The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

58 The Global Argument from Evil
I’ve given you one love-pat, right?
You don’t want another.
So watch it, Jack. 1
The attitude expressed in these two quotations is not confined to avowed
enemies of Christianity. The theologian Kenneth Surin, a Christian,
contends in his book Theology and the Problem of Evil that anyone who
attempts to reconcile the goodness and omnipotence of God with such
evils as the Holocaust actually undermines his own and others’ abilities
to oppose those evils and is, therefore, at least in a sense, cooperating
with their perpetrators. (At any rate, I think that’s what his thesis is. As
is the case with a great many twentieth-century academic theologians,
Surin writes a kind of prose that seems to an untutored analytical
philosopher like me designed to conceal his meaning.)
I am not entirely out of sympathy with writers like Mill, the fictional
author of the poem in Amis’s novel, and Surin. There is one sort of
position on God and evil toward which the intellectual scorn of Mill
(I’ll discuss his moral scorn presently) seems entirely appropriate, and it
could plausibly be argued that Surin would be right to say that anyone
who defended this position was encouraging indifference to the evils of
the world. I have in mind the idea that—in the most strict and literal
sense—evil does not exist. Now it might seem surprising that anyone
would defend this idea. Consider the following well-known passage
from The Brothers Karamazov:
‘‘By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow ...told me about the crimes
committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of
a general rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and
children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till
morning, and in the morning they hang them .... These Turks took a pleasure
in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb,
and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their
bayonets before their mothers’ eyes ...’’ 2
How can anyone listen to stories like this and say that evil does not exist?
Well, one sort of answer to this question is provided by the adherents of
more than one Eastern religion: the appearance of evil that is all about
us is mere appearance, illusion, for the simple reason that all appearance,
everything ordinary people take for sensible reality, is illusion. I will not
consider this position. I’ll take it for granted that what our senses tell us
about the world around us is reasonably accurate. But there have been
thinkers who held that evil was an illusion even though the sun and