The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

64 The Global Argument from Evil
We are imagining that stage of the debate in which Atheist is trying
to convince the agnostics to abandon their agnosticism and become
atheists like herself, and, more specifically, that stage in the debate in
which she attempts to employ the global argument from evil to that
end. She inaugurates this stage of the debate with a statement of the
global argument, a slightly more elaborate version of the argument than
the one I have given:
God, if he exists, is omniscient, or, at the very least, knows as much
as we human beings do. He therefore knows at least about the evils of
the world we know about, and we know that the world contains a vast
amount of evil. [I am going to assume that neither party to the debate
thinks the Leibniz/Pope thesis on evil, the thesis that evil is an illusion
of our limited perspective, is worth so much as a passing mention.] Now
consider those evils God knows about. Since he’s morally perfect, he
must desire that these evils not exist—their non-existence must be what
he wants. And an omnipotent being can achieve or bring about whatever
he wants—or at least whatever he wants that is intrinsically possible.
And the non-existence of evil, of bad things, is obviously intrinsically
possible. So if there were an omnipotent, morally perfect being who
knew about the evils we know about—well, they wouldn’t have arisen
in the first place, for he’d have prevented their occurrence. Or if, for
some reason, he didn’t do that, he’d certainly remove them the instant
they began to exist. But we observe evils, and very long-lasting ones. So
we must conclude that God does not exist.
What shall Theist—who grants that the world contains vast amounts
of truly horrible evil—say in reply? I think that he should begin with
an obvious point about the relations between what one wants, what one
can do, and what one will, in the event, do:
I grant that, in some sense of the word, the non-existence of evil must be
what a perfectly good being wants. But we often don’t bring about states
of affairs we can bring about and want to bring about. Suppose, for
example, that Alice’s mother is dying in great pain and that Alice yearns
desperately for her mother to die—today and not next week or next
month. And suppose it would be easy for Alice to arrange this—she
is perhaps a doctor or a nurse and has easy access to pharmaceutical
resources that would enable her to achieve this end. Does it follow
that she will act on this ability that she has? It is obvious that it does
not, for Alice might have reasons for not doing what she can do. Two