomy, the division of the new philosophy is now between rationalists and empiricists, with Descartes of course representing the former, and Locke the latter.[19]
Zbigniew Janowski, in his work Cartesian Theodicy, [20] however, points to something similar to Neiman’s claim. Theodicy as a theme is not radically separate from epistemology, but in fact envelops it and gives it a grander meaning. Evil and suffering are in fact ultimately about our knowledge of the world. For evil and suffering shatter our trust in the world, surely, but even further they shatter the very mechanisms by which we form trust in the first place. For Descartes, the classic question “whence evil?” is transposed to: “whence our deceptions?” The Meditations as such, are a spiritual exercise and a theodicy.[21] Though perhaps absurd to us today, for Descartes the Evil Genius is “not a thought experiment but a threat.”[22]
Christia Mercer, for example, has recently demonstrated Descartes’ dependence upon his relative contemporary, the Carmelite mystic Teresa of Avila, having crafted his Meditations along the lines of Teresa’s famous work The Interior Castle which was a mystical treatise describing one’s spiritual preparation and journey to God, including the overcoming of the Evil Deceiver demon.[23] Or, as Michael Allen Gillespie notes, another prime motivation for Descartes turns out upon investigation to be a desire to counter the horrifying picture he inherited of the God of late medieval nominalism and voluntarism—a God whose will is absolute and whose decrees arbitrarily dictate what is good, what is evil, what is known, and what is unknown.[24] The anxiety about certainty comes not from the fact that we may be mistakenly dreaming, or that sticks look bent when placed in water and so we can never be quite sure we are viewing the world properly. Rather, the hole that would be left without some core of certainty, some bedrock, would embed that dark deceiver god into the heart of reality itself.
Yet, as Neiman also argues: “Philosophers working on problems of foundationalism wished to be part of the same subject that engaged Kant and Hegel. … So contemporary historians described earlier philosopher’s projects in terms they wished to share. Being represented with certainty was not in fact the greatest problem the external world had traditionally posed for philosophy—but it was the one most twentieth-century philosophers wanted to solve.”[25] The enormously influential mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell is a particularly good example. “Russell’s disinterest [in the problem of evil] is so great that, like other analytic philosophers, he read it back into history [emphasis added]: even the index to his 895-page History of Western Philosophy devotes more entries to Egypt than it does to evil.”[26] In many ways this was a cunning anti-theological move by Russell. Not content simply to attack theology head-on as so much nonsense, Russell’s strategy was also to rewrite it, or, indeed, in a few instances, write it out of history altogether.
This is not an unusual strategy for Russell as a historian.[27] In an essay entitled “Shadow History in Philosophy,” historian and philosopher Richard A. Watson argues that “the shadows of great philosophers … constitute a shadow history of philosophy that is more influential than philosophy itself.”[28] By this he means not the misuse of history, but the use of misinterpretations that stand as axiomatic assumptions within a philosophers work even when they know these aren’t quite right. Bertrand Russell stands out as one of Watson’s primary examples of this sort of shadow history. Russell knows, for example, that his representations in his famous The Problems of Philosophy of, say, Hegel, are not right and create—but this does not matter because Russell is not so much attending to Hegel the historical figure as he is creating a Hegel as an archetype of a certain philosophical approach (and one, I might add, that Russell severely dislikes). Watson notes “a creature of Russell’s own construction has had at least as much influence on Anglo-American philosophy since Russell created him in 1912, as did the historical Hegel from 1807 to sometime prior to 1912.”[29]
Yet, as Neiman also argues: “Philosophers working on problems of foundationalism wished to be part of the same subject that engaged Kant and Hegel. … So contemporary historians described earlier philosopher’s projects in terms they wished to share. Being represented with certainty was not in fact the greatest problem the external world had traditionally posed for philosophy—but it was the one most twentieth-century philosophers wanted to solve.”[25] The enormously influential mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell is a particularly good example. “Russell’s disinterest [in the problem of evil] is so great that, like other analytic philosophers, he read it back into history [emphasis added]: even the index to his 895-page History of Western Philosophy devotes more entries to Egypt than it does to evil.”[26] In many ways this was a cunning anti-theological move by Russell. Not content simply to attack theology head-on as so much nonsense, Russell’s strategy was also to rewrite it, or, indeed, in a few instances, write it out of history altogether.
