Pro Pain On the Role of the Phenomenon and Concept of Pain in Studying Animal Minds

Pain and suffering are prima facie bad things. They are widespread. So the traditional argument against theism (the argument from evil) starts with them. Defendants of God’s goodness either have to explain why there is evil (i.e. offer a theodicy) or have at least to show that the argument from evil has no force against theism. Alvin Pantinga (1985) distinguishes between offering a (positive) theodicy and countering the argument from evil (e.g. Plantinga 1996). The traditional defence against the argument from evil sees evil as either a unavoidable consequence of human freedom or a consequence of human freedom after the fall. This defence applies to evil as stemming from human action. But there is more suffering in the world. Assuming animals to be able to suffer, there is the pain of an animal in agony being killed by a forest fire caused by lightning. The free will defence of evil is of no use here except we assume the whole natural order to have changed after the fall (cf. van Inwagen 1988). Van Inwagen (1991) sets himself the task to account for this not human caused evil without giving a full fledged theodicy. The question is what could be the role of suffering and pain in the natural order. A role that could not be fulfilled by something else than pain. A defence of God’s goodness in the face of pain can argue along the two lines: 1. Pain plays a necessary role in a natural order that leads to human minds; since human minds are part of the purpose of creation, pain is unavoidable (and justified). 2. The distribution and duration of pain might be adjusted just to its purpose, even if we do not see the connection. In this paper I try to develop these ideas, focussing on (1). The perspective I take is that of investigating animal minds. Investigating animal minds is a test case for the interdisciplinary