The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

170 Notes
of them: all of them but 0 and 1. (And one might go on to contend that
the same was true of our defense.) On one understanding of probability
(‘‘objective chance’’ as opposed to ‘‘subjective probability’’), this is correct.
(In this note and in the text, I have been deliberately vague about ‘‘what
kind of probability’’ I’m talking about—simply in order to avoid what
I think would be an unnecessary digression.) But the following point
remains, and it’s the only point that matters: our lay person should be
willing to say of the conjecture, ‘‘For all I know it’s true, and for all I know
it’s false. I’m completely neutral as to its truth-value.’’
8. The two examples are isomorphic in structure. Let the urn contain as many
balls as there are galaxies. (The number of balls in the urn is irrelevant
to the force of the example.) Let the god who prepares the urn assign a
galaxy to each ball, and let him turn a ball white if it corresponds to an
inhabited galaxy and black if it corresponds to an uninhabited one. An urn
prepared in this manner would be, from the point of view of someone in
our epistemic condition who was asked to assign a probability to ‘The first
ball drawn will be black’, indistinguishable from an urn containing the
same number of balls in which the proportion of black balls was chosen by
arandomdrawing.
9. For more on this topic, see my essay ‘‘Modal Epistemology’’.
10. For some of the facts about our world that should be appreciated by anyone
engaged in world design, see Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers.
11. I doubt, however, whether the genesis of rationality involved only the
operations of the laws of nature. I will say something about my reasons for
skepticism on this point later in this lecture.
12. For evidence that supports this thesis, if evidence is needed, see Philip
Yancey and Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain. Paul Brand is the physician
who discovered that leprosy (Hansen’s disease) does not, as had long been
believed, ‘‘rot the flesh’’. The disease, rather, destroys the nerves that
transmit pain-signals to the brain from many parts of the victim’s body,
particularly the hands and the feet; what observers had taken for rotting
flesh was flesh that had been banged and pressed (unintentionally, by its
‘‘owners’’, who, unable to feel pain, were unaware of what they were doing
to themselves) till lesions developed.
The Gift of Pain is about the ‘‘function’’ of human pain, but—given
that the book is right about human pain—it is hard to not to conclude
that pain has the same function in the physiological economies of apes
and beavers. I particularly commend to readers of the present book the
authors’ discussion (pp. 191–7) of ‘‘why pain has to hurt so much’’—i.e.
their presentation of convincing empirical evidence for the thesis that
not particularly unpleasant signals of incipient peripheral damage (a loud
buzzer, say) or only slightly unpleasant signals (like a mild electric shock) are
ineffective means of protecting an organism from inadvertent self-injury.