Within Reason - #29 Richard Swinburne - Souls, Free Will and the Problem of Evil

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Richard Swinburne is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and author of a number of books on the philosophy of religion, the soul, and Christianity, amongst other subjects. To support the podcast, please visit support.withinreasonpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Samburg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. Get tickets now. Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. My guest today is Mr. Richard Swinburne. Richard Swinburne is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford University, and one of the most respected contributors to the field of philosophy of religion from a Christian perspective. Born in 1934, Professor Swinburne has spent the last 50 years writing extensively on the philosophy of religion,

as well as topics including mind-body dualism and the philosophy of science. He's particularly well known for a trilogy of books, faith and reason, the coherence of theism, and the existence of God. I spoke to Professor Swinburne at his home in Oxford, and we discussed mind-body dualism, as well as the existence of free will. Professor Swinburne believes in the existence of libertarian free will, and, as you may know, I certainly do not, so I didn't want to waste an opportunity to pick this great philosopher's brain on that issue. We also talk about the problem of evil and the issues that this might pose for belief in the existence of a good God.

It was a privilege to sit down with Richard Swinburne, and I do hope that you enjoy the following conversation. Professor Richard Swinburne, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for inviting me. You probably have no reason to remember this, but we did meet once before after you were. had conducted a debate with Peter Milliken at the Oxford Union in the Oxford Union Bar afterwards. Thank you for reminding me. I remember being fascinated by just how long you've been in Oxford in academia.

When was it that you came here as an undergraduate? I came up to Oxford in 1954 as an undergraduate. And one of the things I wanted to ask you is, of course, I imagine that the academic space and the way that philosophy is popularly understood and taught has changed a lot since then. I wonder if you could give us an indication of how and why you think that might have happened. When I was an undergraduate, the Oxford atmosphere, philosophical atmosphere, was dominated by what is called ordinary language philosophy, though logical positivism had a certain secondary place.

And ordinary language philosophy meant J. L. Austin. And ordinary language philosophy thought that the aim of philosophy was to show, as Wittgenstein put it, the fly the way out of the fly bottle, that is to say, to explain why all these puzzling things like why there is a universe and why we have free will and what makes persons the same as a person the same as another person. 50 years before are really linguistic puzzles so we can choose what to say and it needs philosophers to explain why there isn't any deep

reality which they are investigating but these are what they call pseudo problems and for example free will is a very important issue for philosophers do we have free will well the way to solve that

ordinary language philosopher held, was to investigate when we say someone had said something of their own free will or freely, and so we had to look how those words was used, and we could say that, well, someone was said to be talking freely if nobody was twisting their arm or threatening them with imprisonment. On the other hand, what was happening in their brain wasn't particularly relevant to this, and that seemed to be clearly false. But I learned from ordinary language philosophy that one has to be rather careful about how one uses words, and if one does introduce technical terms, one has to define them rather carefully in more familiar terms, and I hope I have preserved that sensitivity, as I have

tried to define some rather important philosophical terms via more ordinary terms and more ordinary examples. On that matter of definitions, one of the first questions I wanted to ask you was something that seems a bit deceptively simple. What, in your view, is a human being? Well, a human is also a word that needs some rather careful definition and it can be used. Usage is not very clear.

I mean, there are narrow senses of humans in which all humans are people of the same race as you and me or descended from people rather like you and me in bone structure or something like that. Or one could define them as people of that sort who have free will and moral beliefs and so on and so on and we can then investigate

it would be an arbitrary matter perhaps as to whether if we find creatures on other planet who look rather like us and seem to have similar abilities whether they would be humans or whether they wouldn't be because they were descended from quite different routes than ourselves

So we have to give a careful definition of that and I don't think it's a very important word in itself because I think it's not what is philosophers call an essential kind that is to say I could be me even if I cease to be human if, for example, I gradually grew an alligator body and had thoughts and feelings like alligators there would be every reason to say that I was no longer a human but instead an alligator. So you can define it as you want.

