The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

128 The Sufferings of Beasts
a world in which all human suffering was miraculously prevented would
be a massively irregular world.)
Secondly, suppose that, contrary to what I am inclined to think,
the anti-irregularity defense does provide good reason to think that no
moral case could successfully be made against an omnipotent creator
of a world containing human suffering in the amount and of the kinds
found in the actual world. It never hurts to have more than one defense.
The counsel for the defense who has a plausible story that explains
away the prosecuting attorney’s apparently damning evidence does well.
But the defense counsel who has two such plausible stories—different
stories, stories that are not trivial variations on a single theme—does
better. (This sort of case, by the way, shows that a defense need not
be probable on the existence of God and evil and what is known to
the audience of agnostics. If Theist had ten defenses, defenses that were
logically inconsistent with one another, the average probability of these
defenses on any proposition could not be greater than 10 percent. But
it would be a good thing, from Theist’s point of view, to have ten
independent defenses, despite the fact that this would necessitate a low
average probability for the individual defenses.)
It might also be argued that there was a certain tension between
the anti-irregularity defense and the expanded free-will defense, since
the anti-irregularity defense implies that there is at least a prima facie
case against God’s employing a miracle on any given occasion, and the
expanded free-will defense entails that the raising of our immediate nonhuman
ancestors to human or rational status was a miraculous event.
This argument has little force, however, for the raising of our primate
ancestors to rationality could have taken place in a world that contained
very little in the way of miraculous irregularity. It would, in fact, require
nothing more than a genotypic and phenotypic transformation of a
few score or a few hundred, or, at most, a few thousand organisms.
It might be asked why the expanded free-will defense need postulate
that the genesis of human rationality requires divine intervention at all.
There are two reasons. First, human beings and beasts are, as I have
noted, radically different. Between us and the highest primates there
is a vast gulf. I have a hard time believing that this gulf was bridged
by the ordinary mechanisms of evolution in the actual time in which
it was bridged. Whenever the first rational primates existed, it is clear
that our ancestors of one million years ago were mere animals, no more
rational than present-day chimpanzees or gorillas, and a million years
is not much time for the evolutionary development of radical novelty.