The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Notes 173
appear in the book, an argument that is addressed to exactly this question.
The argument, as I remember it, was this, or something very like it:
Human beings and beasts share the same animal nature; human beings can
therefore sympathize with beasts and are consequently subject to (certain
severely limited) moral obligations pertaining to their welfare. God and
human beings share the same rational nature; God can therefore sympathize
with human beings and is consequently subject to (certain severely limited)
moral obligations pertaining to their welfare. But no nature is common
to God and beasts, and he therefore cannot sympathize with them, and is
therefore subject to no moral obligations pertaining to their welfare.
(The first and third sentences of this argument correspond closely to the
argument in the text. It is the second sentence that is ‘‘addressed to exactly
this question’’.) Whether this is Geach’s argument or not, it does not meet
the case. Whatever merits the argument may have, it does not even claim
to show that an obligation to attend in any way to the physical sufferings of
human beings is among the moral obligations pertaining to human welfare
that God is said to be subject to. And, indeed, the opposite seems to be
true: however deeply God may sympathize with those aspects of the human
condition that involve only our rational nature, he cannot sympathize with
our physical sufferings, and (if the larger argument is correct) cannot be
subject to any moral obligation that is grounded in sympathy with physical
suffering.
LECTURE 8 THE HIDDENNESS OF GOD
1. This argument does not appeal to the validity of ‘‘Absence of evidence is
evidence of absence’’ as a general epistemological principle. And that is to
its credit, for that principle is wrong: we have no evidence for the existence
of an inhabited planet in the galaxy M31, but that fact is not evidence
for the non-existence of such a planet. For a discussion of this principle
and arguments for the non-existence of God that appeal to it, see my essay
‘‘Is God an Unnecessary Hypothesis?’’ If the present argument appeals to
any general epistemological principle, it is this rather obvious one: If a
proposition is such that, if it were true, we should have evidence for its
truth, and if we are aware that it has this property, and if we have no
evidence for its truth, then this fact, the fact that we have no evidence for
its truth, is (conclusive) evidence for its falsity.
2. Those who wish to learn more about the problem of the hiddenness of
God should consult Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser’s Divine
Hiddenness: New Essays. The present lecture is an expanded version of my
own contribution to that volume, ‘‘What is the Problem of the Hiddenness
of God?’’