NOTES 37942 Simplicity here can be a matter of kinds of things, number of things, kinds of laws,
number of laws, combinations of the above, etc.; none of these ways of understanding
simplicity will make (N) true.
43 God of course, on this account, loses purely intrinsic value if God creates – but this is no
real loss – God has just as much intrinsic value as before, and in addition comes to have
extrinsic value.
44 Moral value is another matter.
45 Much of it, of course, occurred prior to there being any human beings. The view that we
should exercise considerably more ecological caution in the future than we have in the
past does not presuppose or entail that the disappearance of a great many species provides
evidence against the existence of God.
46 The (presumably uncontroversial) assumption being that an omnicompetent God could
have prevented the relevant species from becoming extinct.
47 Again allowing for such replacements for “There is no” as “We can think of no” or “To
the best of our knowledge, and after careful reflection, we can discern no,” and the like.
48 At this point, the question again arises as to whether the notion of as much natural
value as it is possible that there be is not like the highest possible integer, so that any
objection based on appeal to it is self-refuting.
49 In the sense intended, having natural worth entails having intrinsic worth.
50 There will, of course, come a point where someone claims that there is intrinsic
unexchangeable irreplaceable worth to there being spotted owls or snail darters and that
any God who lets it be true that there no longer are any such things deserves to live in
Sing Sing Prison for ever. It is possible to postpone that point for some time, do a lot of
interesting philosophical (and presumably theological) work before one gets there. Further,
it will be extremely hard if not impossible to show that, say, spotted owls have
unexchangeable natural worth.
51 Earlier Judaism was in fact highly reserved regarding any notion of afterlife for human
persons. Allowing a human person to cease to exist did not seem to them to be something
God could not quite properly do. This, of course, does not entail that they thought that
God could properly, say, obliterate Abraham when he reached the age of forty and “replace”
him with a biologically-forty-year-old Abraham*.
52 Critics tend here to leap to “the hard cases” – to, say, a human whose intellectual capacities
are profoundly limited, less than those typically ascribed to a mature chimpanzee. But
the hard cases are emotionally hard (it is psychologically very difficult to think of, let
alone experience, biologically human creatures with such limitations) and morally hard
(what do we owe such humans, besides not causing them suffering) and intellectually
hard (because it is both difficult to think clearly about such matters and controversial
about what we actually know regarding such cases – how accurate are our judgments
regarding their capacities – and about what future medicine may enable us to do for
them). But the critic presumably, in the sort of push-come-to-shove scenarios that are of
some help in clarifying thought about such matters, will agree that there is an important
difference between the case in which (i) one can save the life of only one of two biological
humans – one “normal” child and one of capacities of the sort described earlier, and (ii)
one can save the life of only one of two “normal” children. The question as to what to do
is much harder in (ii) than in (i). It is hard to explain that fact anything like adequately
without accepting something very like the view that persons (defined in terms of their
intellectual, moral, and religious capacities) have baseline intrinsic worth. “Person” is
not a biologically definable term. It is not at all clear to me that anything short of a
person has BIW, or that the critic can both deny this and adequately justify the claim
that things that are not persons possess intrinsic natural worth. But going into all of this
would require a book on moral philosophy.