But I think the most useful definition is that it is someone like us who has similar abilities and appearance and origins from ourselves. And that'll do. Now, crucially, you would imagine perhaps that the word person is more, applicable than human here as being more than merely material. A lot of people when they define what a person is, what a human is, they think it's essentially, as you say, a member of the homo species, race of creatures. But you like to think of persons as more than merely material. Yes, I think that's a much wider term. In persons includes humans, but it's a much wider

term, and I would define it as a pure mental substance, I'll give you a definition of that in a moment, a pure mental substance who has free will and moral beliefs and certain powers to make a difference to things, and that is compatible with them either having a body or not having a body. I understand by a pure mental substance, one for whose existence no, nothing material is necessary. And I think that'll do. So a person, at least an embodied person, who's alive right now, like you and me, we, in your view, consist of two parts. Yes. And that would be broadly described as a mind or a soul connected to a physical body? Yes, I'm using soul in the sense that Plato and Descartes used it as a thing which has properties, a substance is the philosophical, technical term.

Yes. Now, what I wanted to ask you about is one of the first problems that people encounter when considering persons as being material and also partly immaterial, which is the problem of interaction between these two parts. parts of the human being, it seems that if I were to prod your brain in various ways, it affects the mind. And similarly, it seems impossible for the mind to change or do anything in any way without the brain also doing something. So this leads a lot of people to think that the mind and the brain are just the same thing. What is it that allows us to separate these out and to explain how they could possibly interact if one is material and one is not? it certainly doesn't follow from the fact that one makes a difference to the other

and conversely that they must be the same thing that's quite a further question so your question is how can they interact and I'm just saying well it's a basic truth that they do interact and I can show you that

by saying that if you stick a pin in to me I feel pain And pain is a mental property, a pure mental property, in the sense that it is one to which the subject has direct experience and necessarily is a better place to know about than anyone else. I can know whether I am in pain better than you can. And that's a necessary truth. It wouldn't be my pain, if you could know about it better than I can. It wouldn't be a paid at all. And there are lots and lots of mental properties.

And a soul, as I understand it, is capable of having mental properties. I should have said that at the beginning. It must, as well as satisfying my definition, then given, It must be capable of having mental properties, these being properties to which the subject has privileged access. Now, given that, it's just obvious that things in my brain cause mental properties and mental properties such as my making decisions or spontaneously crying out when I have a pain. These are interactions.

If you don't understand how that can happen, well, we're not omniscient, but it obviously does happen, and I think we must start from there. But do you see why people see it as a problem or an objection to the idea that there is a separation between mind and body that two things of an entirely different category? You say you just accept it as a basic fact that they do interact and that they can exert control over each other. But do you understand why it is that people see this as a problem, given that these are two totally different kinds of substances? It seems a very strange mystery that they should be even able in principle to touch each other. Well, I don't see why, but I can understand in the present climate where physicalism is so rampant that people think this without questioning.

But if they settle down and thought about it, they would realize that there were properties to which the subject has privileged access and properties which are publicly accessible, all physical properties are publicly accessible, and they will realize that these make a difference to each other. I haven't given you an argument for those properties being properties of a soul, but clearly this stage one that there are such properties and that there is interaction is something people just have to face up to. And I really think that physicalists who say,

well, there aren't really such properties of their brain states, are simply a head in the sand, frankly. Really? So to those who say that the mind or the soul is essentially an emergent material property, do you think that they're just flatly mistaken? If they're saying it's an emergent material property, Yes. But remember how I've defined it. I've defined it as pure mental substance.

So their objection must consist not in saying that it's a material thing, but in consisting that there aren't such things and talk must be analysed in different ways. I remember once before you spoke to my friend Cameron Batutzi from the Capturing Christianity YouTube channel and he asked you what position you held that you were most convinced of, that you most strongly believed was true. And I'm pretty sure that at least the first thing you said was the separation of mind and body. Yes. What is it that makes you so certain?

And how would you explain this to somebody who hasn't come across this problem before? Well, all right. Now, this is going to take me about 10 minutes to give you the first moves in this. Let's start with the issue of personal identity. Personal identity is the problem or some, I am the same person as a certain person who has got a degree at Oxford in the 50s. Most people would agree with that, and the issue is what makes me the same person. And this is the question of personal identity. Well, the obvious answer is, because to most people, well, the same body.

