The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

104 The Local Argument from Evil
have carefully planned her husband’s murder for months, but it was
by chance they met on that bus 28 years before. Now why doesn’t God
miraculously prevent each horror? Why didn’t he see to it that the
man responsible for the Mutilation broke his ankle earlier in the day
that would have been the day of his encounter with his victim—or
something of that sort? And why hasn’t he done the same mutatis
mutandis with respect to every horror? According to the expanded
free-will defense, he has not done this because to have done it would
have frustrated his plan for restoring human beings to their original
union with him by removing an essential motive for cooperating with
him—namely, the realization that there is something horribly wrong
with the world they live in. The best that could come of a miraculous
prevention of each of the horrors that resulted from our separation
from God would be a state of perfect natural happiness—like the state
of the souls of infants who die unbaptized, according to traditional
Roman Catholic theology. But allowing horrors to occur opens the
possibility of a supernatural good for humanity that is infinitely better
than perfect natural happiness. God’s strategy, so to call it, is like
the strategy contemplated by Dororthy’s doctor: to refuse to give
Dorothy a drug that would stop the pains in her chest because doing
so would frustrate the doctor’s project of getting her to stop smoking
and lose weight. (And such a strategy is morally permissible for God,
whether or not it is for a human physician.) Now God perhaps does
act to prevent any number of horrors. For all we know, he reduces
the number of horrors in our world to some very small fraction of
what it would have been if not for his specific and local miraculous
action. Still, he has to leave the unredeemed world a horrible place
or his plan for the redemption of humanity will fail.
This is what the expanded free-will defense says. This much we have
already said. And this much, we have said, is not a reply to the argument
from horrors, because it does not—by itself—seem to entail the falsity
of any of the premises Atheist set out. But we are now in a position to
imagine how one might reply to her invitation to Theist to say which of
the premises of the argument to ask the agnostics to declare ‘‘not proven’’.
God, then, removes many horrors from the world—that is, in many
cases, he sees that if he interacts with the world simply by sustaining the
existence and normal causal propensities of its inhabitants, a horror will
occur, and he does more than this; he makes specific local changes in the
world in such a way that what would have happened doesn’t, and the