The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

52 Philosophical Failure
representatives of the categories ‘‘atheist’’, ‘‘theist’’, and ‘‘agnostic’’, and
because the debate is carried on under ideal conditions, the response of
the audience, whatever it may be, will be uniform. The consequences
of rejecting this assumption would be an interesting topic for further
investigation.) As I have said, I am going to try to convince you that the
argument from evil is a failure by this standard.
There are certainly successful arguments, both in everyday life and
in the sciences. But are there any successful philosophical arguments? I
know of none. (That is, I know of none for any substantive philosophical
thesis.) I hate to admit this, if only because I should like to think that
some of the arguments associated with my name are successes. But I
have to admit that it’s at best highly improbable that they are. It’s
true that none of them has been tested in an ideal debate like the one
I have imagined, but, to expand on a point I made earlier, there are
less-than-ideal debates that come close enough to being ideal that the
performance of my arguments in these debates is strongly indicative
of how they would fare in an ideal debate. I know something of how
these debates have gone, and I regard myself as in a position to say
that it seems very unlikely that my arguments would succeed in an
ideal debate. Take, for example, my arguments for the incompatibility
of free will and determinism. 4 These arguments have been tested by
being presented to several successive generations of graduate students
in various universities. And that test is a real-world approximation to
the ideal debate I have imagined. The outcome of this test has been
as predictable as it was disappointing: some of the graduate students
were convinced by my arguments, and some of them weren’t. True,
these graduate students were not all initially neutral as regards the
question of the compatibility of free will and determinism. And most
of the graduate seminars in which the arguments were presented were
not ‘‘team taught’’ by a compatibilist and an incompatibilist. But the
diverse response of the real-world graduate students to my arguments
leads me to suppose that the response of an audience of ideal agnostics
to an ideal presentation of these arguments would be uniform: they
would remain, one and all, agnostics in the matter of the compatibility
of free will and determinism. And all philosophical arguments, or at any
rate all philosophical arguments that have attracted the attention of the
philosophical community, have been tested under circumstances that
approximate sufficiently to the circumstances of an ideal debate, that it
is reasonable to conclude that they would fail the ‘‘ideal debate’’ test.
If any reasonably well-known philosophical argument for a substantive