This is not an unusual strategy for Russell as a historian.[27] In an essay entitled “Shadow History in Philosophy,” historian and philosopher Richard A. Watson argues that “the shadows of great philosophers … constitute a shadow history of philosophy that is more influential than philosophy itself.”[28] By this he means not the misuse of history, but the use of misinterpretations that stand as axiomatic assumptions within a philosophers work even when they know these aren’t quite right. Bertrand Russell stands out as one of Watson’s primary examples of this sort of shadow history. Russell knows, for example, that his representations in his famous The Problems of Philosophy of, say, Hegel, are not right and create—but this does not matter because Russell is not so much attending to Hegel the historical figure as he is creating a Hegel as an archetype of a certain philosophical approach (and one, I might add, that Russell severely dislikes). Watson notes “a creature of Russell’s own construction has had at least as much influence on Anglo-American philosophy since Russell created him in 1912, as did the historical Hegel from 1807 to sometime prior to 1912.”[29]
We can attribute some of this to the fact that Russell—being a lapsed Hegelian himself—no doubt over-indulged in his critique in the way one does when assailing formerly held positions. Nonetheless, for our purposes it is important that Hegel—a full-fledged participant in the use of theodicy—should also be one of the main targets of Russell’s distortion.
Leibniz—the coiner of the term theodicy no less—has also been deeply shaped by Russell’s representations. Russell sought to make Leibniz a “kindred spirit”,[30] a philosopher occupied with mathematics, definitions, and precision. And, of course, Leibniz was all of those things. In questioning Russell’s interpretation it would be churlish not to point out its appeal and its power as an explanatory hermeneutic. Along with the independent conclusions reached by Louis Couturat (so that this paradigm is often called the Russell-Couturat approach) Leibniz is configured as a thinker moving deductively from a set of axiomatic first principles, from logic to logic as it were, with no gap for God to fill. Some problems come, however, by way of the fact that Russell ignores and dismisses that such qualities as Leibniz’ rigorous logic and finely honed mathematical reasoning ultimately find their home in a larger metaphysical and even (gasp!) theological lattice of ideas and arguments.[31]
In order to make Leibniz a more obedient puzzle piece to fit into the picture of philosophy Russell finds attractive, however, he explicitly remarks that his method is to move “without regard to dates or influences” so that the method of investigation is more akin to mathematics than it is to history or even philosophy.[32] This view was more or less unquestioned as the dominant method of interpreting Leibniz until the emergence of several studies including Christia Mercer’s path-setting investigation, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development.[33] More specifically, Donald Rutherford in his Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature establishes that theodicy, ethics, metaphysics, and natural philosophy in Leibniz all cohere into a systematic unity. Indeed, it is only in the “near-ecstatic vision of the liberation of the soul [from evil] through knowledge,” that we attain the unity of Lebniz’s thought. [34]
Russell’s particular attitude toward Hegel also contributed to the erasure of theodicy as a philosophical theme for modernity. Reacting to the disillusionment in the wake of the French Revolution’s failure, Hegel saw Napoleon as intending evil that was used by God for a good and benevolent design: an opening for the spread of the authoritarian structure of the Prussian state. We do well to remember too that Hegel explicitly remarked that he considered his larger project in terms of theodicy in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History:
Hegel was not alone. Indeed, as will become important in a moment, Hegel was a big fan of the Englishman William Paley—famous for his design arguments and notorious for his so-called “Watchmaker” analogy. As Frank M. Turner notes “Hegel wanted to do for history what Paley did for nature,” namely, provide a theodicy that helps us see that the slaughter bench of history was, in Paley’s Disney-esque phrase, “a happy world after all.”[36] Both men were consistently preoccupied with eliminating the notion of “waste.”[37] Nothing is waste, for all is part of the grand design either of the self-unfolding of Geist or the scrupulous tinkering of the Watchmaker God.
