Pain and the Nature of Minds

This component of the Problem of Evil research initiative funded multi-site, multi-year empirical and conceptual research, fellowships, conferences, workshops, dissertation fellowships, and public events. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of this issue, research was encouraged from a wide variety of disciplines in both the humanities and natural sciences.

Charles Darwin, reflecting on evolutionary history, famously exclaimed, "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature."

Recent critics of religious belief have argued with increasing ardor and rancor that the nature, duration, and quantity of evil, especially so-called "natural evil," shows us that the world is, after all, blind, pitiless, and indifferent.

The Pain Project addressed part of this issue by examining questions about the nature and potential utility of pain and suffering, about the nature and moral significance of qualitative differences in the capacities of organisms to experience pain and suffering, and about the relationship between pain and such goods as creativity, freedom and moral development.

 

Learn more about The Pain Project, funded through the The Problem of Evil grant and led by David Bain, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns.