I
have written about Theological Zombies a few times now, including the
original eponymous article, The
Logic of Theological Zombies, The
How Many Problem and most recently Theological
Zombies to the Rescue! I also
mentioned them in God
as Utility Monster. And
that’s in addition to discussing them at the Reasonably Fallacious Forums.
I
note that in The
Logic of Theological Zombies, I cut straight to the chase and showed
that consideration of such zombies can be used to argue that christianity is
false. I much assumed that people
understand what I mean by the term “Theological Zombie”, possibly relying too
much on the assumption that people will understand the concept as being akin to
the concept of the “Philosophical Zombie” (without even mentioning the term
“Philosophical Zombie”). Finally, I’ve
come to realise that there might be another possible form of
“Theological Zombie” to that which I was originally considering.
Let’s quickly look at the reasoning behind Theological Zombies. If god is all-powerful, all-knowing and
all-good and wants to save souls, then saving souls is a good
thing. It’s a sufficiently good thing to
justify creating souls in the first place.
There are plenty of indications in theism that not having your soul
saved is a bad thing.
Consider for a moment a soul that is apparently not going to be
saved in this universe. Given its omniscience,
the god would have known, right from the moment of creation that this soul was
not going to be saved. The soul was
going to go through the pain and suffering of existence, which according to
various arguments is supposed to be a formative experience, without getting the
payoff of salvation. But the god set up
the universe that way anyway, despite having options such as not creating any
souls at all or creating the universe in a slightly different way – either so
that that soul does not come into existence, or so that when that soul comes
into existence the conditions are right for it to be saved.
It’s latter option, combined with the god’s omnipotence and
omniscience that leads to Theological Zombies.
Omnipotence means that the god is not limited to the creation of a
single universe, or the creation of each universe in a particular way, while omniscience
allows it to know what conditions are right for each soul to be saved. Then all that is required is creation of the
conditions that are conducive for salvation of each possible soul. If that means a multitude of universes tailored
to small groups of souls, or even a single soul, then so be it – that’s not a
big deal for an omnipotent god.
The only real beings in such a universe are those who are hosting
souls that are going to be saved by such a universe, making all the same
decisions, taking all the same actions as they would if the god established the
universe and populated entirely with souled beings. However, some of those souls would not be
saved and others could be saved in a better universe. The idea here is that the universe that a
soul finds itself in is the best of all possible universes consistent with
being saved. A saved soul, however, will
therefore find itself surrounded by Theological Zombies – beings that are
indistinguishable from souled beings, but are empty. They don’t carry out a script per se but
rather do what the god can see would happen if it created a universe full of
souled beings and the target soul was saved.
When I first considered this, I thought of the Theological Zombies
as being akin to Philosophical Zombies, as per Wikipedia:
A
philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a
hypothetical being that from the outside is indistinguishable from a normal
human being but lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example,
if a philosophical zombie was poked with a sharp object it would not feel any
pain sensation, yet could behave exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say
"ouch", recoil from the stimulus, and say that it is feeling pain).
I called them Theological Zombies to distinguish them only in intent,
in that a god was creating what are effectively p-zombies to minimise suffering
while allowing a difficult soul to be saved – because that soul could not be
saved without an otherwise unacceptable level of pain and suffering. Note that with a p-zombie there is nothing
that it is like to be a p-zombie – because there is no there
there, a p-zombie is not consciously aware of being. This would not necessarily be the case for
Theological Zombies. A Theological
Zombie could be precisely what a materialist atheist thinks herself to be, an
emergent property of matter without a soul (whatever that actually is).
If you think about it deeply enough, we as materialist atheists
consider ourselves to be bits of stuff reacting to other bits of stuff, not
only in regard to things that are not our bodies, but also within our bodies. Pain and suffering are reactions in the stuff
that make up our brains to stuff in other parts of our bodies (or other parts
of our brains, in the case of a headache).
From this perspective, it could be said that there is no “I” that is experiencing
pain and suffering. It’s possible therefore,
to thread the needle and have a universe in which pain and suffering is some
sense real, since there could entirely material beings like myself with no “soul”
who can be under the impression that they are experiencing pain and suffering but
who, without an “I” to actually have that experience, don’t really suffer. The small number of souled beings in this
universe would not therefore find themselves in the situation of being
surrounded by automatons, but rather by effective atheists (even if some of
them are working under the misapprehension that they are believers and are going
to be saved, which maybe they sort of are, but not by virtue of their
experiences in this universe).
There remains the issue of this universe being rather awful. A maximally excellent being type of god could
do better. The argument here is that
such a god does do better and has done better with as perfect a
universe that can exist with humans in it and perhaps the vast majority of us qualified
for salvation in it (and there were only a relatively small number of Theological
Zombies, being those who could not be saved under the circumstances of near perfection). Then god created increasingly worse universes
with small numbers of souled beings and the vast majority being Theological
zombies. This universe, with its natural
disasters, predators and parasites, with an almost constant state of war,
poverty and widespread crime, this is still the sort of universe that is best,
with the least pain and suffering commensurate with whoever the souled beings
are in it.
This is actually quite consistent with my observations of some
believers, they do appear to be among the worst of people and some of them
surely would be, having a nature that would make it impossible for them to be
saved in a better universe. You hear
some apologists on the topic of morality, claiming that if their god did not exist,
they’d have no compunction about being immoral (or words to that effect) and
you realise that these are truly scary people.
A gentler world is not for them.
Note that I am not saying that the Theological Zombie argument
needs to have materialist zombies, rather than p-zombies. I’m just addressing the possibility. Either way, the people who need this universe
to be saved remain true scumbags.
