The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument Continued 91
were human beings or which are in some other way causally unconnected
with human choice. Those I will consider presently. [I’m not going to
allow Theist to keep this promise. I’ll discuss ‘‘pre-lapsarian horrors’’ in
the seventh lecture, but I’ll lay out the arguments on both sides of the
case myself, without feigning that these arguments are presented in the
context of an ideal debate.] But it is unwise to try to do everything at
once. I should like to turn the floor back to Atheist and ask her whether
my story doesn’t have the features I claim for it.
Here ends Theist’s long speech. Theist has told a story, a story he calls
‘‘the expanded free-will defense’’. The purpose of the story is to raise
doubts in the minds of the agnostics about one of the premises of the
argument from evil: namely, the conditional premise, ‘If there were a
God, we should not find vast amounts of horrendous evil in the world’.
Theist hopes that the agnostics will say something like the following
when they have heard the expanded free-will defense: ‘‘If there is a God,
the rest of that story might well be true. But then there is no reason
to accept Atheist’s conditional premise. It may be true, but it also may
well not be true.’’ And if Theist’s hope is fulfilled, if that is how the
agnostics do react to his story, then, by my definition of ‘failure’, the
global argument from evil is a failure.
I believe that that is indeed how the agnostics would react.
No doubt you have questions about the story. You may, for example,
want to ask whether an audience of neutral agnostics would react to the
story by saying, ‘‘If there is a God, the rest of that story might well
be true’’. Perhaps you think not. Perhaps you think it’s a bizarre story.
Perhaps you think that the agnostics ought to react to it as any jury
composed of normal, reasonable people would have reacted if Clarence
Darrow had tried to raise doubts in their minds about whether Leopold
and Loeb had murdered Bobby Franks by telling a story that turned on
the murder’s having been committed not by his clients but by their evil
twins, clones created by the super-science of malevolent extra-terrestrial
beings. We should expect a normal, reasonable jury member to react
to such a story by saying something like, ‘‘Darrow wants me to believe
that if his clients are innocent, the rest of that story he has told us
might well be true, too. Well, I don’t think that. I think that even
if those two young men are somehow innocent of the murder they’re
accused of, the rest of the story is certainly false.’’ I have to say that
I don’t think that our rational jurors, the members of the audience
of agnostics, would have the corresponding reaction to the expanded