The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Lecture 6
The Local Argument from Evil
At the conclusion of the previous lecture, I said that in today’s lecture, I
would see what sort of argument Atheist might offer for the conclusion
that a morally perfect being would not do what the expanded free-will
defense says God has done. Her best response to the expanded free-will
defense, I think, would along these lines:
You, Theist, may have told a story that accounts for the enormous
amount of evil in the world, and for the fact that much evil is not caused
by human beings. But there is a challenge to theism that is based on the
evils we find in the world, and not simply on what might be called the
generalfactofevil.Thereisanargumentthatisbasedontheobvious
gratuitousness of many particular evils. I will present such an argument,
and I will try to convince these estimable agnostics that even if you
have effectively answered what our creator, Mr van Inwagen, has called
the global argument from evil, your response to this argument does not
touch what he has called local arguments from evil.
Let us consider certain particular very bad events—‘‘horrors’’ I will
call them. Here are some examples of what I call horrors: a school
bus full of children is crushed by a landslide; a good woman’s life is
gradually destroyed by the progress of Huntington’s Chorea; a baby is
born without limbs. Some horrors are consequences of human choices,
and some are not. But whether a particular horror is connected with
human choices or not, it is evident, at least in many cases, that God
could have prevented the horror without sacrificing any great good
or allowing some even greater horror. (If you tell me that among the
children in the school bus there might have been a child who would have
been the twenty-first-century counterpart of Hitler, and that enormous
amounts of evil were therefore prevented by the crushing of the school
bus, I reply that that case is exactly like the case of the surgeon who
saves a patient’s life by amputating a limb but perversely refuses to use
an anaesthetic; the same good result could have been achieved in a way