As Hegel put it in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (and to which Paley could no doubt voice hearty agreement): “The sole aim of philosophical inquiry is to eliminate the contingent.”[38] That is, eliminate waste. Eliminate that which does not conduce itself to a fruitful story. In passing, one alteration that this already seems to imply is that whatever lip service was still being played to the notion of evil as privation, as part of the detail work of the “immanent frame” of grand mosaic that modern thought was constructing, evil has attained a sort of “positive” existence as it contributed to the whole.[39]
Leibniz—the coiner of the term theodicy no less—has also been deeply shaped by Russell’s representations. Russell sought to make Leibniz a “kindred spirit”,[30] a philosopher occupied with mathematics, definitions, and precision. And, of course, Leibniz was all of those things. In questioning Russell’s interpretation it would be churlish not to point out its appeal and its power as an explanatory hermeneutic. Along with the independent conclusions reached by Louis Couturat (so that this paradigm is often called the Russell-Couturat approach) Leibniz is configured as a thinker moving deductively from a set of axiomatic first principles, from logic to logic as it were, with no gap for God to fill. Some problems come, however, by way of the fact that Russell ignores and dismisses that such qualities as Leibniz’ rigorous logic and finely honed mathematical reasoning ultimately find their home in a larger metaphysical and even (gasp!) theological lattice of ideas and arguments.[31]
In order to make Leibniz a more obedient puzzle piece to fit into the picture of philosophy Russell finds attractive, however, he explicitly remarks that his method is to move “without regard to dates or influences” so that the method of investigation is more akin to mathematics than it is to history or even philosophy.[32] This view was more or less unquestioned as the dominant method of interpreting Leibniz until the emergence of several studies including Christia Mercer’s path-setting investigation, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development.[33] More specifically, Donald Rutherford in his Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature establishes that theodicy, ethics, metaphysics, and natural philosophy in Leibniz all cohere into a systematic unity. Indeed, it is only in the “near-ecstatic vision of the liberation of the soul [from evil] through knowledge,” that we attain the unity of Lebniz’s thought. [34]
Russell’s particular attitude toward Hegel also contributed to the erasure of theodicy as a philosophical theme for modernity. Reacting to the disillusionment in the wake of the French Revolution’s failure, Hegel saw Napoleon as intending evil that was used by God for a good and benevolent design: an opening for the spread of the authoritarian structure of the Prussian state. We do well to remember too that Hegel explicitly remarked that he considered his larger project in terms of theodicy in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History:
The aim of human cognition is to understand that the intentions of eternal wisdom are accomplished not only in the natural world, but also in the realm of the [spirit] which is actively present in the world. From this point of view, our investigation can be seen as a theodicy …. It should enable us to comprehend all the ills of the world, including the existence of evil, so that the thinking spirit may be reconciled with the negative aspects of existence; and it is in world history that we encounter the sum total of concrete evil … In order to justify the course of history we must try to understand the role of evil in the light of the absolute sovereignty of reason.[35]
Hegel was not alone. Indeed, as will become important in a moment, Hegel was a big fan of the Englishman William Paley—famous for his design arguments and notorious for his so-called “Watchmaker” analogy. As Frank M. Turner notes “Hegel wanted to do for history what Paley did for nature,” namely, provide a theodicy that helps us see that the slaughter bench of history was, in Paley’s Disney-esque phrase, “a happy world after all.”[36] Both men were consistently preoccupied with eliminating the notion of “waste.”[37] Nothing is waste, for all is part of the grand design either of the self-unfolding of Geist or the scrupulous tinkering of the Watchmaker God.
