"Theodicy" isn't a word that you'll encounter very often unless you are heavily into theology. Despite its classical construction (theos = god + dike = justice) it is of relatively recent coining, dating from the early 18th century, and it doesn't have a particularly well solidified definition. Broadly speaking, however, it refers to attempts to explain the problem of evil - that is, how concepts of an omnipotent and omnipresent all-loving God can be squared with the empirically obvious presence of pain and injustice, in a way that is not ineffable (that is, may be understood rationally by mortal beings).
Despite having attended one of the country's great cathedral schools, I'm far from thoroughly grounded in theology, so I'm not going to look at theodicy in great detail. As a rationalist atheist (1) I've always found such things to be the philosophical equivalent of those epicycles with which the geocentricists attempted to prettify a collapsing position in the face of looming empirical untenability (2). What I'm more interested in is the background to the early attempts at theodicy and how they are strangely linked to the earliest scientific fumblings in ... seismology.
Leibniz and his magnificent wig.
The word theodicy was invented by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, remembered now largely (3) as the mathematician who developed the ideas of calculus contemporaneously with Isaac Newton (and then engaged in a vituperative conflict over the subject with his English counterpart). Like any self-respecting man of education at the time, however, Leibniz had his finger in many pies (Newton, for instance, was a keen alchemist), and was also an important figure in contemporary philosophy. Leibniz's theodicy holds that, though the world is not perfect, it is the best ("optimal") amongst possible worlds, since it was created by a loving God. Any other conceivable world would contain the same faults or worse.
The "problem of evil" was hardly new, and other attempts at its solution had been made, notably by Saint Augustine of Hippo. But in the intellectual and spiritual ferment which attended the Reformation it is not surprising that new thinking on the subject was required. Leibniz's position would be heavily criticised by Voltaire in 1755, and it is the locus of this criticism which is particularly interesting: Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (Poem on the Lisbon Disaster). As the title suggests, this was a response to a terrible event which had thrown the idea of the "best possible world" into severe doubt.
Why me? The Complaint of Job (William Blake)
On 1st November, 1755, a massive earthquake took place on the Azores-Gibraltar Transform Fault, several hundred kilometres south west of the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, with an intesity estimated at between 8.5 and 9.0 on what is still popularly known as the Richter Scale, though this terminology is now outdated. Though much of southern Portugal was devastated, and the shocks were felt as far away as Finland, it was the appalling consequences in Lisbon that most exercised contemporary consciences. Huge cracks opened up in the town centre as the shocks continued for around 5 minutes, and many of the townspeople fled to the relatively open dock area for safety.What they saw there would, given our knowledge of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean, cause alarm today, but at the time its meaning was not understood. The water had withdrawn from the docks, leaving the detritus of a busy port - wrecks, lost cargoes - exposed for all to see. 40 minutes later, the sea returned, engulfing the lower parts of the city with the speed of a man on horseback, powering up the River Tagus into the interior. Two more waves followed (4). What was untouched by the waves was prone to destruction by the fires that inevitably followed in the upper reaches of the city. Of Lisbon's population of around 200,000, maybe 40,000 perished in the earthquake and the tsunamis and conflagrations which attended it.
Lisbon: demolished, flooded and on fire. Whose optimal world is this?
Portugal was a famously devout country. The disaster had occurred on All Saints' Day. Most of the city's churches had been destroyed, yet the brothel quarter had survived largely unscathed. The Royal Archives, containing the accounts of early explorers like Vasco da Gama, were destroyed, and irreplaceable works of art by Rubens, Corregio and Titian lost along with the 70,000 books of the Royal Library. How could this conceivably be the "best of all possible worlds" imagined by Leibniz?
The ruins of Carmo Convent, preserved as a memorial to the disaster.
That, certainly, was the opinion of Voltaire, king of the philosophes, but it was not the only lesson drawn by contemporary thinkers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, argued that the heavy loss of life was caused by the unnatural crowding together of people in the city, against nature. (I've previously expressed a certain amount of dislike of Rousseau, and once again he gets the wrong end of the stick, pushing his own obsessions to the detriment of the other issues.) Another who was greatly moved by the destruction was Immanuel Kant (5), and he used the enormity of the event, unimaginable to the human imagination, as an example whilst deveoping his theories of the sublime.
But this was not Kant's only reponse to the Lisbon disaster. Mirroring Leibniz, better known for his mathematics, but who also investigated theodicy, Kant, better known now for his philosphy, sought some scientific rationale for the earthquake that had devastated Portugal. Poring over all available information about the events, he wrote a number of pamphlets putting forth ideas as to how such violent earthquakes might be produced. His theory - that the shocks resulted from the settling of huge, gas-filled underground caverns - now seems quaint, but it was at least an attempt to formulate an explanation which relied on reason rather than recourse to supernatural influence. As such it is often considered to be the first work of seismology.
Moreover, Kant was not the only one to make a scientific enquiry into the earthquake. Sebastiao de Melo, the Prime Minister of Portugal (then a commoner, but later to become the Marquis of Pombal) took a rigorously practical approach and circulated a survey to all Portuguese parishes requesting details of the time and behaviour of the quake, the effects on buildings, the loss of life and injuries resulting, and the behaviour of the sea, if appropriate. Whilst de Melo didn't indulge himself in specualtion as to the cause, the replies to his questions, archived by the government, have allowed seismologists to study the 1755 earthquake in much greater detail than any previous historical quake.
Theodicy and seismology: science from a philosopher, theology from a mathematician. God bless the 18th century - even if He/She/It/They couldn't see fit to bless Lisbon.
Notes
(1) I self-identify as an atheist despite being conscious that my actual position is more a sort of militant agnosticism. This is because describing oneself as an agnostic tends to invite ridicule (from militant atheists) or attempts at conversion (from dunderheaded monotheists), which gets tiresome after a while. My position is that it has never been demonstrated to me that God is necessary, not that I believe there is no God, but it tends to be functionally similar to atheism. As far as the other part of this self-description - "rationalist" - is concerned, I also recognise the limits of rationality. Most of our lives are lived on a predominantly irrational basis, however we might wish to see ourselves as autonomous rational actors, whatever a radical materialist bully like Richard Dawkins might wish to imagine. But - even if (especially if) we don't understand something, we must seek explanations, not take refuge in magic.
(2) Though early heliocentric theories didn't actually explain perceived planetary motions much better than the geocentric ones... That would require the subsequent theoretical breakthrough supplied by Kepler's laws of planetary motion, derived from the painstaking observational astronomy of Tycho Brahe. Kepler, incidentally, was able to make himself financially secure through practising astrology, while Tycho had a prosthetic nose.
(3) The great mathematician also has a brand of biscuit named after him, thanks to their manufacture in his home town of Hanover. Unfortunately, he didn't invent them :)
(4) The tsunami caused by the eathquake was still ten feet high when it reached Cornwall, and also came ashore at Martinique on the other side of the Atlantic,.
(5) A real pissant, who was very rarely stable. Unfortunately, Leibniz and Rousseau don't feature in the song.... [EDIT: There used to be an embedded video here but for some reason, Blogger has developed a tendency to unexpectedly shed videos, and I've replaced it with a link in the text.]
EDIT: Souncloud link retired 2/1/2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment