The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

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Notes 163 8. See Antony Flew, ‘‘Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom’’; J. L. Mackie, ‘‘Evil and Omnipotence’’; H. J. McCloskey, ‘‘God and Evil’’; Nelson Pike, ‘‘Hume on Evil’’; and Alvin Plantinga, ‘‘The Free Will Defense’’. 9. But there are other defenses, although none of them has been so carefully developed or extensively examined as the free-will defense. There is, for example, the ‘‘plenitude’’ defense: the Principle of Plenitude requires God to create all possible worlds in which good outweighs evil; the world we inhabit is one of these worlds; there are vastly many other created worlds, in some of which good outweighs evil much more decisively than it does in our world, and in some of which it only barely outweighs evil. Versions of the plenitude defense are presented in Donald A. Turner’s ‘‘The Many-Universes Solution to the Problem of Evil’’ and in Hud Hudson’s book The Metaphysics of Hyperspace. There is Alvin Plantinga’s recent ‘‘felix culpa’’ defense, according to which the evils of the world are a necessary condition for the immeasurably great good of the Incarnation. (See his essay ‘‘Supralapsarianism, or ‘O FelixCulpa’’’.) There is the ‘‘radical Calvinist’’ defense, according to which God decrees evil in order that his glory may be displayed in its final defeat; all created beings who suffer, suffer justly (the defense contends) because God has created them with evil wills—to demonstrate his glory and power by his ultimate victory over them—and their sufferings are an ordinate punishment for the evil actions that their evil wills lead them to perform. (A Notre Dame graduate student, Christopher Green, defended this view in a term paper in a seminar on the problem of evil, and made it seem more plausible than I should have thought possible. A later version of this paper, entitled ‘‘A Compatibi-Calvinist Demonstrative-Goods Defense’’, was read at the 2003 Eastern Division meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers. It is as yet unpublished.) It may be that further development and discussion of these or other defenses would lead me to revise my judgment that the free-will defense is the only defense that has any hope of success For recent work on the free-will defense, including the seminal work of Alvin Plantinga, see Adams and Adams, eds., The Problem of Evil, and Peterson, ed., The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings. The free-will defense derives, at a great historical remove, from St Augustine. A useful selection of Augustine’s writings on free will and the origin of evil (from The City of God and the Enchiridion) canbefoundin A. I. Melden, ed., Ethical Theories, 164–77. Three important book-length treatments of the problem of evil, all in the Augustinian (or ‘‘free will’’) tradition, are C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain;P.T.Geach,Providence and Evil; and Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil.
164 Notes 10. Note that I do not say that affirmation of the truth of contradictions makes rational debate impossible. That may or may not be so, but to contend that it is so is not a part of my argument. Para-consistent logicians need not take offense. I said that someone who affirms the truth of contradictions has the resources to make rational debate impossible. Someone who affirms contradictions will no doubt affirm other things as well, and some of these things may forbid his making use of these ‘‘resources’’. Note, however, that the dialogue in the text does not represent the contradictionaffirming Cartesian theodicist as making use of the principle that anything follows from a contradiction. So far as I can see, he affirms nothing, takes no dialectical step, that could be disputed by the ‘‘friends of true contradictions’’. LECTURE5THEGLOBALARGUMENT CONTINUED 1. The literature on the problem of free will is vast—even if one restricts one’s attention to recent work by analytical philosophers. It is perhaps natural enough that I should recommend my book An Essay on Free Will as a point of entry into this vastness. More recent work, and comprehensive references, can be found in Laura Waddell Ekstrom, ed., Agency and Responsibility: Essays in the Metaphysics of Freedom; Robert Kane, ed., Free Will; and Gary Watson, ed., Free Will. 2. The two most important discussions of counterfactuals of freedom can be found in these splendid (but highly technical) books: Plantinga’s The Nature of Necessity (ch. 9) and Thomas Flint’s Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (chs. 2 and 4–7). 3. For references to Thomist and Jesuit theories of counterfactuals of freedom, see Flint, Divine Providence,chs.2and4. 4. I have in mind the version of the free-will defense (TheNatureofNecessity, ch. IX, sects. 7–9) that includes the proposition that ‘‘every creaturely individual essence suffers from trans-world depravity’’. 5. See Robert Merrihew Adams, ‘‘Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil’’ and ‘‘An Anti-Molinist Argument’’; William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge and ‘‘Anti-Molinism is Undefeated!’’; and my ‘‘Against Middle Knowledge’’. 6. The standard argument for the incompatibility of omniscience and free will depends on God’s being ‘‘in time’’. In brief outline, it goes as follows. If God knew, and hence believed, at t (a moment in the remote past) that I should lie tomorrow, then I am able to tell the truth tomorrow only if I am able either to bring it about that God did not have this belief or that it was mistaken. And I am able to do neither of these things. I lack the ability to do the former because that ability would be an ability to change
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THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX
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Preface These lectures were deliver
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Outline Contents Detailed Contents
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2 The Problem and Argument from Evi
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10 The Problem and Argument from Ev
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Lecture 2 The Idea of God I said th
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20 The Idea of God unifying princip
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24 The Idea of God And Demiourgos i
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26 The Idea of God evil. When we fi
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