The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

116 The Sufferings of Beasts
balls in the urn are black? You have no way of answering this question:
no answer you could give is epistemically defensible: ‘‘35 percent’’ is
no better than ‘‘6 percent’’; ‘‘about half’’ is no better than ‘‘about a
quarter’’; ‘‘a large proportion’’ is no better than ‘‘a small proportion’’,
and so on. (More exactly, no answer is better than any equally specific
competing answer. Of course there are answers like ‘‘between 1 percent
and 90 percent’’ that have a pretty good crack at being right. But this
answer is no better than ‘‘between 7 percent and 96 percent’’ or ‘‘either
between 4 percent and 6 percent, or else between 10 percent and 97
percent’’.) And, because you have no way of answering the question,
What proportion of the balls in the urn are black, you have no way of
assigning a probability to the hypothesis that the first ball drawn from
the urn will be black. 5
Here is a case that is less artificial. Ask me what proportion of the
galaxies other than our own contain intelligent life, and I’ll have to say
that I don’t know; 6 no answer I could give is epistemically defensible for
me. The answer could be ‘‘all’’ or ‘‘none’’ or ‘‘all but a few’’ or ‘‘about
half’’. I see no reason to prefer any possible answer to this question
to any of its equally specific competitors. (Or such is my judgment,
a judgment based on what I think I know. I could be wrong about
the implications of what I think I know, but then I could be wrong
about almost anything.) And if I am right to think that I cannot say
what proportion of the galaxies contain intelligent life, I have no way to
assign a probability to the hypothesis that a given galaxy, one chosen at
random, contains intelligent life.
In my view, our epistemic relation to the defense I have presented
is like the epistemic relations illustrated by my examples. 7 It is like
your epistemic relation to the hypothesis that the first ball drawn will
be black or my relation to the hypothesis that Galaxy X, which was
chosen at random, contains intelligent life. 8 That is to say, we have
no way to answer the following question: Given that God exists, how
likely is it that the other components of the defense are true? We should
have reason to reject the defense if we had reason to believe that an
omnipotent being could create a world—a world that was not massively
irregular—in which higher-level sentient creatures inhabited a hedonic
utopia. Is there any reason to think that an omnipotent being could
create such a world? I suppose that the only kind of reasons one could
have for believing that it was possible for an omnipotent being to create
a world having a certain feature would be the reasons one acquired
in the course of a serious attempt to ‘‘design’’ a world having that