The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Sufferings of Beasts 125
if no good came of the instance of suffering cited in the argument,
the occurrence of that event does not tell against the existence of an
omnipotent, morally perfect being; for it may be that the omnipotent,
morally perfect Creator of the world was morally required to draw a
morally arbitrary line through the set of threatened evils, and that the
instance of suffering that the argument cites fell on the ‘‘actuality’’ side
oftheparticularlinehechose.
But this is rather abstract. Let us consider a concrete case that illustrates
these abstract points. Let us consider a famous case we have mentioned
or alluded to a number of times, the case of ‘‘Rowe’s fawn’’. (We will
imagine—Rowe doesn’t say this—that the fawn’s horrible death took
place long before there were human beings.) Rowe contends, first, that
an omnipotent and omniscient being could have prevented the fawn’s
suffering without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some
evil as bad or worse, and, secondly, that an omniscient, omnipotent
wholly good being would have prevented the fawn’s suffering—unless it
could not have done so without losing some greater good or permitting
some evil as bad as or worse than the fawn’s suffering. Whatever might
be said about the first of Rowe’s two premises, it should be clear that
if God has some good reason for allowing the world to contain the
sufferings of beasts, and if there are alternative, morally equivalent
amounts of (intense) suffering that would serve God’s purposes equally
well, then the second premise may well be false. God, everyone will
agree, could have miraculously prevented the fire, or miraculously saved
the fawn, or miraculously caused its agony to be cut short by death.
And—I will concede this for the sake of argument 18 —if he had done
so, this would have thwarted no significant good and permitted no
significant evil. But what of the hundreds of millions (at least) of similar
incidents that have, no doubt, occurred during the long history of life?
Well, I concede, he could have prevented any one of them, or any two of
them, or any three of them ...without thwarting any significant good
or permitting any significant evil. But could he have prevented them all?
No, or not necessarily. For if God has some good reason for allowing
beasts to suffer, this good reason would not be served if he prevented
all cases of such suffering. There may well be no minimum number
of cases of intense suffering that God could allow without forfeiting
whatever good depends on the suffering of beasts—just as there is no
shortest sentence that a legislature can establish as the penalty for armed
assault without forfeiting the good of effective deterrence. It may well
be, therefore, that the fawn suffered simply because its sufferings fell