The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

14 The Problem and Argument from Evil
and atheists. Suppose we distinguish radical evil and ‘‘ordinary’’ evil.
(Ordinary evil comprises such diverse items as a twisted ankle, the
Lisbon earthquake, and Tamerlane’s building a hill of his enemies’
skulls.) It may be that although atheists have no trouble accounting
for the existence of ordinary evil, they cannot easily account for the
existence of radical evil. Since I am saying ‘‘it may be’’, since I have
done no more than concede this point for the sake of the argument,
I need defend neither the thesis that the distinction between radical
evil and ordinary evil is real and important nor the thesis that the
existence of radical evil (unlike the existence of ordinary evil) poses
some sort of problem for atheists. 14 There may well be people who say
that there is no important moral distinction to be drawn between the
Holocaust and, say, the Roman obliteration of Carthage following the
Third Punic War. And there may well be people who say that, although
there is indeed a qualitative moral difference between the two events,
atheists can nevertheless as easily account for the existence of the one
as the other. I am simply examining, hypothetically, the consequences
of supposing, first, that the distinction can be made and is important,
and, secondly, that accounting for the existence of radical evil presents
atheists with a prima facie difficulty. If these two suppositions are right,
a certain problem about evil, the problem of accounting for the existence
of radical evil, confronts both the theist and the atheist. My point is
this: If there is indeed a ‘‘problem of radical evil’’, it has little to do with
the problem of evil. Not nothing, maybe, but not a great deal either. 15
There is, nevertheless, an obvious terminological connection between
the two problems. One of the meanings of the word ‘evil’ is ‘radical
evil’—and this meaning is not merely one of its meanings; it has been the
word’s primary meaning for several centuries. If the phrase ‘the problem
of evil’ weren’t already a name for a certain ancient philosophical or
theological problem about a benevolent and omnipotent Creator and a
creation that contains an ample supply of very bad things, it would be
an excellent name for a problem we must today, on pain of elementary
confusion, call by some other name—such as ‘the problem of radical
evil’. I find it plausible to suppose that the ambiguity of the word ‘evil’
has something to do with the confused belief of Mackie’s theologians
that something called ‘‘the problem of evil’’ confronts both theists and
atheists.
I have called Mackie’s theologians ‘simple-minded’. I called them
that because I judged that their confusion was a verbal confusion and
that they had fallen into it because they were not thinking clearly or