As Hegel put it in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (and to which Paley could no doubt voice hearty agreement): “The sole aim of philosophical inquiry is to eliminate the contingent.”[38] That is, eliminate waste. Eliminate that which does not conduce itself to a fruitful story. In passing, one alteration that this already seems to imply is that whatever lip service was still being played to the notion of evil as privation, as part of the detail work of the “immanent frame” of grand mosaic that modern thought was constructing, evil has attained a sort of “positive” existence as it contributed to the whole.[39]
This becomes clearer when one re-locates theology into its broader historical contexts. In terms of the history of ideas, for example, recently “design” arguments are often invoked in a somewhat cramped form by way of the controversies over intelligent design (ID) and evolution. It is forgotten that, historically speaking, design arguments were typically part of a broader project of theodicy that also included prescriptions on ethics, social order, economics, politics, and law.[40] Lest we forget, in book X of his Laws, even Plato noted that the root of all misconduct is disbelief in God, and so he recommends that lawbreakers be forced to listen to lectures on proofs for existence of the divine. In today’s lowered standards of public discourse, this would perhaps translate into throwing unpurchased copies of God’s Not Dead 2 at the offender.
Let us close with one example. As Frank M. Turner writes “perhaps the most important and least noticed aspect of British natural theology from the late seventeenth century onwards was its providing both a theological and social theodicy.”[41] From Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, to the Bridgewater Treatises, to William Paley, these “design” arguments also doubled as theodicies that demonstrated how God intricately brought good from evil and so also properly ordered society. To abandon design, therefore, could be done not just because one didn’t believe in God, but rather one could be a fully orthodox individual who didn’t believe in the current social order or in the particular way William Paley’s design arguments somewhat over-optimistically assured humans that all suffering was secretly for good. This, in part, stemmed from the world that Newtonianism built:
Let us close with one example. As Frank M. Turner writes “perhaps the most important and least noticed aspect of British natural theology from the late seventeenth century onwards was its providing both a theological and social theodicy.”[41] From Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, to the Bridgewater Treatises, to William Paley, these “design” arguments also doubled as theodicies that demonstrated how God intricately brought good from evil and so also properly ordered society. To abandon design, therefore, could be done not just because one didn’t believe in God, but rather one could be a fully orthodox individual who didn’t believe in the current social order or in the particular way William Paley’s design arguments somewhat over-optimistically assured humans that all suffering was secretly for good. This, in part, stemmed from the world that Newtonianism built:
Not only was this liberal Anglicanism basic to Newton; it was also embraced by a new generation of Cambridge-trained clergymen who used both pulpit and press to articulate for the educated elite what was nothing less than a new version of the Christian message. They addressed themselves to the competitive and self-interested world of the market, and found its ethics, when restrained by Christian virtue, compatible with salvation. … Chance and disorder [read: waste] are only apparent, not real, they argued, and God instills order in a world made complex by competition, market fluctuations, and (not least) political upheaval. Science, liberal Anglicans argued, proves the reality of that inherent, providentially directed, natural harmony. … The Newtonian synthesis entered the eighteenth century as an intellectual construction born in response to the English Revolution [that is, as a theodicy].[42]The import of this observation comes from the fact that, while it is well known that Darwin in his Origins of Species was attempting to overcome Paley’s design arguments (in fact Paley was so impressed upon Darwin’s thoughts, Paley exists as a negative image pressed into the pages of the Origin) it is less well know how Paley and Victorian Design arguments affected Darwin in terms of theodicy and the problem of evil. It is a myth much circulated that Darwin lost his Christian faith and became agnostic due to his theory of evolution.
This stemmed rather from the death of his daughter Annie, who died in both a protracted and painful way. In a recent study, Randal Keynes[43] has demonstrated that there was a pronounced increase in emphasis on the randomness, waste, and disorder that natural selection acts upon after Darwin’s daughter passed. He was so devastated he no longer could believe in the sensible, anodyne world Paley had constructed. And so, in its own way, the death of Annie enfolded evolution into a new, radicalized narrative of chance and contingency that shattered the prevailing Newtonian/Paleyian theodicy of God, nature, market, and society. So when Darwin came, this glass king shattered.
