Excusing God

Raymond Tallis highlights the problem of evil.

- Raymond Tallis

This is the third time in this column I have written about - or more specifically, criticised Philip Goff's ideas. In Issue 135, I demonstrated (at least to my own satisfaction) that panpsychism, as set out in Professor Goff's 2019 book Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, did not make sense. Then in Issue 162, I argued against the claim advanced in his Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023) that the intrinsic improbability of a planet able to support life was evidence for a cosmic purpose. Now I am at it again. You may think that this amounts to literary stalking, or even persecution. That may be the case. But it is also a tribute to the intrinsic interest of Goff's ideas, the lucidity with which they are expressed, and their power to widen the horizon of the thinking even of those who, like me, ultimately reject them.

This time my focus is on something more specific claimed by Goff, in a recent article in this magazine, 'A God of Limited Power' (Philosophy Now 164). Here he addresses the difficulty often invoked by infidels such as myself "of reconciling a loving all powerful God with the terrible suffering we see in the world." The argument is that if God truly is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent – ideas central to Judeo-Christian belief – then he would not wish, nor indeed allow, that there should be suffering in the universe. So why is there so much suffering?