- If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
- If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
- If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
- If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
- Evil exists.
- If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
- Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
It may come to a surprise to some atheists, however, that many academic philosophers, even sympathetic atheistic ones, believe that the argument has been refuted. Those who believe this to be the case, often point to Alvin Plantinga's "Free Will Defense" (FWD) as a sound refutation.
In fact, FWD is as an instantiation of a broader response to the Problem of Evil. The response essentially contends that it cannot be logically demonstrated that the existence of evil is unnecessary for the existence of a greater good (an argument which I will now refer to as PGG, as in Possible Greater Good). Because it is possible that the greater good could not be logically disconnected from the permission of evil, and God could not break the rules of logic, God and the existence of evil do not necessarily contradict each other. Plantinga's argument has given this argument force by actually providing a seemingly plausible example of a greater good that cannot logically be untied from allowing evil. This has led atheists to construct probabilistic arguments from evil which aim to show that the best explanation for the existence of evil is that God does not exist.
I contend, though, that the (logical) Problem of Evil can be resurrected (hence the title of the essay). The argument is designed to undercut FWD but I will defend one of the premises with a further argument that aims to undercut the broader response to the problem of evil, the PGG.
First, we must flesh out Plantinga's argument to see how it undercuts the Problem of Evil as it is traditionally stated. The argument makes of heavy use of modal logic or the idea of possible worlds. I'll articulate the essence of the argument without using the technical jargon.
FWD attacks premise two of the Problem of Evil as articulated above. Plantinga believes that God strives to make the best possible world, however, he is constrained by the freedom of his creation. The best possible world would be one in which everyone would freely choose to do good. However, God, logically, does not have the power to ensure that this world become actualized because that would mean the moral agents would not have free will, and thus not live in the best possible world. Instead, God creates the best feasible world (or the best world possible without eliminating free will). Thus, evil exists in the world ( as a result of the free choice of moral agents) and yet God, as classically conceived, exists.
To respond, I first want to table the question of so-called "natural evil", that is the suffering created by natural events. To simply reach for this response is to make a concession that I don't think needs to be made, which is that free will and the elimination of human evil is at odds.
Traditionally speaking, there are three schools of thought on free will: Libertarianism, Compatibilism, and Hard Determinism. Both Libertarianism and Combatabilism affirm the existence of free will, however, the former rejects determinism while the later accepts it. Hard Determinism affirms determinism, but contrasts with Compatibilism on the basis that it rejects free will. Plantinga's argument is predicated on Libertarianism. My argument affirms a species of determinism and thus can be conceived as an argument affirming compatibislm. But instead of merely assuming compatibilism, my argument purports to show that God could prevent evil without eliminating what I think everyone should call free will, thus making the argument immune from the FWD. Here is the argument:
1. If God exists, God would prevent agents from committing acts of evil, if free will could be preserved.
2. All agents have their free will preserved if they retain the capacity to act on their desires.
3.If all agents had their desires to commit an evil act replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts, their free will would be preserved.
4. If all agents had their desires to commit an evil act replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts, no agent would commit an evil act.
5. If God exists, God would replace all desires to commit an evil act with desires to commit non-evil acts.
6. All desires to commit an evil act have not been replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts.
7. Therefore, God does not exist.
Premise one is based on the same logic found in the original problem of evil. This premise concedes to the FWD, however, that free will is a good that God would not want to eliminate. It also assumes that there isn't some other greater good that God would want to preserve, only made possible by the allowance of evil (a point made by PGG proponents). This, then, is the premise that I have said I will defend from the PGG later on. For now, I will focus on the premises that specifically work to rebut the FWD. If premises two through four are sound, then evil can be eliminated without eliminating free will. These are the premises which I will now turn.
Premise two is the most fundamental of the premises. To me it is self-evident that a free agent must maintain their capacity to act on their desires. Reflect on what if would mean for an agent to not have this capacity. By necessity, any action committed by such an agent would be coerced. It is by conceptual necessity then that a free agent must be able to act on his desires.
Now, some may respond that this concession isn't enough. They may say that in at least some circumstances, when people act on their desires they are not acting freely. In other words, it may be a necessary condition for freedom to act on one's desires, but it is not a sufficient condition. One may point to addicts (of any kind) and contend that these people feel compelled to act on their addictive urges, which stand in contrast to their more deliberate desires, such as being financial stable or making their family proud.
This example, however, does not rebut the premise. We may grant that people experience competing desires that vary in their natures, some more immediate or urgent and others that are more abstract and exist upon reflection. But despite the differences, they are all desires. Crucially, those who act upon their addictive urges, are not being compelled in a literal sense, as they are acting in accordance to their will, despite their actions often being in contrast to their long term well-being.
