The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Notes 161
3. The Existence of God; See pp. 145–8.
4. Pope, Epistle I, ll. 289 ff.
5. Well, not Surin—who is, after all, a Christian. I’m not sure how Surin
supposes that a Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) theologian or philosopher
should reply when an atheist attempts to convince theists or agnostics that
there is no God by laying out the argument from evil and claiming for
it the status of a proof of the non-existence of God. Perhaps like this:
the philosopher or theologian simply ‘‘responds in faith’’; that is, he or
she proclaims that it is a matter of faith that there is a God despite the
vast amount of evil in the world, and then proceeds to pour scorn on any
apologist who responds to the atheist’s argument in any other way—even
if that way does not take the form of a theodicy (even if it consists, say, in
pointing out some logical fallacy in the atheist’s argument).
6. I’m going to assume that there is an objective moral standard, that this
standard applies both to God and to creatures, and that it’s possible for
humanbeingstobemistakenaboutitsdemands.Ifthisassumptionis
wrong, if there is no objective moral standard, then, presumably, there is
no such property or attribute as ‘‘moral perfection’’. (When, in the text, I
say that moral perfection is, non-negotiably, one of the divine attributes, I
presuppose that it exists: if the words ‘moral perfection’ denote a property,
they denote a property that God cannot possibly lack.) If there is no such
attribute as moral perfection, it must, of course, be removed from the list
of divine attributes (that is to say, the words ‘moral perfection’ must be
deleted from our statement of the list of divine attributes). If there is no
such attribute as moral perfection, the aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit
will not be morally perfect—and not because it will be morally imperfect,
but because there will not be any such thing for it to be. (Neither it nor
anything else will be either morally perfect or morally imperfect, for a thing
can no more be morally imperfect if there is no objective moral standard
than it can be morally perfect.) But no doubt anyone who felt compelled
to remove ‘‘moral perfection’’ from the list of the properties a ‘‘something’’
must have if it is to be a something than which a greater cannot be
conceived (having been convinced by some argument or other that there
was no objective moral standard) would want to ‘‘replace’’ it with some
attribute whose existence did not presuppose an objective moral standard:
‘‘benevolent in the highest possible degree’’, perhaps, or ‘‘exhibiting perfect
love toward all creatures’’. And, no doubt, the existence of vast amounts of
truly horrible evil raises problems for those who believe in an omnipotent
being who is benevolent in the highest possible degree (or whose love for
all creatures is perfect) that are essentially the same as the problems it raises
for those who believe in an omnipotent and morally perfect being
I should perhaps say something to those theists who resist the idea that
there is an objective moral standard that ‘‘applies to God’’. I will say this.