>>>Hey everyone, two questions: first, next week I will begin a series on ethics. I have a fair idea of what I’ll say, ranging from atomic war to abortion to famine with the moral theory of utilitarianism/consequentialism as a unifying theme. I’m basically confident I can handle this well, but I’m a little worried. For what ever reason, the consequentialists seem to have all the good writers: J. J. C. Smart, Peter Singer, Peter Unger. Where are the good, forceful statements of the anti-consequentialist case, aside from simple statements of the “would you kill one to save five” objections? (Though I don’t deny Anscombe was really good on that front.)

Second, this will be the first post in the lecture series presenting an original argument from a paper I’ve written–actually, a paper I presented at an undergraduate conference back in April. Specifically, the final statement of the PoE I give here is original to me, as far as I know. If I made the paper available, would anyone actually read it?<<<

This lecture will wrap up our unit on God, having covered the main three arguments for the existence of God (plus some minor ones), and now one argument against: the problem of evil.

“The problem of evil” is the traditional name for questions in the neighborhood of “if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly morally good, how can he allow evil?” A good example of a popular statement of the problem comes from Sam Harris:

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

A few basic points about the problem of evil: first, in recent philosophy, a lot of people have said that we ought to call it “the argument from evil,” because in its most worrying form, its a rational argument with the conclusion that we ought not believe in God. Calling it the “problem of evil” conjures up images of a vague spiritual struggle, which leads to serious further confusions. For example, theists may say “how do atheists deal with the problem of evil?” or “the problem of evil is only a problem if you assume that God exists.” Part of the reason they say this is because they are generally ignorant of philosophy and in particular ignorant of what atheists have said on the subject. But part of the reason is that popular discussions of the argument from evil discuss it carelessly.

On similar lines, the explanation of what the argument from evil is that I just gave you–that it’s the question of how can there be evil if God exists–is actually a very bad way of stating it. Theistic philosophers often say that their personal inability to say why there’s evil isn’t evidence of anything–maybe they just don’t know. This is one of the few points in these lectures where I will tell you that something a philosopher has said is absolutely, unequivocally, 100% without a doubt correct. The fact that someone doesn’t know the answer to a question isn’t any evidence at all that their beliefs are false. What’s wrong with this argument is the same as what’s wrong with saying “why is there something rather than nothing?” or “how do you explain the existence of morality?” or “how did life on Earth come to be?” and then concluding without further argument that God exists.

So, if that’s a bad way of formulating the argument from evil, how should it be formulated? The one statement that always gets cited by philosophers as most basic comes from a paper by J. L. Mackie published in the 1950s:

(1) God is all-powerful
(2) God is good
(3) A good thing eliminates evil as far as it can
(4) There is no limit to what an all-powerful being can accomplish.
Therefore, God does not exist.

I hope you can all see that if assumptions (3) and (4) are true, the God described in (1) and (2) cannot exist. The question then becomes whether (3) and (4) are true.

The most popular line of response is to qualify both (3) and (4). (4) is qualified to say that God’s power is limited by absolute limits on possibility like logic. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, God can do anything, but “make a square circle” is not a thing, it’s nonsense, it doesn’t become coherent by adding the words “God can.” (3) is limited by saying that a good thing only eliminates evil as far as it can without allowing some greater evil, or losing a great enough good. This is where the concept of “theodicy” comes in: on the sloppier statements on the argument from evil, a theodicy is an explanation of why God allows evil. On the version we’re considering, a theodicy tells us about a great good that would be lost by eliminating all evil.

Tom Morris, in /Philosophy for Dummies/, gives a pretty good list of standard theodicies:

*The Punishment Theodicy: It’s good that there be justice in the world, and this requires there to be punishment for sin. Some theologians, inspired by the story of the Fall in Genesis, seem to think all evil is like this.
*The Free Will Theodicy: It’s good that there be free will, but this means free will can be misused, causing evil. What about natural disasters? Again, it’s proposed that these are the result of the Fall, or perhaps the activity of demons.
*The Soul-Making Theodicy: It’s good that there be moral and spiritual development, but this requires people to struggle with evil.
*The Mystery Objection: In a spiritual/religious context, it is sometimes said that evil is a mystery, and this is supposed to be uplifting somehow. On a more intellectual level, it may, again, be argued that we just don’t know what could justify God in allowing evil, allowing Mackie’s 3rd assumption to be rejected without providing a specific explanation.

This is a pretty good list, but variants can be given. The phrase “Soul Making” is associated with the philosopher John Hick, but other prominent philosophers of religion, Richard Swinburne and Peter van Inwagen, have said similar things to Hick in slightly different terms. (By the way, all the philosophers I’m talking about today are still alive and pretty prominent, except for Mackie, who died in 1981.) Also, while Tom Morris’ list calls only one the free will defense, free will is pretty important to all of them. The concept of Free Will usually invoked is a pretty specific one: what’s called “libertarian” or “incompatiblist” or “contracausal” free will, free will in a sense that’s incompatible with your actions being determined by prior causes. How many people hear that and say, “oh, yeah, that makes sense”? Some people may think it obvious that free will has to mean this, but a lot of philosophers dispute this, indeed dispute that the idea of libertarian free will makes any sense. They say a free action is just one caused by your desires or some such, so free will is compatible with determinism.

