Recently in Problem of Evil Category

Standard sceptical theism focuses on our ignorance of the realm of values. I want to suggest a different kind of sceptical response to an evil E. This response identifies a good G such that it is clear that the occurrence of a good relevantly like G logically requires the permission of an evil relevantly like E, but instead the scepticism is in that we have on balance no significant evidence against the conjunction:

1. G obtains and
2. G outweighs E and
3. there is no alternative good G* dissimilar from G that doesn't require anything nearly as bad as E and that would be more or approximately equally worth having.

And it's fairly easy to generate examples of G that do the job for particular E. Take Rowe's case of the horrendous evil inflicted on Sue. Let G be Sue's having forgiven E's perpetrator. We have no significant evidence against the conjunction (1)-(3), then. Granted, we may have significant evidence that G did not obtain in this life, though even that is probably a stretch, but we have no balance no significant evidence that G didn't obtain in an afterlife. My intuitions strongly favor (2)--there is a way in which forgiveness seems to defeat evil--but in any case we have no significant evidence against (2). As for (3), granted there are many great moral goods that don't require anything nearly as bad as E, but I don't think we have on balance significant evidence that these goods are roughly as good as or better than G. Now, of course, it can be the case (whether due to a logical contradiction or dwindling probabilities) that we don't have significant evidence against any conjunct but we do have significant evidence against the conjunction. But I don't think this happens here.

Too often, discussion about skeptical theism focuses on whether there are likely to be unknown goods which could outweigh the evils we know of (Officially, I have problems with the notion of "knowing of" an evil, but I'll set that aside). That can create the impression that an affirmative answer is reached, skeptical theism wins. But that would be a misunderstanding.

Some responses to the Problem of Evil involve defending the proposition that it is on balance a good thing that the world was created. I want to propose a Problem of Mediocrity or Problem of the Just-Good-Enough or more broadly the Problem of the Not-Great world. As I envision it, it's disconfirmation of theism is compatible with the world being on balance good. It goes like this:

(1) Being the kind of Being God is, we expect greatness in everything He does.
(2) The world is not great.
(3) Hence, theism is disconfirmed.

I'll refine it a bit below and raise an objection below the fold

The latest (July 2011) Faith and Philosophy contains an excellent article by Jeff Speaks on some difficulties related to establishing the consistency of certain claims (he uses as examples the existence of human freedom and the existence of evil) with the existence of an Anselmian God. The basic idea is this: since an Anselmian God is, by definition, a necessary being, establishing the possibility of an Anselmian God is tantamount to establishing the necessary, and therefore actual, existence of an Anselmian God. But these compatibility arguments typically, in one way or another, assume the possibility, and so the actuality, of an Anselmian God. If we were allowed to assume this premise, our task would be extremely easy! We could argue as follows:

1. God (actually) exists


2. Evil (actually) exists

Therefore,

3. The existence of God is consistent with the existence of evil.

In his paper, Speaks argues that Warfield's argument for the compatibility of necessary omniscience with human freedom and Plantinga's free will defense are both a lot like this. That is, they both assume that, possibly, an Anselmian God exists. But if that assumption is admissible, then we could just use this simpler argument. But obviously we can't use this simpler argument, so the premise must be inadmissible. (This isn't exactly the way Speaks puts his points together; it's my interpretation of what his arguments actually show.)

Speaks states the "principal conclusion" of his paper as follows:

any argument for the compatibility of two propositions must also be an argument for the possibility of each of those propositions. Hence it is impossible to argue for the compatibility of two propositions, one of which is necessary if possible, without arguing for the truth of that proposition. (p. 291)

In this post, I'm going to push back.

Rowe-style arguments from evil contend that there are evils that are inscrutable in the sense that we do not know a justification for them.

Let's say a justification for E is a reason R such that, in light of R, God would be justified in allowing E.

An evil is inscrutable provided we don't know a justification for E. But what does it mean not to know a justification? On the strongest reading, there is the ability to understand R in the full detail that God understands it in and know that the reason thereby understood justifies E. On the weakest reading, there is the ability to give some definite description D of R and know that the reason falling under D justifies E.

That there are evils on the inscrutability corresponding to the strongest sense of "know the justification" is not at all surprising given theism.

