Sinnott-Armstrong’s argument

1. Sinnott-Armstrong’s argument • Take cases of seemingly gratuitous suffering of infants. • A doctor who didn’t help (even when it would be easy to help) would be a bad person. • Likewise, if God doesn’t help, and there’s no good reason not to, God is not morally perfect. • We can’t think of any good reasons why God shouldn’t help. • So the suffering is evidence against a morally perfect God. • And while this works for any individual bit of evil, it works even more given that there is lots of evil.

2. Sinnott-Armstrong’s argument • If there were an all-powerful and all-good God, then there would not be any evil in the world unless that evil is logically necessary for an adequately compensating good. • There is lots of evil in the world. • Much of that evil is not logically necessary for any adequately compensating good. • Therefore, there is no God who is all-powerful and all-good. • Sinnott-Armstrong allows that evil is logically consistent with God’s existence. But he insists that it is evidence against God’s existence.

3. Further explanation • ‘Evil’ • He’ll focus on easy cases: suffering, serious disabilities, death. • Justified evils • “[E]vils can be justified only by benefits that are adequate to compensate for those evils” • Morality • Don’t allow serious harms that can be prevented at insignificant cost. • The benefit must be important enough. • There must be no better way to get it. • God • God can do anything that’s logically possible—so his excuses are limited.

4. Various responses • Unconscious • Privation • Contrast • Punishment • Heavenly • Virtuous • Glorious • Free Will • Standard • Modest • Overriding

5. Free Will • Sinnott-Armstrong admits that free will is very valuable. • But, he says, you should still stop murderers. • Sometimes you can stop people without even affecting their free will. • Lots of evil is natural evil, which has nothing to do with free will. • Free will might show that evil isn’t logically inconsistent with God; but we’re talking about evidence.

6. Modest • Any action, no matter how bad, can be defended by saying there might be good reasons we can’t see. • Neighbor analogy • Uncertainty shouldn’t stop us from making judgments. • Especially after we’ve done a thorough investigation. • There’s no reason to think we wouldn’t see a good reason if there were one. • And God would have good reason to let us know what’s going on.

7. Craig’s response to Sinnott-Armstrong: Some distinctions • Emotional problem of evil vs. Intellectual problem of evil • Logical (internal) problem of evil vs. Evidential (external) problem of evil

8. General remarks • The key inference • From “there exists apparently gratuitous evil” to “there exists genuinely gratuitous evil” • Reasoning by analogy • God’s relationship to us very different from our relationship to our neighbor • Divide and conquer • God’s reasons for allowing evil might be “complementary and mutually reinforcing”

9. Specific criticisms of the inference • Limits on human knowledge • We don’t know enough to make confident probability judgments about God’s reasons for allowing evil. • Things are complicated and interconnected in ways we could never understand. • Sinnott-Armstrong’s neighbor analogy fails because neighbors, unlike God, have the same limits on their knowledge. • And we have no reason to think God would let us know his reasons.

10. Specific criticisms of the inference • Specific Christian doctrines make apparently gratuitous evil expectable • Our purpose isn’t happiness, it’s knowing God. Evils that look gratuitous towards the first purpose might not be gratuitous towards the second. • We’re in a state of rebellion. All the moral evil is totally expectable. • God’s purpose includes the afterlife, which will completely swamp the evils of this world.

11. Specific criticisms of the inference • Whether gratuitous evil exists depends on whether God exists • Any theist with decent reasons for accepting theism is off the hook. • Sinnott-Armstrong’s childbeating analogy fails. • And (at least some) arguments do show that God is morally perfect. • And what kind of atheism is consistent with a morally flawed God?

12. Final points of Craig’s response • It’s actually an argument for theism • If there’s true evil in the universe, then morality is objective, and therefore God exists. • Perhaps even gratuitous evil is okay • Perhaps there’s a vague amount of evil required to make the world a good place. • And so there’s nothing wrong with gratuitous evil per se.

13. Part X of Hume’s Dialogues • Demea says misery is what’s best at leading people to religion. • Then Demea and Philo wallow in human misery for a while. • nature • imaginary terrors • society • bodily disease • mental anguish • Philo considers and criticizes a few “apologies” • Cleanthes says things don’t seem so bad to him. • Demea insists that even the great feel it.

14. Back to natural religion • Philo says Cleanthes’ anthropomorphism is in trouble. • How can Cleanthes say God’s moral perfection is similar to the moral goodness we’re familiar with? • There is a purpose in nature, but it’s not happiness, it’s preservation and proliferation. • Cleanthes catches on to Philo’s game. • Demea says there’s an easy solution: the afterlife. • Cleanthes rejects “[t]hese arbitrary suppositions” and insists that the world is overall a nice place, and that there are more pleasures than pains. • Philo says even if pleasures are more frequent, pains are more “violent and durable”.

15. Back to skepticism • Philo says Cleanthes is at risk of introducing skepticism. • The world seems to almost everyone to be a pretty miserable nasty place, so Cleanthes has to deny the appearances. • And if we admit we don’t know how to make an estimate balancing out all the pains and pleasures, then (on Cleanthes’ approach) we can’t know whether God is good or evil or doesn’t care. • And even if the world is overall a nice place, that doesn’t get you infinite benevolence or moral perfection: any evil at all will block that inference. • Even if evil is compatible with God’s moral perfection, you still can’t infer a morally perfect God from observing a world with evil in it.

16. Part XI • Cleanthes moves to a finite god. • Talk of the infinite sounds more like worship than solid philosophy. • Retaining human analogy, you can’t get an infinite god from observing the world. • But you can get a really good finite god, who operates under constraints, and allows evil in order to bring about the greater good. • Cleanthes asks Philo if this view faces any problems.

