The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Notes 153
horriblesignificance,andthecaseofthetheistwhoatsomepointcomes
to believe that the existence of evil confronts his beliefs with an intellectual
challenge.
8. Indeed, an apologist might privately believe that he knew the real truth
about why an omnipotent and loving God allowed evil to exist, and
yet regard this real truth as unsuitable for apologetic purposes. Such an
apologist would be like a defense counsel who thought that the real truth
about the evidence that seemed to demonstrate the guilt of his client was
so complex and involuted that he could better serve his client by avoiding
all mention of it and telling instead a simple, plausible story that explained
away the prosecution’s apparently damning evidence, a story that was false
in fact, but which the prosecution would be unable to disprove.
9. For a very different approach to the problem of evil see Marilyn Adams’s
Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. In this book Adams discusses
both the purely intellectual problem considered in these lectures, and many
other problems connected with trust in God and the very worst evils
present in his creation. I find this book unpersuasive (as regards its general
tendency and main theses; I think Adams is certainly right about many
relatively minor but not unimportant points), but endlessly fascinating.
For another important—and also very different—discussion of the
problem of evil, see Eleonore Stump’s Stob Lectures, Faith and the Problem
of Evil.
10. The same point applies to those who think they are in possession of a
theodicy: it would be a stupid and cruel thing for, say, Leibniz to tell the
mother that the child’s death was an essential component of the best of
all possible worlds, or for Pope to tell her that whatever is, is right. And
these responses would not be stupid and cruel because they rested on a
false theodicy: even if—per impossibile, I want to say—the child’s death
was an essential component of the best of all possible worlds, it would be
a stupid and cruel thing to respond to the mother’s distress by telling her
that truth. That something is true, and, to borrow a technical term from
the philosophy of language, conversationally relevant, does not mean that
it should be said.
11. See my essay ‘‘The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God’’.
12. Elsewhere in the letter, Bilynskyj says that Christians to whom terrible
things have happened often ‘‘wear themselves out’’ trying to find meaning
in them. To learn that a terrible thing has no meaning can be a liberation
for such Christians—not, of course, a liberation from the burden of
their grief, but a liberation from a false burden that a wrong view of
God’s relations to the evils of the world has added to the burden of their
grief.
13. J. L. Mackie, ‘‘Evil and Omnipotence’’. The quoted passage appears on
p. 25 in Adams and Adams.