The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

36 The Idea of God
not a possible property if human beings have free will. I am, however,
going to treat the two divine attributes most closely connected with the
argument from evil—omnipotence and moral perfection—as ‘‘nonnegotiable’’
components of the concept of God. (And I will adopt a
similarly intransigent attitude in respect of omnipresence, which will
figure in our discussion of ‘‘divine hiddenness.’’) That is to say, I shall
ruleoutanyattempttomeettheargumentfromevilthatproceedsby
attempting to place restrictions on the power of God or attempts in
any way to qualify his moral perfection. I shall do this because I regard
omnipotence and perfect goodness as just obviously entailed by the idea
of a greatest possible being.
I claim now to have spelled out, in just the relevant sense, the
content of the concept ‘God’—or at least to have made a pretty good
start on spelling out this content. (It may be that some will want
to add attributes to my list. What about beneficence or benevolence,
for example? This property obviously has some sort of connection
with moral perfection, but it is not obviously entailed by it. What
about freedom?—for, although I have affirmed God’s freedom in my
discussion of the attribute ‘‘creator’’, ‘freedom’ is not one of the items
in my list of attributes. What about love? Does St John not tell us that
God is love? And is love not a plausible candidate for an attribute of an
aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit? I have no objection in principle if
someone wants to add properties to my list, provided they are consistent
with the ones already there. I shall, of course, want to look carefully at
each candidate for admission.) My central concern in these lectures is an
argument whose conclusion is that there is no omnipotent and morally
perfect being, a conclusion that immediately entails that God does not
exist. As I have said several times, my position is that this argument,
the argument from evil, is a failure. But what does this mean? What is
it for a philosophical argument to be a failure? In the third lecture, I
will attempt to answer this question. In Lectures 4–7 I will try to show
that the argument from evil is a failure in the sense spelled out in the
Lecture 3.