Interestingly, one of the main scientific promoters of Darwin’s theory, Ernst Haeckel, also went through a similar crisis with the death of his wife (who as a coincidence was named Anne) that also radicalized his interpretation of Darwinian evolution as anti-theological and as an anti-theodicy. Robert J. Richards, in an analysis of Haeckel’s work on evolution[44] and its reception writes that “had Haeckl not suffered these tragic events that caused him to dismiss orthodox religion as unmitigated superstition and to advance a militantly monistic philosophy his own version of Darwinian theory would have lost its markedly hostile features, and these features would not have bled over to the face turned toward the public.”
This is not to invalidate the theory of evolution, or overlook the difficulties that arose between it and theology. It is rather to point out that one of the driving factors radicalizing the theory was not a narrative of science vs. religion, but the modern reworking of the age old trauma born from suffering and evil.
Interestingly, one of the main scientific promoters of Darwin’s theory, Ernst Haeckel, also went through a similar crisis with the death of his wife (who as a coincidence was named Anne) that also radicalized his interpretation of Darwinian evolution as anti-theological and as an anti-theodicy. Robert J. Richards, in an analysis of Haeckel’s work on evolution[44] and its reception writes that “had Haeckl not suffered these tragic events that caused him to dismiss orthodox religion as unmitigated superstition and to advance a militantly monistic philosophy his own version of Darwinian theory would have lost its markedly hostile features, and these features would not have bled over to the face turned toward the public.”
This theme of tragedy and trauma within the heart of the debates over Darwin and evolutionary theory goes further than this. As one more example, we might point to the fact that the Scopes Trial was initiated by a group of activists led by George Rappleyea. A Methodist who believed in evolution based on how his priest had presented it as God’s grand design, he was radicalized into anti theological interpretations while attending the funeral of the 6 year old son of one of his colleagues. There at the funeral the grieving mother, wanting reassurance her son was with Christ, was told between her sobs, “he had never been baptized or confessed Christ. He is in the flames of hell.”
Rappleyea grew wild with rage at this fundamentalist insensitivity. When he heard a few days later of the Tennessee anti evolution law, he channeled his anger “and made up his mind to show the world” Fundamentalism was as intellectually hollow as its spirituality.
This is not to invalidate the theory of evolution, or overlook the difficulties that arose between it and theology. It is rather to point out that one of the driving factors radicalizing the theory was not a narrative of science vs. religion, but the modern reworking of the age old trauma born from suffering and evil.
[1] A handy guide to some of the ins-and-outs of the debate over modernity can be found in the now dated but still very useful Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 5-44.
[2] Immanuel Kant, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” in Religion and Rational Theology ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24.
[3] Here in particular the understudied phenomenon of misotheism (“God-hating”) becomes incredibly relevant to understanding modern theodicy. See: Bernard Schweizer, Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). This is an important addition to the conversation, because in theodicy the binary is often between believers and unbelievers. However, the curious phenomenonon of those who seem to at least tacitly believe in God’s existence in the act of hating Him for the misery found in his creation complicates our categories considerably.
[4] Gordon Bigelow, “Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics,” Harper’s Magazine (May 2005): 33-38. Quote at 33.
[5] Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, 221: “profound shifts in the intellectual and social world of Europe created the conditions in which theodicy became a discourse practice.”
[6] Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 4. Emphasis in the original; Cf. Alasdair Macintyre and Paul Ricouer, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 14. “The God in whom the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to disbelieve had been invented only in the seventeenth century.” This has been expanded in the incredibly detailed study of Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) 346: “Christianity, in order to defend its God, transmuted itself into theism.”; Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). cf. William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 2: “Some of the features that contemporary critics find objectionable in so-called traditional Christian theology in fact came to prominence only in the seventeenth century.”; Derrick Peterson, “August God: Notes on the Historiographical Construction of Classical Theism,” Ad Fontes No.3 Vo.1 (2018): 3-12; Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), esp. 120-163; Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–21 who calls the modern view “theistic personalism” as distinguished from actual “classical theism’; Janet Martin Soskice, “Naming God: A Study of Faith and Reason,” in Reason and the Reasons of Faith, ed. Paul Griffiths and Reinhard Hütter (New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 241–254.