I've got the same body. But then I ask, well, how much of the same body? If I have a heart transplant, am I the same person? If I lose my legs and I'm given artificial ones, am I the same person? I don't think people would doubt that. And indeed, they'd only doubt whether I was the same person if some of my brain had been tempered with. And the reason for that is that all our conscious thoughts,

on our brain. All our mental properties depend on our brain. Okay, so the next suggestion is I'm the same person if I have the same brain. But the same question arises again, how much of the same brain? And, well, some people have bits, quite large bits of the brain taken out and they are said to be the same person. So how much of the same brain? And this question is, you know, this question, comes very acutely to our notice with the following interesting neurophysical physiological discovery the brain is the organ of consciousness but it's the upper part of the brain the cortex that consciousness depends on and our brains have two cortices a left and a right one they're joined together but they They are largely separate, and it's on the cortex that I say say that consciousness depends. So, and the interesting discovery is, if you take one of the cortexes out, the subject is still much the same in the sense of having the same memories and the same character and so on.

That is if you remove about half of that person's brain. Well, of the top of that person's brain, yes. And likewise, it doesn't matter which half you take out. If you take the left half out, the same plies. Take the right half half. And this is done very occasionally. We know this because there's an operation called hemispherectomy, in particular anatomical hemisporectory,

which consists in removing half of that. In acute cases, it's a cure for epilepsy, which starts in one of the halves. So this is known. Well, given that, at the moment, although neuroscientists can take out bits of the brain, they can't transplant plates into the brain. But I'm sure that will come because they're learning. now to implant, to join up broken nerves in the spine and the neurons of the brain are the sort of same sort of thing. So it will come. Maybe the next century, but it will come.

So the following thought experiment is in no way just a thought experiment. It's a very serious one. Suppose there are three people. Let's say there are triplets. I don't, call, and we call one of them Alexandra, the middle one, and we call the left one Alex, and we call the right one Sandra. Now, suppose we take out of Alexandra's brain, both of the hemispheres, both the left and the right, and we put one into Alex's brain, and the other into Sandra's brain, and so Suppose we then take out their other hemisphere, the one they were left with, and as we've been seeing, one hemisphere is enough. Now, each of them would claim to be Alex, Sandra.

That's all the memories they would have access to and so on and so on. But they can't both be Alexandra. They have different thoughts and feelings and go out of the room by different doors and never see each other again. So there are only three possibilities of what has happened here. The first is that the left-hand one, Alex, is Alexandra. The second is that the right-hand one is Alexandra, Sandra is Alexandra, and the third is that neither of them are. And there is no conceivable experiment which could show which is the case.

And yet this is not a matter of. That is to say, if somebody is having an operation, they want on their brain, they want to know if they will survive. And the neuroscientists may be able to say, well, certainly there will be a surviving person who has most of your body. Yes, but says the prospective patient, I want to know if it will be me. and unless there's a correct philosophical answer to that question, they won't know. So the issue is what makes one of them me and nobody knows the answer.

But there must be something that's some difference that makes one of them me and by making one of them me, I don't mean causes them to be me, but constitutes being me. analytical philosophers have produced various ideas. They have said, well, it's me if it has. Forget that particular example, but this is a general theory of what makes a subsequent person me.

Subsequent person if he has most of the brain, or subsequent person if has most of the memories and character. But the problem with these suggestions is, when you spell them out, they're extremely arbitrary. To spell them out, they would have to say something, well, something's me if it's got 52% of my brain, but not if it has 51.

And that is silly. Being me can't consist in that. And if it could, you wouldn't know that it could. and likewise you can't have a memory criteria and you can't say it's me if it has most of the previous memories nor

even if you combine these criteria and the same applies but there must be something that makes me me and since it's not a physical thing in other words part of the brain and since it's not a property such as either the physical

properties of size and so or the mental properties of thought, it must be something else. And since both mental properties and physical properties are ruled out, and physical substances ruled out,

it must be a mental substance. It must be something indivisible and non-material which makes me me. And that's what I call the soul. If there weren't any soul, there wouldn't be a truth about whether

a later person was me or not. And going back to the Alexandra example, if they didn't have souls, there wouldn't be a truth about whether any of them, either of them, or none of them, were me. But if they have souls, there is an answer. The one that has Alexandra's soul is Alexander. We may not know what it is, but at any rate we know what would. We would need to know in order to know that. And unless you say, therefore, that what makes someone a later person is there having a soul, you can't answer the problem of personal identity.

