The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Lecture 7
The Sufferings of Beasts
In this lecture, I will present a defense that accounts for the sufferings
of non-human terrestrial animals—‘‘beasts’’—or, more exactly, for the
sufferings of beasts that cannot be ascribed to the actions of human
beings. Since non-human animals presumably do not have free will,
and since some (most, in fact) of the sufferings of non-human animals
occurred before there were human beings, no extension or elaboration
of the free-will defense can account for all animal suffering. (Or not
unless it attributed the suffering of beasts to the free actions of angels
or non-human rational animals. At the end of this lecture, I will briefly
consider a version of the free-will defense that has this feature.)
I maintain that the defense I shall present, when it is conjoined with
the free-will defense, will constitute a composite defense that accounts
for the sufferings of both human beings and beasts, both rational or
sapient animals and merely sentient animals.
In this lecture, I will abandon explicit reference to Atheist, Theist,
and their debate before the audience of agnostics. I will present the
second half of my composite defense in my own narrative voice. But I
remind you that the ideal debate I have imagined remains my standard
for evaluating a defense. In my view, the question we should attend
to is not what I think of a defense or what you think of it, not
what religious believers or committed atheists think of it, but what
genuinely neutral agnostics think of it (or what they would think of
it if there were any of them). My role in relation to a defense is to
present it in as strong a form as possible; the role of atheists is to see
to it that those who evaluate it are made aware of all its weak points;
it is agnostics, neutral agnostics, who should be assigned the role of
evaluating it.
I will now tell a story, a story that, I maintain, is true for all anyone
knows, a story according to which God allows beasts to suffer (and in
which the extent of their suffering and the ways in which they suffer are