[7] Terrence W. Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2000), 114, notes regarding “Augustinian theodicy” for example that “[these accounts are] not Augustine’s. Rather, subsequent theologians built this theodicy by amalgamating ‘relevant’ texts out of Augustine’s various writings. They have attributed to Augustine a system of ‘theodicy’ which goes far beyond what he actually claimed and said.”
[8] Le Goff, Must We Divide History, 31, 32, 34.
[9] Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment, 91-93.
[10] Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance, 187.
[11] Quoted in Willem Styfhals, “Modernity as Theodicy: Odo Marquard Reads Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 80, no. 1 (January 2019): 113-131. Quote at 115.
[12] Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age trans. Robert M. Wallace (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985), 135.
[13] Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World trans. Robert M. Wallace (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989), 262: “The God of the Middle Ages was supposed to have created the heavens in such a way that man is only able to perceive confusion in them.”
[14] Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, 262.
[15] Gregory Schrempp, The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing (Quebec: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012).
[16] Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 10.
[17] Richard Watson, “Foucher’s Mistake and Malebranche’s Break: Ideas, Intelligible Extension, and the End of Ontology,” in S. Brown, ed., Nicolas Malebranche: His Philosophical Critics and Successors (Assen: Mastricht, 1991), 22-34.
[18] Christia Mercer, “Descartes Is Not Our Father” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/descartes-is-not-our-father.html.
[19] Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6.
[20] This is the organizing theme of Zbigniew Janowski, Cartesian Theodicy: Descartes’ Quest for Certitude (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000).
[21] This is the organizing theme of Zbigniew Janowski, Cartesian Theodicy: Descartes’ Quest for Certitude (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000).
[22] Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 10.
[23] Mercer, “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa.”
[24] Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-65.
[25] Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 291.
[26] Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 291.
[27] A particularly notorious example involves putting a fabricated anti-Copernican quote into the mouth of theologian John Calvin. On the initial exposure of this, see: Edward Rosen, “Calvin’s Attitude Toward Copernicus,” in Copernicus and His Successors (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 161-173. For a good follow up incorporating recent discussion, see: Christopher B. Kaiser, “Calvin, Copernicus, and Castellio,” in Calvin Theological Journal vol. 21 (April 1986): 5-31.
[28] Richard A. Watson, “Shadow History in Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy vol. 31, no. 1 (January 1993): 95-109. Quote at 95.
[29] Watson, “Shadow History,” 98.
[30] Norma B. Goethe, “How Did Bertrand Russell Make Leibniz Into A ‘Fellow Spirit’?” in Pauline Phemister and Stuart Brown, eds., Leibniz and the English-Speaking World (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 195-206.
[31] See, for example: Irena Backus, Leibniz: Protestant Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[32] Goethe, “How Did Bertrand Russell,” 195-196.
[33] Christia Mercer, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
[34] Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 290.
[35] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42-43.
[36] For this connection, see: Frank M. Turner, “The Late Victorian Conflict of Science and Religion as an Event in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Thomas Dixon, Geoffery Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, eds., Science and Religion: New Historical Approaches (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2010), 87-110.
[37] Cyril O’Regan, “Hegel, Theodicy, and the Invisibility of Waste,” in Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler, eds., The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 75-108.
[38] Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 28.
[39] O’Regan, “Hegel, Theodicy, and the Invisibility of Waste,” 77: “…[in this theodicy] any and all negativity is ingredient in divine becoming.”
[40] Frank M. Turner, “The Secularization of the Social Vision of British Natural Theology,” in Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101-130.
[41] Frank M. Turner, “The Late Victorian Conflict of Science and Religion as an Event in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Thomas Dixon, ed., Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 87-110. Quote at 93.
[42] Margaret C. Jacob, “Christianity and the Newtonian Worldview,” 240.
[43] Randal Keynes, Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (New York: Riverhead, 2001).
[44] Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15-16.
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