That's why I think the soul is the crucial element. I would suppose somebody were to just accept that the problem of personal identity is a problem given that perhaps there just can't be a way to describe the sense in which you are the same person as you were before. If somebody says, for example, people speak colloquially about not being the same person that they were 10 years ago. And famously, once every seven years or so, every atom in your body has been replaced. And somebody might just say, well, I take a view that, yes, what a person consists in is something like their physical continuation. And you quite rightly ask, well, then how does that make me the same person I want? was in the 1950s, and they might say, well, you're just not the same person.

You're a different thing now than you were back then. What's the problem with that view? Well, let me make one point. The person said, I am not the same person as I was, which already begs the question. The question begged is whether a same person is being used in the sense that I'm using it. And it isn't, that's to say, what it means is I don't have the same personality, characteristics, attitude to life as I had then, and that's perfectly comprehensible. It's nothing about personal identity in that phrase. The second point I would make, although for most of the body, the atoms are replaced every seven years, that is not the case with the brain.

Indeed, scientists don't know quite how much of the brain is replaced, but the general view is most of it isn't replaced at all, see if there's a difference. I see. I'm interested in asking you about free will, since you've mentioned it once or twice in passing so far. It's often seen as a problem from materialism that if human beings are just atoms bumping into each other,

then there seems to be no way in which we're meaningfully in control of our actions. I wonder if you agree with that assessment, and if so, what it is about having an immaterial aspect to our nature that provides space for free will to obtain. No, actually, I don't think the problems are quite as close as you represent them. I think the physicalist, if he's an open-minded physicalist, can entertain the notion of free will. I take a what's called a libertarian view of free will, that is to say an agent is free if and any of their choice of an action, which action to do. They have that choice independently of all the causes which are acting upon them. Now, you could be a materialist, a physicalist, I'm using these in the same sense,

and say, well, I have free will in virtue of the fact that what goes on in my brain does not fully determine what I do, even though what I do and what goes on in the brain is a physical matter. I don't, of course, think that view is right, but I think it's perfectly compatible with having free will. Now, the problem for free will, as I see it, is one of causation, essentially. It's often described in terms of physical determinism. The problem is, well, if everything is physically determined, how can we be in control? But for me, the question of materialism is irrelevant. For me, it's just causation.

I think it seems fundamentally true to me that any action or any event is either going to be caused by something else. That is, there are conditions under which this event will be entailed, essentially, or it will not be caused. It will be uncaused. Now, in my view, if something is uncourced, that is if there's an element of it that there's no reason why it happened, that is essentially a good definition of randomness. It just happens at random if there's no cause for it to happen in that particular way. And randomness isn't something that we're in control of. So there wouldn't be any control or freedom over random events. in our brain. But then, or our mind, indeed. But then if our, the other option being that an

event in our mind or a thought that we have is caused by something. Now, even if it's caused by something immaterial, like a soul, it seems a problem to me that there's still going to be this chain of causation. Because if the soul causes a particular brain state or a particular event in the mind, then you need to ask, well, why is it that the soul, caused that particular event to arise or to occur. And that itself, that condition of the soul, whatever it was about the soul that brought about this event, will itself be either caused or uncaused. And again, if it's uncaused, it's not in our control. And if it is caused, you end up asking what caused that thing? And you end up with a with a chain of causation that

either terminates in randomness or something outside of ourselves. And so the ultimate causal chain of any particular mind event seems to be something that we're not in control of. And I don't see why having a soul, having an immaterial aspect to us, alleviates us of that problem in the same way that it would exist for a material brain. Well, your view is a very common one. But you seem to be relying on what is known as event causation, that is to say, it's the view of causation common since Hume. That is to say, if we say the fall of the tree falling down, the tree caused the car to swerve,

the correct way to spell this out is the fall of the tree or the sudden appearance of the tree or something like that. It's the event that causes the other event, not the thing. And since Hume, almost all philosophers, I believe, caused. is ultimately to be analysed in that way. And, of course, if you do take that line, your line of argument comes. But I don't think that's the right account at all. And actually, it wasn't the right account before Hume.

