The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

Philosophical Failure 49
be able to convert the agnostics to realism, despite the best efforts of the
nominalist to prevent their conversion. It would seem, however, that
the first possibility vanishes if the realist knows of R, and that the second
possibility vanishes if the nominalist knows of N. Consider the first
case. (We need not also consider the second: what we say about the first
will apply equally to the second.) Norma the nominalist presents the
agnostics with the argument N, and this would, in the end, be sufficient
to convert them to nominalism—if Ronald the realist did not know of
R. But suppose that Ronald does know of R. Then, it would seem, he
does have a way to prevent the agnostics from assenting to the premises
of N: he need only present R. If R is an argument that would, in the
absence of N, have succeeded in converting the agnostics to realism, it
seems that it ought, in the presence of N, to have the power to convince
the agnostics that at least one of the premises of N might well be false.
(Remember: Ronald’s task with respect to N is not to convince the
agnostics that at least one of the premises of N is false, but only that
at least one of its premises may well be false. And he need not identify
some particular premise or premises of N as doubtful; he need only
establish that the proposition that all the premises of N are true is open
to reasonable doubt.) Would there not be, in this case, in Hume’s fine
phrase, ‘‘a mutual destruction of arguments’’, a destruction that would
leave the agnostics agnostics?
I will mention but not discuss one final problem for the criterion
of success I have proposed. How can this criterion be applied to
philosophical arguments whose conclusions are doubted by no one or
almost no one—arguments for the reality of motion, the reliability of
induction or sense-perception, or the existence of an external world or
other minds? I mention this problem out of vanity, lest you conclude
I had not thought of it. I will not discuss it because to do so would
take us out of our way, and the argument we shall be considering, the
argument from evil, is not of this sort.
We have, then, our criterion of success and failure in philosophical
argument. My purpose is to defend the conclusion that the argument
from evil is to be judged a failure by the—I think—very liberal terms
of this criterion.
Let us therefore imagine a debate. Two ideal characters, whom I
shall call Atheist and Theist, are debating before an audience of ideal
agnostics—and now we understand by this term agnostics of the
common-or-garden variety, people who neither believe that God exists
nor believe that God does not exist. 3 But our ideal agnostics are not