But on the weakest sense of "know the justification", as long as we know that God exists, we are in position to know that there is a justification for E, since that God exists entails that E is justified. And then we know R under the description "the reason or collection of reasons that justifies God in permitting E". And if we want slightly greater specificity, we might advert to some moral theory that gives us a characterization of the sorts of reasons that can justify a permission of an evil.

So for the Rowe argument to impress an intelligent theist who claims to know that God exists would require some in-between sense of "know the justification" that satisfies two conditions: (a) it is probable on theism that we would know the justification for every evil (or every evil that we have sufficiently investigated) and (b) the theist cannot plausibly claim to know the justification for every evil. These two conditions pull in opposite directions.

I've just finished a literature survey in preparation for my SEP entry on Skeptical Theism, and I've noticed a bit of a loose end. Consider two kinds of possible worlds including God and evil (from Russell and Wykstra's 1988 dialogue). One kind of world is the "morally transparent" world where the reasons God allows suffering are "near the surface" and so fairly easily discernible by us. Another kind is a "morally inscrutable" world where the reasons why God allows evil are either buried "beneath the surface" or in the distant future.

Wykstra's original 1984 debut of CORNEA (man there is a lot of philosophy in that paper!) advanced the thesis that it is more likely that God would create a morally inscrutable world. Russel and Rowe give reasons for the opposite claim. Below the fold I'll briefly summarize their arguments and suggest why it seems to me the atheist has the upper hand in this argument, and issue a call for attention to the research project of defending the goodness of a morally inscrutable universe.

Christine Overall famously argued that miracles, conceived as violations of the laws of nature, would be evidence against the existence of the traditional God. A lengthy debate with Robert Larmer ensued, in which Larmer argued that only slight modifications to the law-breaking account of miracles are necessary in order for miracles to serve as evidence for, rather than against, the existence of God. Larmer tries to argue that miracles do not violate the laws of nature, but nevertheless holds that they are different from ordinary events in that they don't follow from the laws of nature. (I don't have Larmer's book handy to remember the exact details of his account.)

The Overall-Larmer debate in some respects replays one dialectical thread from the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence: Clarke defends the view that any sufficiently widespread natural regularity should be regarded as a law, and any event that violates such a regularity should be regarded as a miracle. Furthermore, Clarke argues, miracles of this sort occur from time to time. Leibniz argues that God, as traditionally conceived, would not create a world of the sort Clarke envisions and, furthermore, that Clarke's weak conception of laws does not allow a theologically adequate distinction between miracles and ordinary events.

I think Overall pretty decisively won the debate with Larmer, and Leibniz pretty decisively won the debate with Clarke on this and most other points. (One point where Leibniz clearly loses: his insistence that if there were not a unique best possible world God would be unable to create a world is clearly false.) However, there are a lot of people who seem to disagree, who continue to hold that miracles are best understood as somehow in tension with laws, and that such events can serve as evidence for the existence of the traditional God. I in fact think that miracles should not be conceived as in any sort of tension with laws, so, instead of speaking of miracles, I'll speak of 'lawless events'. Lawless events are those which don't follow, either probabilistically or deterministically, from the laws of nature. (interpret 'follow from' in whatever sense your favorite theory of laws requires.) In this post I am concerned with arguments from the traditional divine attributes against the occurrence of lawless events. These arguments will of course work backward to show that lawless events would be evidence against the existence of a being with those attributes.

Consider Rowe's argument, which is essentially:

1. E is an evil for which we have been unable to find a justifier despite serious investigation.
2. Therefore, probably, E has no justifier.
3. If some evil has no justifier, then theism is false.
4. Therefore, probably, theism is false.

And then consider this anti-evolutionary argument:

5. F is a major inheritable feature of an organism for which we have been unable to find an evolutionary explanation despite serious investigation.
6. Therefore, probably, F has no evolutionary explanation.
7. If some major inheritable feature of an organism has no evolutionary explanation, then evolutionary universalism is false.
8. Therefore, probably, evolutionary universalism is false.

It is an interesting sociological fact that many atheists think 1-4 is a good argument and 5-8 is a bad one, and that many creationists and intelligent design advocates think 5-8 is a good argument and 1-4 is a bad one.

But I think both are bad.

