The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

154 Notes
14. But here is a defense of the second thesis (I am quoting, with his permission,
a paragraph of a letter from Alvin Plantinga):
I’m inclined to believe that there is a twofold problem of evil for atheists.
First, I believe there wouldn’t be any such thing as right and wrong at
all, and hence no such thing as evil, if theism were false. (I know, I
know, theism is if true, necessary.) But second, even if that weren’t true
(even if there could be such a thing as right and wrong, given atheism)
naturalism can’t accommodate genuinely horrifying evil, as in cases like
‘‘Sophie’s choice’’. It’s not just that we can’t explain people’s achieving
that level of depravity in terms of ignorance, the struggle for survival, the
reptilian brain, and so on (though it’s true that we can’t); it’s rather that
there couldn’t be evil at that level if naturalism were true. (If naturalism
were true, people might view such things as displaying the level of evil
they actually do display; but they’d be mistaken.) There could be evil of
that appalling degree only if something like the Christian story is true:
there is such a person as God, who has displayed unthinkable love in the
Cross (incarnation and atonement) in order to bestow a stunning benefit
(a benefit that beggars both description and imagination) upon creatures
who have turned their backs on him; but some of us, like Satan, take as
our explicit goal destroying and defacing what God loves, and promoting
and devoting ourselves to what God hates (as with Satan in Paradise Lost.)
There is a level of evil only that sort of action and character can reach; and
that level of evil isn’t possible in a naturalistic universe.
Anthony Burgess was, I think, saying something similar—from the
point of view of a lapsed Catholic—when he wrote, ‘‘There is no A. J. P.
Taylor-ish explanation for what happened in Eastern Europe during the
war’’ (quoted by Martin Amis in Koba the Dread, 196).
15. An analogy might be the relation between, on the one hand, philosophical
problems about what metaphysicians call ‘freedom’ when they are discussing
the ontological grounds of moral responsibility and, on the other,
philosophical problems about what political philosophers call ‘freedom’
when they are discussing the limits a state should place on the actions of
its citizens. What do these two classes of problems have to do with each
other? Not nothing, maybe, but not a great deal either.
16. Here is a simple example of how one who embraced this method might
report the ‘‘discovery’’ that the problems considered by two philosophers
were the same. ‘‘Eighteenth-Century Jack thinks that existence is comprehensible
only if there is a God, and he thinks that the Lisbon earthquake is
prima facie incompatible with the existence of God. He believes, therefore,
that evil (in the guise of the Lisbon earthquake) is a prima facie threat to
the comprehensibility of existence. Twenty-First-Century Jill thinks that
existence is comprehensible only if human behavior is intelligible, and she