The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

174 Notes
3. Those who think that the sufferings of non-human animals that are
unrelated to the acts of human beings are relevant to ‘‘the problem of the
hiddenness of God’’ should feel free to imagine that our invented world
is one in which beasts in the state of nature never suffer. As I said in
the previous lecture, it is not easy to imagine in any detail a biologically
rich world without animal suffering unless one imagines it as a world of
ubiquitous miracles—a world in which, for example, fawns are always
miraculously saved from forest fires. The imaginer who has recourse to a
vast array of miracles had better take care to make them ‘‘unnoticeable’’ (at
least in those epochs and places in which there are human beings to notice
them), for if the ubiquitous miracles were obviously miracles, this would
defeat our purpose in trying to imagine a utopia in which ‘‘the problem of
the hiddenness of God’’ could be raised.
4. I can imagine someone in the actual world (a reader of this book) protesting,
‘‘This metaphysical argument confuses the God of the Philosophers with
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For the prophet Isaiah says (45:
15), ‘Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the
Saviour’ ’’. In my view, however, Isaiah is simply calling attention to
the fact that God has revealed himself to the Hebrews alone, and not
to the great nations of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. (In the Vulgate,
incidentally, Isa. 45: 15 is rendered as ‘‘Vere, tu es Deus absconditus, Deus
Israel, Salvator’’. This is the source of the phrase ‘Deus absconditus’—‘the
hidden God’—that often occurs in discussions of the problem of the
hiddenness of God.)
5. This argument is, of course, modeled on the central argument of Hume’s
unjustly celebrated essay ‘‘Of Miracles’’ (An Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding, sect. X).
6. Atheist’s statement is reminiscent of a famous statement of Norwood
Russell Hanson’s (‘‘What I Don’t Believe’’, 322):
I’m not a stubborn guy. I would be a theist under some conditions.
I’m open-minded. ... Okay. Okay. The conditions are these: Suppose,
next Tuesday morning, just after breakfast, all of us in this one world
are knocked to our knees by a percussive and ear-shattering thunderclap.
Snow swirls, leaves drop from trees, the earth heaves and buckles, buildings
topple, and towers tumble. The sky is ablaze with an eerie silvery light,
and just then, as all of the people of this world look up, the heavens
open, and the clouds pull apart, revealing an unbelievably radiant and
immense Zeus-like figure towering over us like a hundred Everests. He
frowns darkly as lightning plays over the features of his Michelangeloid
face, and then he points down, at me, and explains for every man, woman,
and child to hear: ‘‘I’ve had quite enough of your too-clever logic chopping
and word-watching in matters of theology. Be assured Norwood Russell
Hanson, that I do most certainly exist!’’