Every philosopher, as I know, most philosophers, assume that it was things that did causing, not just persons but other things as well the earth causes the moon to go round it the sun causes the earth to go round the moon and so on and that is to say and in particular among the substances that do causing are human beings

we cause things and if we cause things intentionally, as to say we mean to cause things, that chain ends with us meaning to cause things. At least, it may do, sorry, it may do, it's possible that it does end with us. And you're saying, well, that's just random. No, it isn't.

There's all the difference between a coin falling heads and tails and me deciding to do something, I initiate this. this is not a random event, I've made it happen and I am the cause and therefore I don't go along with this argument agent causation is a little more fashionable than it used to be

though not as a general view but I would take it further as indeed as several philosophers are these days and so it's not merely persons or who are agent causes but sorry who are substance causes

but all things the earth, the sun these cause not the motion of the earth or the motion of the sun any rate among whether or not those are in fact how instances of substance causation

agent causation is certainly in my view, a case of a substance, me, causing something. And that could be true even if me is only a physical thing. It's not random because I do it and I do it for a reason and I've chosen to do it. It's not like a coin falling. But that's the question that I wanted to ask you. You just said, I do it for a reason. Yeah.

Of course, that reason, whatever the reason is for your action, could it sell? be considered as part of this causal chain? I mean, you say that, look, if I turn on the kettle, we might say that, you know, the reason that that occurred is because I caused it. You know, I, it just, it just stops with me. I decided to put the kettle on. But there's going to be a reason why I caused it to happen. In this case, it might be that I'm thirsty. And in such an instance, I'm not in control of the fact that I'm thirsty. I just find myself thirsty. And so if it's the fact that I'm thirsty that causes me to cause the kettle to turn on, then it seems odd to say that this is a free action that I've done because I've decided to do it if, as you say,

to say I've decided to do it means I had a reason to do it. And that reason is something that ultimately I didn't control. I didn't say all intentional actions are free actions. I may have given you that impression. I certainly didn't wish to. humans are free if and only if they have choices between what to do and therefore a competing reasons one of which they choose that's where freedom operates

and paradigmatically for the sake of moral responsibility it operates when I have a choice between what I ought to do and what I feel like doing in other words between the moral action and the desired action. And, of course, that view that that's human,

that is the human situation, goes right back to Plato, who pictured humans as being pulled by two horses who are going in different directions, and the charioteer pulls the horse, one which makes them go in both directions, or if it makes one of them calm. But it seems like when you have a choice

between two options and you make a decision. I think there's a way of characterizing this if we want to defend the view that there's no free will. They're saying that when you're considering two options and you find yourself deciding which one you would prefer, it's not so much that you decide which you prefer as you find out. As in a simple case, a famous example is choosing between flavors of ice cream and you have your chocolate and you have your vanilla and somebody's choosing between the two, they don't get to just decide to want one of them more. They just discover somewhere in their mind that they do. They think, you know what, actually, I think I'd prefer the vanilla, and so they go for the vanilla, but they didn't choose to have that desire override the desire

for the chocolate. It just sort of happened in their brain. Well, that may be so with that example. Once again, I emphasize that I'm not saying that all intentional actions are free, and when you have a serious choice I don't know if I put the word serious in when I was talking before that the situation is quite different I don't as it were find myself doing the immoral act

I allow myself to do the immoral act or I force myself to do the moral act that is the phenomenology you may think there's a cause behind it but that's the phenomenon I mean, the reason I give a trivial example, like the ice cream, is to help to understand the point, but it seems like even in these more serious considerations, you can imagine a world

leader deciding whether or not to, you know, go to war. And there are various considerations and they'll have people showing them information and they'll weigh up the information and they'll make a decision based on that. But what is it we're describing there? if somebody has information on this side and information on this side, and they're not sure, and then one of their advisors says, but have you considered this, sir? And they go, you know what? Yeah, I think we should go to war.