The crucial point is that it is unclear what it would mean for free will to necessitate more than the capacity to act on one's desires. The phenomenological basis of free will is precisely the experience of this capacity. It is thus more plausible than not that this premise is true.
Premise three, it seems to me, follows from premise two. If we contend that an agent retains his free will if he could act on his desires (that is, desires they experience), then his free will would not be eliminated if his desires were merely changed. People's desires change all the time. People work on a paper, until they experience a desire for food. They stay faithful to their wives, until an attractive secretary persuades them to discontinue such behavior. The replacement of desires needed in the argument is one initiated by Divine Command, but why would this make a difference?Outside of perhaps some people performing Pavlovian experiments on themselves, people are not the authors of their desires. In fact if God existed, given His sovereignty, it would be the case that He is the author of every desire that every agent has ever experienced. Thus, even though God has desires replaced, given that agents are allowed to act on the desires they do have, agents still have free will.
If one concedes that desires are a necessary condition for freely willed action ( a basis of premise two), then all that is needed for premise four is a certain account of evil; an account that is shared by philosophers and lay people alike. This account contends that intention is a necessary condition for an act to have moral properties. If intention is a necessary condition for evil, then this precludes the possibility that people can commit evil actions even if they had no desire to do so. In other words, to commit an evil act by accident is to not commit an act of evil at all.
This account of evil is widely shared by philosophers and lay people alike. It is the principle reason why "evil" is not attributed to mechanical entities such as cars. In fact, it is because of this account, that the phrase "natural evil" has always struck me as odd. It seems to me that the only way that acts of nature could become "evil" is if an agent caused or allowed it to happen. Absent technological advancement, then, this phrase seems to ironically presume theism. More to the point, this account of evil strikes me as more true to the concept then its negation.
Now that premise two through four have been established, we must return to premise one to defend it from the PGG. To reiterate, the PGG contends that there is possibly a good that is both necessarily connected to the existence of evil and is great enough to justify evil's existence.With the FWD out of the way, however, the proponents' job has gotten harder not only because they have lost a concrete "good" as a possible candidate. The argument implies a kind of determinism based on desires, and to the extent this is so, then the argument also functions as an argument for Compatablism. If one concedes this desire based determinism established in premises two through four, it no longer seems viable for one to say God merely allows evil. God is causally implicated in the existence of evil. Though the PGG still stands, the proponent must hold the position that God creates evil out of necessity for a greater good.
Typically, the first move for the proponent of the PGG would be to establish that they are in a better epistemic position than those who reject the PGG. Unlike God, we humans are not omniscient. We cannot see how human existence in its entirety fits together. Just like in some cases that an individual may suffer a short term pain or inconvenience, but in the long run actually have been made better off for it, so too can this be the case for the whole of humanity.
At first blush, then, the proponents of the PGG may seem to be more humble epistemically than the proponent of the Problem of Evil, as the proponent is saying the existence of a greater good is merely possible, while the denier rejects this. However, the framing disguises the fact that in order for the PGG to be sound, one would would have to affirm the bold claim that the world cannot be made better without the existence of evil.
In other words, the PGG proponent has to reject the following proposition(ENN), which is the implicit assumption of premise one of the Zombie Problem of Evil :
1. Evil is not logically necessary to attain a morally better world.(ENN)
It is clear to me that to affirm this proposition, one does not need to have access to the full timescale of human existence to make a judgment on whether evil is necessary.The point to remember is that conceptually, God is both omniscient and has the power to do anything logically possible. That includes endowing humans with a nature so as to not need the experience of evil for them to live a maximally good life.
This last fact,specifically, does great damage to the PGG. Responses such as "the existence of evil is necessary for the development of character "or "the existence of suffering leads people to God", are undercut by the fact that it is logically possible for people to have a different nature so as to not need the existence of evil to attain such goods.Given this consideration, coupled with the surrender of free will as the possible good, it seems to me that ENN is much more plausibly true than not true.
There is a consideration, however, that even granting ENN, can undermine the conclusion that God, if he existed, would have created a better world. The consideration is this: What if there is no such thing as the best possible world? This is plausible. Consider a streamlined version of Richard Swinburne's argument: All things being equal, a world is better with more people than less. It is always possible to add more people. Thus, a world that is the best of all possible worlds is impossible. So, is it possible that even though the world could be made better, God would not be obligated to make it so?
