The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Philosophical Failure 41
for things that people had hitherto believed without any rational basis.
My wife is one of those people who don’t quite see the point, evident
as it is to us philosophers, of discussions of Zeno’s paradoxes, and who
has, in consequence, never read Salmon or Grünbaum or any other
author on this topic. But I very much doubt whether her belief that it is
possible for one runner to overtake another—I’m sure she does believe
this, although in fact I’ve never asked her—is a mere prejudice lacking
any rational foundation.)
Now the second sort of consideration I offer in support of the thesis
that success in philosophical argument should be thought of as contextrelative.
Even if a philosopher’s purpose in producing an argument is
to produce converts to its conclusion, the kind of argument that is best
for his or her purposes will depend on various features of the audience
to which it is addressed. A trivial example would be this: Thomas’s
First Way is suitable for presentation to an audience of people who
have normal beliefs about the reality of motion in a way in which it
would not be suitable for presentation to an audience of Eleatics. The
following would seem to be a reasonable principle to adopt as regards
the presentation of arguments in philosophy or any other field. Suppose
one is presenting an argument for the thesis q to a certain audience, and
that p is one of the premises of this argument; if one thinks that p is
true, and if it is reasonable for one to suppose that one’s audience will
agree that p is true, then one need not bother to present an argument for
p—not even if one happens to know of a really lovely argument for p,
and one is aware that there exist philosophers, philosophers of a school
unrepresented in one’s audience, who deny p. Few works of political
philosophy open with a refutation of solipsism.
Now let me take a step back and ask how these rather abstract
reflections are to be applied. How do I mean to apply them? What use
do I propose to make of the idea that questions about the success of an
argument should be raised in a way that takes account of the context in
which the argument is presented? One way in which I might apply this
idea in these lectures would be for me to ask myself which premises of the
argument I propose to examine—the argument from evil—might seem
doubtful to you, my actual audience. But I really know very little about
you, and, even if I did, I should not want to present arguments that were
so carefully tailored to your beliefs and preconceptions that they might
be effective only in this company—select though it be. I am inclined,
rather, to direct my efforts to a more general and abstract goal. Let me try
to describe this more general goal. It is something like this: to ask myself