The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Sufferings of Beasts 117
feature. Let us consider doing that. How should one go about designing
aworld?
One should start by describing in some detail the laws of nature that
govern that world—and one should not neglect to include in one’s
description of the laws the values of the numerical parameters that occur
in them, parameters like the fine-structure constant and the universal
constant of gravitation. (Physicists’ actual formulations of quantum
field theories and the general theory of relativity provide the standard
of required ‘‘detail’’.) One should then go on to describe the boundary
conditions under which those laws operate: the topology of the world’s
spacetime, its average density as a function of time, its initial entropy,
the number of particle families to be found in it, and so on. Then
one should tell in convincing detail the story of cosmic evolution in
that world: the story of the development of large objects like galaxies
and stars and of small objects like carbon atoms. Finally, one should
tell the story of the evolution of life. These stories, of course, must be
coherent, given one’s specification of laws and boundary conditions.
Unless one proceeds in this manner, one’s statements about what
is intrinsically or metaphysically possible—and thus one’s statements
about an omnipotent being’s ‘‘options’’ in creating a world—will be
entirely subjective, and therefore without value. 9
Our own universe provides the only model we have for the formidable
task of designing a world. 10 (For all we know, in every possible world
that exhibits any degree of complexity, the laws of nature are the actual
laws, or at least have the same structure as the actual laws. There are, in
fact, philosophically minded physicists who believe that there is only one
possible set of laws of nature, and it is epistemically possible that they
are right.) Our universe has—apparently—evolved out of an initial
singularity in accordance with certain laws of nature. Might these laws
be deterministic? And if they are, might it not have been possible for an
omnipotent and omniscient being to have carefully selected the initial
state of a universe like ours so as to render an eventual universal hedonic
utopia causally inevitable? Well, there is this point: if a world evolves
out of a singularity, it has no initial state. To create a world that has an
initial state and, like ours, appears to have evolved out of a singularity,
an omnipotent creator would have to create that world ex nihilo at some
moment ‘‘complete with memories of an unreal past’’ (if only a very brief
one). And, as I have said, that would be a case of massive irregularity.
But let us set this point aside and assume that, if the laws of nature are
deterministic, an omnipotent being could have ‘‘fine-tuned’’ the initial