The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Notes 169
going to point any of these things out. Ignoring these nice metaphysical
points (in matters of verbal expression; they are of course present in my
thoughts as I write) will not weaken my argument.
2. The laws of nature fail in a world if some of them are false in that world.
(Whatever else a law of nature may be, it is a proposition, and thus has
a truth-value.) For example, if ‘‘In every closed system, momentum is
conserved’’ is a law of nature in the world w, andif,inw, thereareclosed
systems in which momentum is not conserved, the laws of nature fail in w.
For an account of laws of nature that allows a proposition to be both false
in a world and a law of nature in that world, see my essay, ‘‘The Place of
Chance in a World Sustained by God’’.
3. In this example, I assume that selection pressure is necessary if taxonomic
diversification of the order exhibited by the terrestrial biosphere is to occur
in the natural course of events (i.e. without miracles). This is certainly true
for all anyone knows.
4. Note that propositions (1), (2), and (3) contain no element of the supernatural.
They could be accepted without contradiction by the most fervent
atheists and naturalists.
5. If you were asked to assign a probability to the hypothesis ‘‘The first ball
drawn will be black’’ before the drawing of the number from the hat,
you would know what probability to assign: it would be the average of
the one-hundred-and-one probabilities that the hat-drawing will choose
among: (0/100 + 1/100 + 2/100 +···+100/100)/101; i.e. 0.5. The
thesis asserted in the text, however, is that after the number has been
drawn from the hat, you will have no way to assign a probability to that
hypothesis.
6. To make the case more realistic, we should say, ‘‘galaxies of the same
age and type as our own Milky Way galaxy’’. Very ‘‘young’’ galaxies are
unlikely to be ‘‘inhabited’’, and the same is true of older galaxies belonging
to various specifiable types.
7. This statement requires one qualification. Someone might object that each
of the four propositions that make up our defense is either necessarily true
or necessarily false, whereas the propositions that figure in our examples
are contingent. Here, then, is a third example: an example that involves a
non-contingent proposition. Consider a certain mathematical conjecture:
that there is a largest integer that has the property F. Suppose that all the
mathematicians who fully understand the issues this conjecture involves
are unwilling to commit themselves to its truth or its falsity—that none
of them so much as leans toward saying that it is true or that it is false.
Then the lay person who knows these things is in no position to ascribe
a probability to the conjecture. One might of course say that, because the
conjecture is either necessarily true or necessarily false, the lay person is in
a position to rule out many probability assignments—in fact, almost all