"The Postman Philosopher" by Nicholas James
How Stephen Law went from postman to Oxford philosopher
In July, I was contacted by Nicholas James, who asked if I would be willing to share on Medium a series of posts about a student-led project entitled Portraits of Philosophers. The project is currently seeking support on Kickstarter, with only a few days remaining in its campaign.
It is presented as follows:
Portraits of Philosophers is a beautifully crafted photobook that brings you face-to-face with thirteen remarkable thinkers, from world-renowned philosophers to rising voices, as they explore some of the most important questions of the human condition.
The aim of the project is to make some of today’s most significant philosophical ideas—and the thinkers behind them—accessible to a broad audience.
It is with enthusiasm that I introduce one of Nicholas James’ posts here. This particular piece is about a philosopher who began his career not in academia, but as a postman. As some of my readers know, I myself worked in another field before turning to philosophy: I was a policeman, not a postman, but I found it easy to identify with Stephen Law’s journey toward philosophy.
Here is a little bit more about Nicholas James. He is a philosophy student at the University of Cambridge who has been working on 'Portraits of Philosophers'. His favorite philosopher is Aristotle, but unfortunately he couldn't interview him!
I wish Nicholas and his colleagues every success with this initiative, and I hope you enjoy the following post as much as I did.
At age 20, Stephen Law was delivering mail, and before that he’d been doing manual work.
“I was kicked out of school, essentially,” Law told us in a recent interview, “I attempted to do some A-levels. I was off to leave. Then I had another go. Then I left because I was bored.”
Fast-forward forty years, and Law is now a distinguished Oxford philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers alive today.
How did someone who had such little passion for school end up falling in love with philosophy and teaching it at one of the world’s best universities? As I hope to illustrate in this article, Law’s story shows that it is never too late to undertake an academic journey, and it reveals something very important about the nature of philosophy.
In June last year, we met Law — fittingly — at Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education, where he is the Director of Philosophy. He had agreed to meet me and two other philosophy students in order to be photographed and interviewed for a project that we had been working on called Portraits of Philosophers.
At the time, we were creating a beautiful photo book that captured the world’s most influential living philosophers and were speaking to them about the ever-pressing questions of the human condition, such as topics on mortality, love, freedom, and meaning. After two years, the project is almost finished, but more on that later.
Law arrived at the meeting room where we were interviewing him wearing a crisp blue shirt that paired nicely with his neatly styled, short blonde hair. It was a very different look from the one that he sported earlier in life; Law told us that when he was a postman, he was “a bit of a hippie” with hair “right down [his] back.”
Nonetheless, he admitted that his recent haircut was quite different from the longer, tousled style he normally goes for, and a change that his mother “hates.” While Law may now be working at one of the most formal and traditional institutions in the world, it’s clear that his hippie side is not completely dead yet.
After we introduced ourselves and completed all the necessary preparations for the photoshoot and interview, we got down to the philosophy. Our conversation spanned the breadth of the subject, including moral responsibility, free will, and philosophy of language, but what I found most interesting from our conversation was Law’s personal story.
Law told us that he first became interested in philosophy during his breaks on his mail route:
“I discovered, through reading, a lot of books that really fascinated me, which then led to other books. Eventually I found that I was really reading nothing but philosophy books.”
From there, his passion for the subject grew, eventually discovering that what he was reading could be formally studied:
“I realised you could actually go to university and study it. You could actually go and think about big questions: are my parents real and not virtual? How do I know what makes things right or wrong? Could a computer think?”
Despite having left school without any higher qualifications, Law told us that “by some miracle, I managed to talk my way into City University, in London. They accepted me, and basically, I just never left.”
Such a story just goes to show how philosophy isn’t necessarily something that you have to be drawn to from an early age, nor do you have to come from a certain background. Its questions are perennially interesting, and it is a subject that everyone can learn from.
After finishing his undergraduate course and achieving the highest grades, Law pursued postgraduate studies at Oxford and has since published some incredibly influential articles.
He is most well-known for the ‘Evil God Challenge’, which devises a fresh approach to the problem of evil and the existence of God. The original problem is simple: how can evil exist if there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God?
If God is all-good, then He wouldn’t want evil to exist, if God is all-knowing then He knows that it exists, and if he is all-powerful, He can prevent it from occurring.
There are a plethora of theological responses to the original problem, known as theodicies. The most famous is the free will defence, which says that God made us free to act as we wish, since this is an important source of our well-being, but with this freedom comes the possibility for us to do evil.