Why is this important? If free will were compatible with determinism, God would be able to fix our dispositions and circumstances to guarantee that we behave in a certain way. And if he gave us dispositions that would make us misbehave, he’d be responsible for it, and that would be morally forbidden. You need specifically libertarian free will to get God off the hook for creating people who do bad, or at least that’s the usual line of thought.

We’re going to have a serious discussion of free will later in the course. For now, don’t worry too much if you don’t understand it, because I think there are better ways of vindicating a form of the argument from evil, than claiming that the libertarian idea of free will doesn’t make sense.

But before I get to that, I want to say I don’t think Mackie’s argument is actually a good argument. First, what is evil? Theodore Drange, in his defense of the argument from evil, proposed defining it as “pain and premature death”–implicitly, any pain and premature death whatever. So if we think God should eliminate all evil, we’re saying an ideal world would have no stubbed toes, no teenage angst. How many people feel confident that a perfect world would have no teenage angst? The last time I asked that question of an audience, only one person raised her hand. I, for one, don’t have any strong instincts on this issue.

So if this simple version of the problem of evil doesn’t work, what do we say? A popular approach, presently, is that if there were a God, it would be unlikely that we would see the kinds or amount of evil that we in fact see in the world. Notice that this statement of the argument is very similar to one version of the argument from design, from last class. It raises some of the same issues: how do you calculate the relevant probabilities? This version of the argument is something we could spend a very, very long time on, because of all the subtle variations on it, and because of the sophisticated concepts of probability that get brought up. So you know what? This argument may have more going for it than Mackie’s argument, but I still don’t think it’s the best version of the argument from evil.

I’m convinced that the best way to state the argument from evil is this:

(1) There has been at least one event such that any being able to prevent it would be morally obligated to prevent it.
(2) Premise (1) is incompatible with the existence of God, defined as an all-powerful, morally perfect being
Therefore, God does not exist.

What kinds of events am I talking about with (1)? Well, how many people know about the Rwanda Genocide? Horrible event that happened in Africa in the 90′s, and a lot of people afterward thought that the United Nations, and big nations like the United States, could have prevented it but didn’t. And it’s further thought that this was deeply, morally wrong, that after the Holocaust, we made a “never again” commitment about genocide, and failed to honor it in Rwanda. On a smaller scale, in the 60′s a woman named Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment, and it was reported in the newspapers that her neighbors had heard her screams and did nothing to help, not even call the police. Again, the response to this failure was moral horror. Do these judgments seem right to people, at least as judgments of the humans involved? So based on cases like these, it seems like (1) is true.

Premise (2) is just a consequence of what most theists mean when they say “God.” Being all powerful means you can prevent such things. Being morally perfect means you never fail in your obligations. But if an event falling under (1) happens, it must be no one was able to prevent it, or someone failed in a moral obligation.

As with Mackie’s argument, then best approach seems to be to try to modify the first premise, and do it with the help of theodicies. You can claim the events described in (1) are obligatory for us to prevent, but not for God, and use the theodicies to fill in the details. However, formulating the argument as I have allows you to raise clear objections to these theodicies, and they don’t merely amount to saying that the theist hasn’t explained something. The failure of theodicies, in this case, amounts to the fact that we have what seems to be an obviously true moral claim that’s incompatible with God’s existence, and the theist has given us no reason to doubt that it’s correct. What’s wrong with the theodicies isn’t that they are bad explanations, but that they involve definite moral mistakes. For example: punishment. The people in Rwanda may not have been perfect, but that doesn’t mean they should have been allowed to be murdered. Or, free will: we don’t think interfering with a murder in progress requires destroying free will, at worst its an acceptable curtailing of freedom. Soul making: we don’t fear that lowering the murder rate, making a more peaceful world, will interfere with personal growth, at least not enough to keep us from trying to build a better world. And mystery: well, when the argument from evil is formulated as I have, all I can see in the mystery objection is the suggestion that there’s a theoretical possibility that there might be something wrong with the argument–but you can raise that worry about any argument. It isn’t a serious objection.

This lecture has turned out a little shorter than other lectures. Some philosophy professors have a hard time discussing the argument from evil, because they find the responses that have been given to it are an embarrassment to philosophy, or even morally repugnant. I’m more worried that if I try to say more, I’d just be wasting your time with ideas that have been proposed by philosophers, but which no philosopher would ever take seriously. So: question time. What do people think of the argument from evil?

Book resources:
*/God?: A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist/ by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and William Lane Craig (contains a section on the argument from evil that uses fairly sophisticated ideas presented in an accessible manner).
*/The Evidential Argument from Evil/ ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (An anthology with lots of big names. More technical, but it provides a well-rounded picture of what philosophers have been saying lately about the argument from evil.)

Online resources:
*http://www.infidels.org/ (Loads and loads of essays on various aspects of philosophy of religion, mostly from a skeptical perspective. Bruce Russell’s Why Doesn’t God Intervene to Prevent Evil? and The Tale of the Twelve Officers are especially good as introductory statements of the argument from evil.)

>>>Also, for anyone interested in the blog debate, there was recently a post on the subject garnering a decent comments thread at The Evangelical Outpost.<<<