The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Notes 171
13. Many critics of theism make much of the ‘‘waste’’ or ‘‘profligacy’’ that
is to be found in nature and which is no doubt a necessary consequence
of any evolutionary process in which natural selection plays a significant
role. (Consider, to take just one example, the countless species—classes,
orders, even a few phyla—that have perished ‘‘without issue’’. All the clever
modifications that time and chance worked on the genetic material of these
species are gone: thousands of ingenious and useful solutions to a wide
range of problems of biological design have been, as it were, accidentally
deleted from Nature’s hard drive.) This waste and profligacy should be
considered as one aspect of the ‘‘patterns of suffering of the actual world’’.
14. In my view, it is fair to compare him to a Christian Scientist who believes
both that all sickness is an illusion and that cigarette smoking causes lung
cancer.
15. My answer to this question was contained the following statement:
Unless one proceeds in this manner, one’s statements about what is
intrinsically or metaphysically possible—and thus one’s statements about
an omnipotent being’s ‘‘options’’ in creating a world—will be entirely
subjective, and therefore without value.
In saying this, I ‘‘in effect’’ advocated a form of modal skepticism,
because ‘‘proceeding in this manner’’ is not something anyone has ever
done; nor is it at present possible.
16. This ‘‘quotation’’ is not a continuous passage but a selection of scattered
verses from Job 38 (verses 3, 4, 21, 31, 33).
17. For a discussion of God’s ‘‘leaving things to chance’’, see my ‘‘The Place of
Chance in a World Sustained by God’’.
18. And also because I’m very strongly inclined to think it’s true. More precisely
(for the case is, by its nature, imaginary, and asking whether it has this
feature is therefore like asking whether Lady Macbeth had three children),
I’m very strongly inclined to think that there have been cases in which
beasts who existed long before there were human beings died in agony and
‘‘no good came of it’’.
19. It might be, e.g., that the world is ‘‘nearly regular’’ (the ‘‘opposite’’ of
‘massively irregular’: ‘nearly regular’ stands to ‘massively irregular’ as ‘very
tall’ stands to ‘very short’), and that that is a great good. No doubt the
world would still have been nearly regular if God had miraculously saved
the fawn. And, therefore, if regularity is the only good ‘‘in play’’ in this
case (and irregularity the only evil), no good was achieved (and no evil
averted) by his allowing the fawn to suffer and die. If, however, God had
miraculously eliminated all instances of intense suffering from the natural
world, the good of near regularity would have been lost. And it would have
been lost if he had eliminated all but one of them, all but two of them, all
but three of them ....