The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Notes 155
thinks that the Holocaust is prima facie incompatible with the intelligibility
of human behavior. She believes, therefore, that evil (in the guise of the
Holocaust) is a prima facie threat to the comprehensibility of existence.
So, you see, Jack and Jill are concerned with the same philosophical
problem—admittedly in somewhat different forms.’’
17. I quote from memory. I no longer remember where I read this. I apologize
to Dr Berlinski if I have misquoted him.
18. I have nothing to say about the philosophical value of the texts of Nietzsche
and later thinkers that Neiman reads as contributions to a many-centurieslong
discussion of an overarching problem of evil. I have nothing to say
about the interpretive value of trying to read those texts as attempts to
meet a threat to the comprehensibility of existence posed by radical evil.
My only thesis is that it is simply not true that the authors of these texts (on
the one hand) and the authors of Theodicy and parts X and XI of Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion (on the other) were engaged in a common
project.
19. I could try this. Imagine a world in which the history of European thought is
much like what it is in our world, but with the following minor differences:
in that world, the word ‘evil’ has never meant anything but ‘radical evil’; in
that world, the traditional philosophical problem of the coexistence of God
and bad things has always been known as ‘the problem of bad things’; in
that world, the phrase ‘the problem of evil’ was invented in the twentieth
century by post-religious thinkers as a name for whatever problem it is they
think the existence of radical evil poses. What plausibility would Neiman’s
thesis have in such a world? (How would one even state it in that world?)
Yet European intellectual history in that world differs in no important way
from European intellectual history in the actual world: European thinkers
in the actual world and European thinkers in the imaginary world use a
word differently.
20. A reader for Oxford University Press has made an interesting suggestion.
There is, the reader suggests, a family of interrelated problems in the
ontology of value that might be called ‘‘the metaphysical problem of good
and evil’’. (Philosophers addressing this problem would attempt to answer
such questions as ‘‘What are good and evil?’’ and ‘‘Could there be a world
that contained good but no evil?—is that even metaphysically possible?’’)
The reader goes on to suggest that the metaphysical problem of good and
evil confronts both theists and atheists, although theists and atheists will
no doubt see the problem very differently.
This may be right. And if it is right, it may be that the traditional
problemofevilandthemetaphysicalproblemofgoodandeviloverlapto
a considerable extent. (For example, an atheist’s attempts to formulate the
argument from evil or a theist’s attempts to respond to the argument from
evil may well incorporate theses the proper evaluation of which belongs