A second popular strategy is known as the character-building theodicy, which Law explains as:
“Pain and suffering is for character-building purposes. Sometimes people have a horrible disease, then they get cured, and they say ‘But you know what? I don’t regret the pain and suffering because I really learned a lot from it.”
In response to these theodicies, Law proposed the ‘Evil God Challenge’:
“The Evil God Challenge basically just involves setting up an all-powerful, all-evil God, instead of an all-good God, which then generates a mirror problem — the problem of good.”
Why is it that we live in a world with puppies and ice cream if an all-evil God created the world? For most of us, the existence of good is enough to show that an evil God cannot exist, but Law argues that you can use the same strategies as before to defend belief in an evil God. For example, we could use a free will defence:
“Evil God will want us to do evil of our own volition. He could have made us puppet beings that always do the bad thing, but if you’re a puppet, you’re not responsible for what you do, so what you do won’t be morally evil.”
At first, this defence might not seem compelling: wouldn’t the world have more evil if we didn’t have free will, but were instead compelled to cause endless misery to each other?
But in response, Law argues that there is a moral difference between causing suffering freely and being compelled to do so. He describes the former as “a particularly profound and important form of evil”.
When we think of the vilest examples of evil, we think of cases like murder or deception where the actor chose to do such things. This intentional choice to do bad is part of what makes the act so evil. Thus, an evil God has to permit us to have free will, even if that comes with the downside that we can sometimes do morally good.
Similarly, someone could respond to the problem of good with a character-building argument: to truly experience pain, suffering and evil, we need to have a taste of what happiness and virtue is like, just so we can know what it is like when it is taken away. Law further explains:
“The need for contrast also explains why evil God bestows lavish lifestyles and success upon a few. Their happiness is designed to make the suffering of the rest of us even more acute. Who can rest content knowing that they have so much more, that they are undeserving, and that no matter how hard we might strive, we will never achieve what they have (and remember, too, that even those lucky few are not really happy).”
So, it seems the same strategies to solve the problem of evil in the case of an all-good God can be used to solve the problem of evil in the case of an all-evil God. Law asks us whether such defences seem like plausible ways of defending the existence of evil God, to which he answers the question for us:
“No, that’s just ludicrous.”
No one seriously believes that an all-evil God created the world, in large part due to how much goodness there is. Even people sympathetic to the idea that an all-powerful, all-knowing being created the universe think it is absurd that this being is all-evil. So, if the existence of goodness is enough to prove an all-evil God doesn’t exist, why isn’t the existence of evil enough to show that an all-good doesn’t exist either?
Law’s point is not to categorically prove that traditional theodicies are false, but — by showing that they work just as well at defending the existence of an evil God — that they are less persuasive than they first seem.
This challenge is by no means uncontroversial within philosophical and theological circles, but it is a creative thought experiment that has reinvigorated an age-old debate, and is getting people to think more critically about evil and the existence of God.
The Evil God Challenge is not Law’s only important contribution to the philosophical field; another is his book for children The Philosophy Files. This book is based around the philosophical questions that children tend to spontaneously ask, such as: What makes things right or wrong? Should I eat meat? Is there a God? It helps to satisfy their intellectual curiosity in an easy-to-understand way.
At the end of our interview, Law told us that the inspiration for this book came from a desire to make philosophy more accessible and available to a younger audience — something Law himself never had.
“An awful lot of people aren’t even aware that [philosophy] exists. And when they discover it, as I did, they suddenly have a lightbulb moment. They’ve realised that actually there’s this whole world that’s available to them, that they can explore, and that is fascinating and stimulating and mind-expanding.”
While this contribution to philosophy is less academic than his articles, The Philosophy Files has had just as large an impact on the discipline:
“The number of undergraduates that have said to me, the reason that I got into philosophy and ended up at university is because of your book.”
It was a fitting topic to finish our interview on: that Law, who had little awareness or understanding of philosophy at that age, is now helping so many young students get into the subject. It speaks to his kindness, humility and wisdom — virtues that are characteristic of a truly great philosopher.
Our conversation with Law lasted almost four hours, in which we discussed much more than I could cover in this Medium article. We also talked about why philosophy grants us immunity to indoctrination, and how language can be used to answer the question: What is the meaning of life?
If you would like to read more from our interview, as well as our interviews with twelve other great philosophers, including Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Alice Crary, then you can do so by supporting our Kickstarter (the link is here) where you can receive a copy of Portraits of Philosophers: a beautifully designed photobook that captures these distinguished thinkers through black-and-white photography as well as distilled written conversations.
Love the Evil-God concept and the fun it can generate.
Riveting story, love it!