It seems like what's happening there is external considerations or information, just bringing about this mind state. It depends what sort of advice they're being given. If the advice is, well, would we win or wouldn't we win, that's the factual matter. and free will is most evident in the case of moral choices and moral responsibility, and there there is a decision going on. And sure, advisors may be pushing one side or push in the other, but if the agent sees one of them as doing what he believes to be right and the other one as doing what he feels like,

that's the paradigmatic situation of free will. I entirely accept that there may be other case, rather borderline cases of where is it free or isn't it free. But if you accept the phenomenology of those cases, then it is free. And what you have to say is that the phenomenology is misleading. And of course it may be that's logically possible, but I don't think it is. So it's in moral decision making or not so much moral dilemmas, but whether or whether or there's an obvious moral choice versus some kind of compulsion to do something immoral,

that's where you think free will is most obviously evident. Yes, I don't think it's the only case. But I mean, we have free will to decide between two equally good alternatives, but that's not particularly important. What makes us guilty or praiseworthy or blameworthy is choosing between what we believe. believe to be right and what we feel like doing. Now, I mean, even in a case like that, it might be that being a human animal, you have a compulsion towards doing something immoral, doing something wrong, and there's also a

compulsion within you, a sort of moral intuition that something is the right thing to do, and these, like the horses, are pulling you in different directions, and is it not the case that one just wins out? I mean, some people do choose the immoral action, but it seems like a strange analysis to say, well, they sort of sat down and decided they're going to allow that animalistic nature to override them. It seems like something that just happens. No, the phenomenology is they decide to do the right thing or they allow themselves, but that is an action, allow themselves to do the wrong thing. That is the phenomenology. I entirely accept it's logically possible that the phenomenology is misleading.

I don't think it is because I think there's a, I believe in a principle called the principle of credulity that you should believe in things are as they seem to be in the absence of counter-evidence. But it's logically possible there could be counter-evidence. I have no cast iron argument to show that we do or don't have free will. I think the balance is that we do, but I'm open to argument on that. Crucially, free will gives people the ability, as you say, in moral decision-making to make good choices and bad choices. And many people see this as one of the foremost objections to the existence of a loving God

is the fact that God presides over a world in which people are able to commit great evils. as well as, of course, presiding over a world in which, without the influence of free will, bad things, suffering seems to occur. I wondered if we could take a minute to explain why it is you think that a good God would preside over a world with someone else. Well, free will is an enormous gift to us, enormous gift. We makes us what I call mini-creators. We can make a decision as to what we and the world are going to be like. And that's a great gift.

Of course, there's a price to pay, but it's a great gift, and I think it's worth the price. We're not just robots. God has given us this limited free will, of course. There's only so much. Our choices can only make a small difference to things, but they can, and that's crucial. Now, what would you say to somebody who just says that they'd rather live in a world where there is no freedom and therefore no evil

because they prefer a world that's a bit like a Nozikian experience machine of pleasure and a good experience which it seems at least possible that God could have actualised this kind of world where persons exist and they just experience pleasurable states. I think they've got a bad value system, frankly,

and I think they'd get fed up with it after a few years I mean, the sort of person you picture is the sort of person who is under what people who take powerful drugs are like, isn't it? And that makes the point. I mean, they don't make decisions. They just experience. The ability to make a difference to things is an enormous gift.

And we think that in normal contexts. It's what a good parent doesn't try and force their views on their children. Of course, a good parent wants them to do this and not that, but they don't force them to do that. They let them make up their own mind as they grow older, and that is, if they don't, they're seen as bad parents. I wonder if free will is one of the explanations, or perhaps the explanation, at least of moral evil, the reason why God allows people to commit evil is because free will necessitates their ability to do so. The question that I wanted to ask you is about the afterlife, about the nature of heaven. Do you think that there is free will in heaven? Not free will to choose

between good and evil, no, but free will to choose between many different good states. heaven, I think, is best regarded not so much as a reward for being good, but as the place where good people would be happy. It's a natural home for them because the occupations of heaven, worshiping God and helping God in his task of helping the world in the right direction

other sort of things bad people wouldn't want to do so if somebody by frequently choosing to do the good when it's difficult they gradually make their character different and if we do a good action of one sort one time

we're more likely to do a good action of that sort. The next time humans made like that. And that's a succession of these gradually can make us saints and suitable for heaven. The reason I ask is because it seems like this is a meaningful existence. Being in heaven, of course, it probably wouldn't be heaven if it weren't, if you didn't have this freedom. But if it is the case that people can exist in heaven and have a meaningfully free life between different good options, and this is still a life worth living, then the question arises as to why this can't obtain on earth.

