The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

130 The Sufferings of Beasts
told the story this way: there was no first generation of human beings; the
genesis of human rationality was a gradual event covering hundreds of
thousands of years; but our ancestors were definitely rational by 190,000
bc; on February 26, 187,282 bc; they rebelled against God—and, from
this point, the rest of our story is the same. If I were Atheist, and if I
heard this version of the story told to the agnostics, I should have all sorts
of pointed questions to ask. For example: ‘‘At the time of the Edenic
rebellion, there had been rational human beings for many thousands
of years. What happened to all those rational beings? Where did they
go? They can’t have died, for according to your story, human death is a
consequence of the rebellion.’’ Well, Theist might respond that, after a
certain period of life in Paradise, during which they married and raised
families, Edenic human beings were taken up into some other mode
of existence; in Tolkien’s words, ‘‘removed for ever from the circles of
the world’’. This reply might save the coherence of the story, but it
does not remove the miraculous element from it, for the passage from
paradisal to transcendent existence would be a miraculous event. And
the miraculous element in the story was supposed to be the problem.
Or Theist might say that the earlier human beings didn’t go anywhere.
They never died, and the human population gradually increased from
a few hundred to several million (at the time of the rebellion). Now
this might raise empirical difficulties. (Would a vast deposit of more
or less simultaneous skeletal remains not mark the deaths of those who
participated in the rebellion and their immediate descendants?) And
any proposed revision of the expanded free-will defense that, like the
two we have considered, represents the genesis of rationality as a vague,
smudgy event will raise a problem more fundamental than those I have
mentioned. If the genesis of rationality was a vague event, there would
have to have been a long, a very long, period during which our ancestors
were neither fully rational nor simply beasts. Atheist will certainly
ask what part these ‘‘intermediate’’ creatures played in God’s plan for
humanity. And she will ask Theist to tell his audience at what point they
became immorbid—at what point they stopped dying after the fashion
of their purely animal ancestors. Must the genesis of immorbidity, if
not the genesis of rationality, have been a sudden, sharp event? After all,
an organism either ages and dies, or it doesn’t.
All in all, the story seems to raise the fewest problems in the form in
which I had Theist tell it in the fifth lecture. That is to say, it raises the
fewest problems if it represents the genesis of human rationality as taking
place in a single generation. And it is hard to see how, if this happened, it