17. Antecedent expectations • Curious finite visitor • Told of a world run by a great god, a visitor would expect something much better than this world. • If the visitor knew for sure that this world was run by a great god, then he could admit that maybe there’s a good reason for all the evil, a good reason he can’t understand. • But if the visitor had to figure out the nature of the god by observing this world, he would never come up with a great god. • Even if he’s convinced of his own limited knowledge, he would still never conclude that there’s a great god, just by observing this world. • House example • What would we expect beforehand?

18. Four circumstances • Lots of evil seems to depend on four circumstances, none of which seem necessary. • 1. Pain as motivator • Why not greater and lesser degrees of pleasure? • 2. General laws vs. particular volitions • Sure, our plans rely on general laws. • But why couldn’t God make a world of miracles where we could still rely on plans? • And, moreover, we don’t know everything, and so presumably God could simply mess with the stuff we don’t know.

19. Four circumstances, cont’d • 3. Frugality of nature • Living things are rarely if ever given any more than is needed to survive. • Nature is more like a “rigid master” than like an “indulgent parent” • In humans, for example, why not make us less lazy? • 4. Inaccurate workmanship • The great machine breaks down all the time. • Wind, rain, heat, the body, the passions – all of them go wrong. • Conclusion • Maybe these circumstances really are necessary. If we knew of God’s moral perfection a priori, then there’d be no problem. But we’re left to figure it out from observing the phenomena.

20. Four hypotheses • “There may four hypotheses be framed concerning the first causes of the universe: that they are endowed with perfect goodness; that they have perfect malice; that they are opposite, and have both goodness and malice; that they have neither goodness nor malice. Mixed phenomena can never prove the two former unmixed principles; and the uniformity and steadiness of general laws seem to oppose the third. The fourth, therefore, seems by far the most probable.“ • “The true conclusion is, that the original Source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles; and has no more regard to good above ill, than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy.”

21. Things get hot • Moral evil • The same sort of reasoning applies here. • And if God is the cause of everything, then God is the Author of Sin... • Demea can’t take it anymore: Philo has turned out to be the real enemy. • Cleanthes saw that coming a mile away: these days you can’t talk up human misery without someone taking advantage of it. • Philo again remarks that the priests “change their style with the times” • This goes on, and Demea finds some excuse to leave.

22. Rowe on evil;logical problem • The thesis: God is inconsistent with even a speck of evil • ‘God exists’ and ‘evil exists’ aren’t formally inconsistent—we need extra (necessarily true) premises to bring out the inconsistency. • So try ‘God wouldn’t allow any evil’ as the extra premise. • Is it necessarily true? • Not obviously—perhaps there are very important goods that logically require some evil. • Or (equivalently?) perhaps even the best of all logically possible worlds contains evil. • What about ‘God would only allow evil needed for greater goods’? • This doesn’t get you inconsistency; it only gets you ‘all evil is needed for greater goods’

23. Free will defense • An attempt to show that there’s no inconsistency between God and evil. • It’s logically impossible for God to cause people to freely do something. • It’s possible that, if God creates free people, they will do some evil no matter what. • And it’s better to have freedom and some evil than to have no freedom at all. • So there’s no inconsistency: even God can’t create a world with freedom and yet without evil.

24. Evidential problem • There are some evils that seem to serve no good purpose. • There seem to be ‘pointless evils’ • ‘pointless evil’ = evil that God could have prevented without losing a greater good or allowing a greater evil • For these apparently pointless evils, we can think of no greater good or greater evil that could justify God in allowing them. • So it seems reasonable to conclude that these evils really are pointless. • But if so, then (since God wouldn’t allow pointless evils) it follows that God doesn’t exist.

25. Skeptical theism • Sure, we can’t think of a good reason for God to allow these apparently pointless evils. • But, for all we know, God has a good reason that’s beyond our grasp. • Wykstra’s response • The move from we can’t see an x to there probably is no x is justified only if it’s likely that we’d see an x if there was one. • If God had good reasons for allowing evil, it’s by no means likely that we’d see them. • Consequently, even though we can’t see any good reasons, we don’t get to draw the conclusion that there are no good reasons.

26. Skeptical theism • Good-parent analogy • Small children can’t understand the good reasons for suffering they undergo (at the dentist, or when we put chemicals that sting on a wound) • Likewise, we humans can’t be expected to understand God’s good reasons for letting us suffer. • But, Rowe points out, good parents provide comfort and show concern for their suffering children. • Whereas we humans often suffer alone,without any comfort felt from, or concern shown by, God.

27. Hick’s soul-making theodicy • Without evil, we’d have a lousy environment for moral and spiritual development. • Rowe agrees that a “pain-free paradise” would be bad for development. • But, he points out, often evils defeat development. • If evil only afflicted wrongdoers, we’d be good from fear, and we’d have no compassion for those who suffer. • Rowe agrees with this. • But, he insists, this can’t account for the suffering fawn or the abused child. • The theodicy might show why there needs to be some evil, but it can’t account for seemingly pointless evil.

28. The G.E. Moore Shift • The shift • Suppose you start out knowing p. • But then someone gives an argument against p. • The premises of that argument are likely to be less plausible than p is. • So you can reject the argument because you know p. • Atheism • Likewise, the theist can reject the premise that there are pointless evils if the theist already knows that God exists. • The evidential argument from evil is effective at justifying atheism to an open-minded agnostic. • But it won’t be effective at justifying atheism to a theist whose theism is well-grounded. • Rowe assumes that, even if atheism is true, still there can be rational theists who accept theism for good reasons.