The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

92 The Global Argument Continued
free-will defense. The jurors in the criminal case know enough about
how things stand in the world to know that the ‘‘evil twins’’ story is
certainly false (‘‘certainly’’ in the sense that the probability of its truth
is so close to zero that the possibility that it is true—it is, strictly
speaking, a possible story—should be ignored by anyone engaged in
practical deliberation) even if the accused are innocent. But would it
be rational for the agnostics to say that the creation-fall-and-atonement
story is certainly false even if there is a God? You, perhaps, think that
the story is certainly false—so vastly improbable that the possibility
of its truth must be ignored in serious intellectual inquiry. But then
(perhaps) you think that the existence of God is vastly improbable.
Suppose, however, you were suddenly converted to theism, to the belief
that there was a being who, among his other features, was omnipotent
and morally perfect. Do you think that you would still say that the
creation-fall-and-atonement story was vastly improbable? If you think
that, I have to disagree with you. That’s not what you would say. I
don’t mean that, having been converted to theism, you would accept
the story, or think it more probable than not. I do mean that you would
saythatitwasthesortofstorythatcould be true, that it represented a
real possibility, that it was true for all you knew.
Here is another question you might want to ask: whether I believe
the story I have put into Theist’s mouth. Well, I believe parts of it, and
I don’t disbelieve any of it. (Even the part I believe does not, for the
most part, belong to my faith; it merely comprises some of my religious
opinions. They are on a par with my belief that Anglican orders are valid.)
I am not at all sure about ‘‘preternatural powers’’, for example, or about
the proposition that God shields us from much evil, and that the world
would be far worse if he did not. But what I believe and don’t believe is
not really much to the point. The story I have told is, I remind you, only
supposed to be a defense. Theist does not put forward the expanded freewill
defense as a theodicy, as a statement of the real truth of the matter
concerning the co-presence of God and evil in the world. Nor would I, if
I told it. Theist contends only, I contend only, that the story is—given
that God exists—true for all anyone knows. And I certainly don’t see
any reason to reject any of it. In particular, I see no reason to reject
the thesis that a small population of our ancestors were miraculously
raised to rationality on, say, June 13th, 190,027 bc—or on some such
particular date. It is not a discovery of evolutionary biology that there
are no miraculous events in our evolutionary history. It could not be,
any more than it could be a discovery of meteorology that the weather at