Argument From Evil

From one comment:



It is my view that there are things God values more than a world without suffering. But so what? How would that justify your charge against me that I have jettisoned my “sense of compassion, empathy and morality”?

It should also be remembered that a person being perfectly good does not imply that she will desire above all a world without suffering. Suppose for example a perfectly good person has access to doomsday machine that will instantly and painlessly destroy all life in the universe at the press of a button. She can eliminate all suffering in the world, but arguably cannot do so without also destroying a greater good that outweighs the suffering, and so a perfectly good being would not press the button.

Perhaps your view is that a perfectly good being would desire above all to not allow any net increases in suffering, but that doesn’t seem to be true either. Suppose our perfectly good person is a brilliant psychologist and a police officer who comes across a man who has raped and tortured a homeless woman to death to satisfy his dark impulses just once. Nobody knew the homeless woman existed and the murderer took care to destroy the body. Using her unparalleled psychological knowledge (and perhaps a high-tech brain scanner), the police officer knows that this man is no more likely to commit a future crime than you or I. She knows that arresting him and putting him in jail would not result in a net increase of well-being of anybody but instead would result in a net increase in suffering, since the punished murderer would be sad in prison. If however she helps the murderer destroy the evidence, and she takes a pill to make herself forget the unfortunate event, this can be avoided. Still, the perfectly good person would arrest the man and put him in prison because justice is the greater good, even if it causes a net increase in suffering.

God is seen to be perfectly good, not in the sense of desiring above all a world without suffering, but in being morally perfect. Accepting this view does not require anybody to jettison one’s sense of compassion and empathy; the theist can still strive to alleviate suffering in the world even if she has no idea why God allows evil to occur.

Clever article; I read it some time ago. That said, even if it did succeed in showing that I’m a morally bad person, attacking my moral character does nothing to address the objection to the argument from evil that I put forth in the OP or in Rosenberg’s Argument from Evil Folly, where this thread ultimately came from.

Clever article; I read it some time ago. That said, even if it did succeed in showing that I’m a morally bad person, attacking my moral character does nothing to address the objection to the argument from evil that I put forth in the OP or in Rosenberg’s Argument from Evil Folly, where this thread ultimately came from.[/quote]


Actually, MC, when you make ghoulishly outrageously claims such as "child rape will lead to greater goods", the burden of proof is on you to provide such examples of greater goods.

Also, if the ability to reduce suffering is sufficient to justify any amount of suffering, then hell is better than heaven according to that definition.

And that's not all; if you read CS Lewis' The Problem of Pain, and accept that pain is god's megaphone to the world, then inflicting any amount of suffering is justified as long as it brings people to Christ and eternal bliss.

Where on earth did I make this claim? Even Theophilus in Rosenberg’s Argument from Evil Folly doesn’t make that claim in his theodicy for why God allows evil to occur. Theophilus can claim that even though horrible things like that don’t lead to a greater good, God nonetheless has a morally sufficient reason for allowing the evil to occur.

At any rate, let’s remember where the burden of proof is here. When a theist makes an argument for theism, the burden of proof is on the theist to justify the premises. But when an atheist makes an argument for atheism (e.g. the argument from evil) the burden of proof is on the atheist to justify the premises. The rule: the person making the argument has to justify the premises. If this is to be a fair game, let’s all play by the same rules.


That doesn’t seem to even remotely follow from what I just said. Part of what I’m saying here is that God is said to be morally perfect, which doesn’t entail that God would eliminate all suffering if (so the theist thinks) God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil. At any rate, the conception of God most philosophically sophisticated theists work with is that he’s morally perfect, not omnibenevolent—at least, not omnibenevolent in the sense that God desires above all to decrease suffering. Does this theology imply there will be suffering in heaven? Not really. The theist could say that for all he knows maybe there are morally sufficient reasons for God to allow suffering in this life and morally sufficient reasons for God to create a realm like heaven where there is no suffering.



Please explain how anything I’ve actually claimed implies the following:

Perhaps you’ve confused me with Theophilus, the hypothetical theist in Rosenberg’s Argument from Evil Folly. The purpose of the hypothetical theist was not to put forth a theodicy I believe is actually correct, but to point out that without conceding the existence of an objective moral standard, the atheist is powerless to attack even facile reasons for why a perfectly good God would allow evil, at least if such reasons match the theist’s view of moral goodness (as in the case of Theophilus). And it is relatively trivial to construct a view of goodness that is consistent with a perfectly good God allowing evil in the world, as the example of Theophilus illustrates.

I do not believe the atheist could successfully attack Theophilus’s theodicy (in the sense of establishing that if God existed he would not adopt Theophilus’s conception of goodness) without accepting an objective moral standard, because without conceding the existence of an objective moral standard, the atheist doesn’t appear to have any grounds for thinking that if God existed he would adopt the atheist’s moral standard instead of Theophilus’s.