A few points in response. First, this consideration by itself, I would argue, actually constitutes a defeater for classical theism. As Lebniz responded to a similar line of argument, if there is no best possible world, then God would be forced to pick a world to create at random. This runs counter to the idea of God's perfection, which in Leibniz's view would mean God would do things for sufficient reasons. I sympathize with this line of reasoning.
Second, the sense of "better", I am referring to is a moral one. Yes, it is may be the case that a "better" world would be one with more people, but to actualize such a world would not have the same moral imperative as improving on a world with pointless suffering on a massive scale. If one concedes, the aforementioned points, this is the world that we are living in, a world that should not exist should there be a God as classically conceived. Thus, even if the world can always be made better, God can be expected to eliminate evil.
With these considerations, if ENN is sound then premise one is on firm ground. Given that premise five follows the previous premises and that premise six is self-evident, the resurrection of the Problem of Evil is complete. It is important to remember that though I do not claim to have demonstrated the truth of all the premises with certainty, that does not mean the premises and thus the argument fail. Such a standard is never applied to any other argument in philosophy, including those articulated by practitioners of Christian apologetics. Though each premise of the argument cannot be demonstrated with logical certainty, they all have strong, if not compelling, reasons to believe they are true, and this being the case, they add up to a persuasive argument that the existence of God and the existence of evil cannot be reconciled.
ADDENDUM: Now that the defense is complete, I would like to now address what others may perceive to be a tension between two arguments I have made. Previously, I have defended a position known as moral anti-realism, which contends that there are no moral facts. People may think that this position undercuts the Zombie Problem of Evil, because it is predicated on the existence of evil acts and desires to commit them. The problem with this is that even if you concede moral anti-realism, the Zombie Problem of Evil exposes a tension within theism. The theist is committed to moral realism as God is conceived as a perfectly "good" being. But this conception is in tension with another theistic commitment which is that evil acts, and the desires to commit them also exist. Thus, even a committed moral anti-realist can run the Zombie Problem of Evil and not contradict his own position. To add, I'm not convinced either of the position that moral realism necessitates theism, (reasons for which are outlined in the essay "An Argument for Moral Anti-Realism").
Personally speaking, I am not yet compelled to be a moral anti-realist, however, as a teen, an informal version of the Zombie Problem of Evil, that I myself concocted, did heavy damage to my belief in God and contributed to my abandonment of theism. I think the difference in the effect between the two arguments on my beliefs are largely due to the fact that I never had a strong conviction that God existed, independent of what I was told by authority, while I do feel committed to some sense of moral realism.
In fact, FWD is as an instantiation of a broader response to the Problem of Evil. The response essentially contends that it cannot be logically demonstrated that the existence of evil is unnecessary for the existence of a greater good (an argument which I will now refer to as PGG, as in Possible Greater Good). Because it is possible that the greater good could not be logically disconnected from the permission of evil, and God could not break the rules of logic, God and the existence of evil do not necessarily contradict each other. Plantinga's argument has given this argument force by actually providing a seemingly plausible example of a greater good that cannot logically be untied from allowing evil. This has led atheists to construct probabilistic arguments from evil which aim to show that the best explanation for the existence of evil is that God does not exist.
I contend, though, that the (logical) Problem of Evil can be resurrected (hence the title of the essay). The argument is designed to undercut FWD but I will defend one of the premises with a further argument that aims to undercut the broader response to the problem of evil, the PGG.
First, we must flesh out Plantinga's argument to see how it undercuts the Problem of Evil as it is traditionally stated. The argument makes of heavy use of modal logic or the idea of possible worlds. I'll articulate the essence of the argument without using the technical jargon.
FWD attacks premise two of the Problem of Evil as articulated above. Plantinga believes that God strives to make the best possible world, however, he is constrained by the freedom of his creation. The best possible world would be one in which everyone would freely choose to do good. However, God, logically, does not have the power to ensure that this world become actualized because that would mean the moral agents would not have free will, and thus not live in the best possible world. Instead, God creates the best feasible world (or the best world possible without eliminating free will). Thus, evil exists in the world ( as a result of the free choice of moral agents) and yet God, as classically conceived, exists.
To respond, I first want to table the question of so-called "natural evil", that is the suffering created by natural events. To simply reach for this response is to make a concession that I don't think needs to be made, which is that free will and the elimination of human evil is at odds.