In the middle sections of his 12th chapter, Sobel goes through a series of adjustments to his deductive argument from evil designed to get around various versions of the Free Will Defense and other tactics attempted by theists. For reasons mentioned earlier, I am not happy with Sobel's formal treatment of these arguments, so I'm going to reconstruct the substance of the argument somewhat differently. Consider the following:

1. If there were a perfect being, it would take a best course of action available to it in creating the world


2. If a perfect being took the best course of action available to it in creating the world, the result would be very different from what we observe.


3. But the world is as we observe it to be.
   Therefore,
   
4. There is no perfect being.

Unlike most other recent writers on the subject, Sobel argues that the logical problem of evil - that is, the problem of showing that it is logically possible for God and evil to coexist - is a serious problem which recent treatments have not adequately dealt with. In his 12th chapter, he considers several deductive arguments from evil against the existence of God. In future posts, I will consider the specific arguments that Sobel makes, but here I just want to point out a flaw or limitation in the way Sobel frames his arguments.

Each version of the problem of evil Sobel considers has the following structure:

1. Empirical claim about what the world is like.


2. Claim that (1) and the existence of a perfect being are each individually possible, but incompossible with one another.

Therefore,

3. Claim that there is no perfect being.

1. □(God exists)


2. ~◊(God exists & E)

Therefore,

3. ~◊E

Now, perhaps Sobel does this because he thinks that, earlier in his book, he's shown that necessary being theism isn't one of the better versions of theism. I think he's wrong about that.

At any rate, this is, as I said, merely a technical problem; I think that each of Sobel's arguments has some intuitive pull which is independent of his problematic formalizations, and I will discuss some of them in future posts.

[cross-posted at blog.kennypearce.net]

I return now from my hiatus to blog through the last three chapters of Sobel's Logic and Theism. There are two chapters on arguments against the existence of God, mostly focused on arguments from evil, and one on Pascalian wagers.

In chapter 11, section 4, Sobel presents what he takes to be Hume's evidential argument from evil, and discusses skeptical theist responses to it. Now, in general, the dialectic between the evidential arguer from evil and the skeptical theist goes something like this: the evidential arguer from evil says, a perfect being would probably create a world with very little (or no) evil, but this world has lots of evil, so it was probably not created by a perfect being. The skeptical theist responds, how should I (who am imperfect) know what a perfect being would do?

Now, according to Sobel, Hume's version of the evidential argument from evil includes an important maneuver which he calls the 'beforehand-switch.' The idea is that a hypothesis is best evaluated by considering what we would predict, using the hypothesis, if we didn't already know the outcome. So, for instance, we evaluate Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation by pretending we don't already know the orbits of the planets and using the law to predict them. Suppose, says Sobel's Hume, that we do the same for the hypothesis that the world was created by a perfect being. We pretend we don't know anything about what the world is like, and try to predict what world the perfect being will create. Everyone, it seems, should agree that we would predict that the world would have a lot less pain and suffering in it, and it is surely unreasonable of the skeptical theist to deny that this would be our prediction and that we would be justified in making this prediction.

Consider two theses.

ST: Sceptical Theism.
Chaos: The world is deeply chaotic and the human race is likely to have a long future.

I stipulate that both ST and Chaos are to be understood in such a way that they imply Further Value Scepticism:

FVS: For no ordinary sort of event E (I am excluding here events like the annihilation of the human race) do we have any reason to say that when we consider E's further non-obvious consequences and aspects, including the long-term ones, the overall value of these further consequences and aspects will be negative or positive.

So, now, we have the question whether FVS implies some sort of moral paralysis. Weak moral paralysis is the thesis that for no positive action A is it the case that one ought to do A. Strong moral paralysis is the thesis that for every positive action A, one ought not do A.

Consider two asymmetry theses. First, Doing-Refraining Asymmetry:

DRA: It is significantly worse to be the cause of an evil by means of a doing than by means of a refraining, even when one is the cause unknowingly and unintentionally.

Second Good-Evil Outcome Asymmetry:

GBOA: The disvalue of being the cause of a great evil is significantly greater than the value of being the cause of a comparable great good.

I will now offer a handwaving argument for this thesis:

(*) If both DRA and GBOA are true, then strong moral paralysis follows from FVS.
(**) If at least one of DRA and GBOA is false, then neither kind of moral paralysis follows from FVS.