The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument from Evil 59
the stars and St Rule’s Tower were not. Their idea, if I understand it,
is something like this. An event like the Turkish massacres in Bulgaria
would be an evil if it constituted the entire universe. But, of course, no
such event does. The universe as a whole contains no spot or stain of
evil, but it looks to us human beings as if it did because we view it
from a limited perspective. Perhaps an aesthetic analogy will help us to
understand this rather difficult idea. (I found this helpful analogy in a
book by the philosopher Wallace Matson; 3 I hasten to add that it does
not represent his own point of view.) Many pieces of music that are of
extreme beauty and perfection contain short discordant passages that
would sound very ugly if they were played all by themselves, outside the
musical context in which the composer meant them to occur. (Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier is an example.) But these passages are not ugly
in their proper musical context; they are not the kind of passage that
Rossini was referring to when he said, ‘‘Wagner has lovely moments
but awful quarters of an hour’’. Seen, or rather heard, in the context of
the whole, they are not only not ugly but are essential elements of the
beauty and perfection of that whole. The idea I am deprecating is that
the horrors and atrocities of our world are the moral analogues of these
discordant passages. The loci classici of this idea are Leibniz’s Theodicy
and Pope’s Essay on Man, particularly the famous lines:
All nature is but art unknown to thee,
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. 4
(In the matter of Leibniz, if you want to tell me that I am wrong to
imply that his position was the same as Pope’s, or anything close to
it, I won’t fight back. Let’s say that by ‘Leibniz’ I mean Leibniz as he
has commonly been understood. Even if this Leibniz is a fiction, he
has been an influential one.) I don’t see how anyone could accept this
position. It seems to me to be wholly fantastic. Do not misunderstand
this statement. I wish to distance myself from the vulgar slander that
ascribes moral insensibility (or downright wickedness) to Pope—a
slander about which I’ll have more to say in a moment. For my part,
I accuse him only of intellectual error. But the intellectual error is of
enormous magnitude—comparable to the intellectual error of, say, the
astronomer Percival Lowell, who believed that Mars was covered with