The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Local Argument from Evil 111
have to deal with Alice’s father, who will say, ‘‘You have 101 bottles
of medicine on the table, each of which contains the same amount of
medicine. Call that amount a ‘dose’. I want you to take 1/102nd of
a dose from each bottle and give what you collect by this method to
Alice.’’ If (on the other hand) they reject Charlie’s mother’s proposal,
they will have to condemn Charlie to death without achieving any
good thereby. We cannot evade this conclusion: No matter what the
authorities do, they will have to permit the death of a child they could
have saved, or almost certainly could have saved, without achieving
any good by permitting that child’s death.
It seems clear, therefore, that there can be cases in which it is morally
permissible for an agent to permit an evil that agent could have
prevented, despite the fact that no good is achieved by doing so. But
then, it would seem, if the expanded free-will defense is a true story, this
is exactly the moral structure of the situation in which God finds himself
when he contemplates the world of horrors that is the consequence of
humanity’s separation from him. The local argument from evil, the
argument from horrors, therefore, fails.
Here ends Theist’s speech in reply to Atheist’s presentation of the
local argument from evil—or, more exactly, to her presentation of
any local argument that appeals to a post-lapsarian horror (such as the
Mutilation). It seems to me that if the audience of agnostics has been
convinced by Theist’s response to the global argument (a big ‘if ’, you
may want to say), they will be convinced by his reply to the local
argument.
But Atheist has at least one arrow left in her quiver, the arrow I just
mentioned. If the local argument has failed, it is the local argument
with the restriction under which we have been considering it: that
it be based on a post-lapsarian horror. There is still to be considered
the matter of pre-lapsarian horrors, horrors such as a fawn who dies
horribly in a forest fire long before there are human beings. There
were certainly sentient animals long before there were sapient animals,
and the paleontological record shows that, and a priori considerations
having to do with the uniformity of nature strongly suggest that, for
much of the long pre-human past, sentient creatures died agonizing
deaths in natural disasters (not to mention agonizing deaths due to
predation, parasitism, and disease). Obviously the free-will defense