Traditionally speaking, there are three schools of thought on free will: Libertarianism, Compatibilism, and Hard Determinism. Both Libertarianism and Combatabilism affirm the existence of free will, however, the former rejects determinism while the later accepts it. Hard Determinism affirms determinism, but contrasts with Compatibilism on the basis that it rejects free will. Plantinga's argument is predicated on Libertarianism. My argument affirms a species of determinism and thus can be conceived as an argument affirming compatibislm. But instead of merely assuming compatibilism, my argument purports to show that God could prevent evil without eliminating what I think everyone should call free will, thus making the argument immune from the FWD. Here is the argument:
1. If God exists, God would prevent agents from committing acts of evil, if free will could be preserved.
2. All agents have their free will preserved if they retain the capacity to act on their desires.
3.If all agents had their desires to commit an evil act replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts, their free will would be preserved.
4. If all agents had their desires to commit an evil act replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts, no agent would commit an evil act.
5. If God exists, God would replace all desires to commit an evil act with desires to commit non-evil acts.
6. All desires to commit an evil act have not been replaced with desires to commit non-evil acts.
7. Therefore, God does not exist.
Premise one is based on the same logic found in the original problem of evil. This premise concedes to the FWD, however, that free will is a good that God would not want to eliminate. It also assumes that there isn't some other greater good that God would want to preserve, only made possible by the allowance of evil (a point made by PGG proponents). This, then, is the premise that I have said I will defend from the PGG later on. For now, I will focus on the premises that specifically work to rebut the FWD. If premises two through four are sound, then evil can be eliminated without eliminating free will. These are the premises which I will now turn.
Premise two is the most fundamental of the premises. To me it is self-evident that a free agent must maintain their capacity to act on their desires. Reflect on what if would mean for an agent to not have this capacity. By necessity, any action committed by such an agent would be coerced. It is by conceptual necessity then that a free agent must be able to act on his desires.
Now, some may respond that this concession isn't enough. They may say that in at least some circumstances, when people act on their desires they are not acting freely. In other words, it may be a necessary condition for freedom to act on one's desires, but it is not a sufficient condition. One may point to addicts (of any kind) and contend that these people feel compelled to act on their addictive urges, which stand in contrast to their more deliberate desires, such as being financial stable or making their family proud.
This example, however, does not rebut the premise. We may grant that people experience competing desires that vary in their natures, some more immediate or urgent and others that are more abstract and exist upon reflection. But despite the differences, they are all desires. Crucially, those who act upon their addictive urges, are not being compelled in a literal sense, as they are acting in accordance to their will, despite their actions often being in contrast to their long term well-being.
The crucial point is that it is unclear what it would mean for free will to necessitate more than the capacity to act on one's desires. The phenomenological basis of free will is precisely the experience of this capacity. It is thus more plausible than not that this premise is true.
Premise three, it seems to me, follows from premise two. If we contend that an agent retains his free will if he could act on his desires (that is, desires they experience), then his free will would not be eliminated if his desires were merely changed. People's desires change all the time. People work on a paper, until they experience a desire for food. They stay faithful to their wives, until an attractive secretary persuades them to discontinue such behavior. The replacement of desires needed in the argument is one initiated by Divine Command, but why would this make a difference?Outside of perhaps some people performing Pavlovian experiments on themselves, people are not the authors of their desires. In fact if God existed, given His sovereignty, it would be the case that He is the author of every desire that every agent has ever experienced. Thus, even though God has desires replaced, given that agents are allowed to act on the desires they do have, agents still have free will.
If one concedes that desires are a necessary condition for freely willed action ( a basis of premise two), then all that is needed for premise four is a certain account of evil; an account that is shared by philosophers and lay people alike. This account contends that intention is a necessary condition for an act to have moral properties. If intention is a necessary condition for evil, then this precludes the possibility that people can commit evil actions even if they had no desire to do so. In other words, to commit an evil act by accident is to not commit an act of evil at all.
This account of evil is widely shared by philosophers and lay people alike. It is the principle reason why "evil" is not attributed to mechanical entities such as cars. In fact, it is because of this account, that the phrase "natural evil" has always struck me as odd. It seems to me that the only way that acts of nature could become "evil" is if an agent caused or allowed it to happen. Absent technological advancement, then, this phrase seems to ironically presume theism. More to the point, this account of evil strikes me as more true to the concept then its negation.
Now that premise two through four have been established, we must return to premise one to defend it from the PGG. To reiterate, the PGG contends that there is possibly a good that is both necessarily connected to the existence of evil and is great enough to justify evil's existence.With the FWD out of the way, however, the proponents' job has gotten harder not only because they have lost a concrete "good" as a possible candidate. The argument implies a kind of determinism based on desires, and to the extent this is so, then the argument also functions as an argument for Compatablism. If one concedes this desire based determinism established in premises two through four, it no longer seems viable for one to say God merely allows evil. God is causally implicated in the existence of evil. Though the PGG still stands, the proponent must hold the position that God creates evil out of necessity for a greater good.