I've sometimes heard this as described as the why not heaven now objection, but specifically with regards to free will, somebody, I've often heard that the reason suffering, or the reason moral evil exists on earth is because it's essentially logically necessary, or there's a requirement that, order to be meaningfully free, you have to be able to commit evil. But if there can be free will in heaven, a meaningful free will, and yet there be no evil

and suffering, that seems to undermine the point that in principle free will requires the ability to commit evil. Well, no, and I didn't say that it did. I mentioned earlier there are other cases of free will when we are choosing between equally good but perhaps very important alternatives. You're quite right, as it were, God could take people to heaven and make them naturally inclined to do the good. And that would be very worthwhile, and indeed it is a normal Christian doctrine, for example, that baptised babies go straight to heaven. And whether or not that's true, at any rate, that's seriously part of the Christian tradition.

But surely the best arrangement would be to let us have a choice of whether we wanted to be in that situation. And even if these are two equally good states, the best state of all is to live a life in which we have a choice of whether to be the sort of person who would enjoy doing the life of heaven. Would you say that given how good heaven is and given how good communion with God is, anybody who truly understands the nature of heaven and the nature of God and its goodness, and yet decides that they don't want it, decides that they don't want to go to heaven, don't want communion with God, would be necessarily acting irrationally in the sense that it's not in their interest. because if it is the case that there is this God who is perfectly good and this place where it's the most good place you can possibly be, anybody who rejects that is acting irrationally, it seems to me that of the people who reject heaven in the sense of not worshipping God, not following God, they don't all universally do so irrationally. It seems like many people do it for just lack of conviction. They haven't seen arguments that persuade them in the way that they might persuade other people. What do you think can account for the fact that this good God, you say, well, it would be good for him to give us a choice.

But it seems like if the terms of the choice were fully understood, any rational person would choose communion with him. And so the fact that they don't all choose that implies that though he's given us this choice, he hasn't given us the requisite information. to rationally make the choice? Well, we don't all have the requisite information. That is quite true. But there again, there is a reason for that. It's one of the good things in life that we can take trouble to find the requisite information. It's another of the good things in life that we can help other people to find that.

And therefore, a certain amount of ignorance is a good thing at the start. That's part of what our freedom consists in, the freedom to find out what is good. Some people, of course, don't even have the chance to do that. And it may be, I can't altogether know what God would do, but it may be that God does take them if they've tried as well as they can to heaven anyway and give them the right inclination. I mean, the Catholic Second Vatican Council said that everybody who has tried to do the best, et cetera, et cetera, can be saved.

But another possibility, which is seriously entertained, certainly, by the Orthodox Church, is that their fate is not finally settled on earth, that is to say this is not just purgatory. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory is the, as it were, pergastry is meant to be part of heaven.

It's just that you're on the right track if you're in purgatory and you've just got to spend a few years getting things straight. But the Orthodox Church does allow the possibility that maybe, as

we haven't had serious choices, we shall even be given them in the afterlife before a final judgment is passed on us. And that seems also a possibility. So I think there are various ways of alternative ways in which I can meet your concern there. A final thing I wanted to ask you about was we spoken about the soul and the free behaviors of human beings. something that mystifies me about this conversation is where the rest of the animal kingdom might fit into this I know you've written in the past that you think that some other animals have mental lives

that beetles cockroaches probably don't we're not so sure about fish you know it's not entirely clear but it does seem that at least a great deal of the animal kingdom as you say has a mental life can suffer and it seems that that suffering must morally matter. When we talk about the problem of evil and we speak about human free will being the reason why people commit evil actions and when it comes to natural evil like tsunamis and earthquakes, maybe God needs to allow these evils to obtain to grant higher order goods.

You can't have bravery and courage without fear and distress, these kinds of things. And maybe it's about the moral development of human beings. It gives them the opportunity to choose to respond to these evils in various ways. These considerations don't seem to apply to the suffering of animals. And I wonder, do you think that there's a good philosophical reason to suppose that God might allow animals to suffer when it comes to physical suffering in much the same way as human beings do without those kinds of theodices available to them? Yes, I didn't say that having a choice. moral choice, was the only reason for God allowing this.

Yes, I think the higher animals are conscious. Lower animals, I see every reason to suppose aren't, because consciousness depends on the cortex, and they don't have brains like ours. So there's no reason to suppose that there are are in them parts which give rise to pains. And indeed, it's always worth noting that when you stick a pain in me and I feel something,

there are two things going on. There are two nervous paths from the place of the injury to my brain. One of them determines how, I react. The other one determines how I feel. Yes. And it's quite possible to have the one without the other, and I think the Beatles and so on are in that position. However, mammals I'm inclined to think feel. These are the only ones I think one can be confident about. Yes, they feel, but I don't think they feel as much as us.

And of course, I may be mistaken about that, but they don't have quite, they don't have the same receptors in the brain because they don't have quite the

same part of the anterior prefrontal cortex as we do and even when it's somewhat similar to ours, they don't have as much of it as we do. I mean, our nearest relative, the chimpanzee, only has a brain, including the part relevant for that, a third of our size, the size of our brains. So, yes, they feel, but I don't see any reason to suppose they feel as much as we do.

Now bearing that in mind, the occurrence of pains, and in particular the causes of pains, that is to say, when they are pursued by predators or trying to get food or, above all, when they are trying to, as the mother animal does, often decoy predators from their offspring, in order to save the offering themselves. The ability to do these things makes their lives purposeful and meaningful. If you put them in a zoo, there's no point in their existing. But if you put them in the wild,

there is a considerable point in their existing because they can do all sorts of actions which will get them food, which will get them a mate, which will save them from predators, etc., etc. Now, I don't think there's actions are free actions, but I do think they're worthwhile actions, and that wouldn't be possible

without pains. And therefore, I think that the ability, albeit unfree, to do such actions, makes their lives worthwhile. But I mean, a disease striking an animal. you know, causing blotches on their skin and an eventual horrifying and painful death. You know, not as a result of animals running around and eating each other, but just some kind of infection or something that it receives. It just seems to me, and you may be right that animals feel less pain than human beings do,

but the problem of evil only needs for there to be any amount of pain more than is morally justifiable for it to be a problem. if a good God allows suffering he must have a morally permissible reason for doing so. The animal in that condition is also struggling struggling to keep himself alive in difficulties and that's what gives this life purpose

is also a source of information to other animals. They see he's got the disease so they steer clear and that he is of use to them. And being of use and being able to do something or try to do something to help himself in this situation are things that make his life meaningful. But, of course, they're not enough

if his pains were the sort of pains that we have. I don't think they are. If you showed me they are, I would be concerned. That would be a problem in your view for the existence of a good God. Yes. And do you, I mean, would that be enough to cause you serious trouble? If we uncovered that the mental life of animals was quite analogous to humans in terms of the amount of suffering they were experiencing

and the amount of distress that they were going through? It would worry me. I can't say, I can't predict otherwise, but I would say it would worry me and it would certainly lessen my confidence in the existence of God, yes. And do you think that's a question that will ultimately be answered by science or by philosophy? I don't think it'll be ought to ever be answered, frankly, because animals don't talk. They haven't got the sophistication.

Anyway, even if they did have, how can they explain what it feels like to be me? it's hard enough to understand what it feels like to be you, let alone them. So I don't think that's going to be solved by anybody, but we can only have, you know, very somewhat hesitant probabilistic evidence. And I think I have somewhat hesitant probabilistic evidence that they don't suffer as much as we do. Well, it's always nice to leave things on an open question. Professor Swinburne, thank you so much for your time and for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for inviting.