The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

118 The Sufferings of Beasts
state of the universe so as to produce, in the fullness of time, a hedonic
utopia. Could the omnipotent being have also done this if the laws were
indeterministic? There is certainly no guarantee of this. If the laws of
nature are indeterministic, then, for all we know, any initial state of the
world that permitted the eventual existence of complex animals, however
carefully selected that state was, might (if the world were left to its own
devices once it had been created) eventually be succeeded by states
that involved vast amounts of suffering. A deterministic creation would
therefore seem to be the only option for a creator who wishes to make
a world that contains complex animals that never suffer: even if only a
minuscule proportion of the possible initial states of the world would
yield the desired outcome, if even one did, he could choose to create a
world with that initial state. But is a deterministic world (a deterministic
world containing complex organisms like those of the actual world)
possible? Have we any reason to think that a deterministic world is
possible? These questions raise many further questions, questions that
mostly cannot be answered. Nevertheless, the following facts would
seem to be relevant to any attempt to answer them, and they suggest
that there is at least good reason to think that a deterministic world
that contains complex life—or any life at all—may not be possible.
Life depends on chemistry, and chemistry depends on atoms, and atoms
depend on quantum mechanics (classically speaking, an atom cannot
exist: the electrons of a ‘‘classical’’ atom would spiral inward, shedding
their potential energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation, till
they collided with the nucleus), and, according to the ‘‘Copenhagen
interpretation’’, which is the interpretation of quantum mechanics
favored by most working physicists, quantum mechanics is essentially
indeterministic. If the laws of nature are quantum-mechanical, it is
unlikely that an omnipotent being could have ‘‘fine-tuned’’ the initial
state of a universe like ours so as to render an eventual universal hedonic
utopia causally inevitable. It would seem to be almost certain that, owing
to quantum-mechanical indeterminacy, a universe that was a duplicate
of ours when ours was, say, 10 −45 seconds old could have evolved into
a very different universe from our present universe.
Our universe is, as I said, our only model of how a universe might
be designed. And that universe is not without its mysteries. The very
early stages of the unfolding of the cosmos (the incredibly brief instant
during which the laws of nature operated under conditions of perfect
symmetry), the formation of the galaxies, and the origin of life on the
Earth are, in the present state of natural knowledge, deep mysteries.