Typically, the first move for the proponent of the PGG would be to establish that they are in a better epistemic position than those who reject the PGG. Unlike God, we humans are not omniscient. We cannot see how human existence in its entirety fits together. Just like in some cases that an individual may suffer a short term pain or inconvenience, but in the long run actually have been made better off for it, so too can this be the case for the whole of humanity.
At first blush, then, the proponents of the PGG may seem to be more humble epistemically than the proponent of the Problem of Evil, as the proponent is saying the existence of a greater good is merely possible, while the denier rejects this. However, the framing disguises the fact that in order for the PGG to be sound, one would would have to affirm the bold claim that the world cannot be made better without the existence of evil.
In other words, the PGG proponent has to reject the following proposition(ENN), which is the implicit assumption of premise one of the Zombie Problem of Evil :
1. Evil is not logically necessary to attain a morally better world.(ENN)
It is clear to me that to affirm this proposition, one does not need to have access to the full timescale of human existence to make a judgment on whether evil is necessary.The point to remember is that conceptually, God is both omniscient and has the power to do anything logically possible. That includes endowing humans with a nature so as to not need the experience of evil for them to live a maximally good life.
This last fact,specifically, does great damage to the PGG. Responses such as "the existence of evil is necessary for the development of character "or "the existence of suffering leads people to God", are undercut by the fact that it is logically possible for people to have a different nature so as to not need the existence of evil to attain such goods.Given this consideration, coupled with the surrender of free will as the possible good, it seems to me that ENN is much more plausibly true than not true.
There is a consideration, however, that even granting ENN, can undermine the conclusion that God, if he existed, would have created a better world. The consideration is this: What if there is no such thing as the best possible world? This is plausible. Consider a streamlined version of Richard Swinburne's argument: All things being equal, a world is better with more people than less. It is always possible to add more people. Thus, a world that is the best of all possible worlds is impossible. So, is it possible that even though the world could be made better, God would not be obligated to make it so?
A few points in response. First, this consideration by itself, I would argue, actually constitutes a defeater for classical theism. As Lebniz responded to a similar line of argument, if there is no best possible world, then God would be forced to pick a world to create at random. This runs counter to the idea of God's perfection, which in Leibniz's view would mean God would do things for sufficient reasons. I sympathize with this line of reasoning.
Second, the sense of "better", I am referring to is a moral one. Yes, it is may be the case that a "better" world would be one with more people, but to actualize such a world would not have the same moral imperative as improving on a world with pointless suffering on a massive scale. If one concedes, the aforementioned points, this is the world that we are living in, a world that should not exist should there be a God as classically conceived. Thus, even if the world can always be made better, God can be expected to eliminate evil.
With these considerations, if ENN is sound then premise one is on firm ground. Given that premise five follows the previous premises and that premise six is self-evident, the resurrection of the Problem of Evil is complete. It is important to remember that though I do not claim to have demonstrated the truth of all the premises with certainty, that does not mean the premises and thus the argument fail. Such a standard is never applied to any other argument in philosophy, including those articulated by practitioners of Christian apologetics. Though each premise of the argument cannot be demonstrated with logical certainty, they all have strong, if not compelling, reasons to believe they are true, and this being the case, they add up to a persuasive argument that the existence of God and the existence of evil cannot be reconciled.
ADDENDUM: Now that the defense is complete, I would like to now address what others may perceive to be a tension between two arguments I have made. Previously, I have defended a position known as moral anti-realism, which contends that there are no moral facts. People may think that this position undercuts the Zombie Problem of Evil, because it is predicated on the existence of evil acts and desires to commit them. The problem with this is that even if you concede moral anti-realism, the Zombie Problem of Evil exposes a tension within theism. The theist is committed to moral realism as God is conceived as a perfectly "good" being. But this conception is in tension with another theistic commitment which is that evil acts, and the desires to commit them also exist. Thus, even a committed moral anti-realist can run the Zombie Problem of Evil and not contradict his own position. To add, I'm not convinced either of the position that moral realism necessitates theism, (reasons for which are outlined in the essay "An Argument for Moral Anti-Realism").
Personally speaking, I am not yet compelled to be a moral anti-realist, however, as a teen, an informal version of the Zombie Problem of Evil, that I myself concocted, did heavy damage to my belief in God and contributed to my abandonment of theism. I think the difference in the effect between the two arguments on my beliefs are largely due to the fact that I never had a strong conviction that God existed, independent of what I was told by authority, while I do feel committed to some sense of moral realism.
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