On Being a Theological Zombie

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.