The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument from Evil 67
the conclusion of the argument follows logically from its premises), at
least one of the premises of the argument has to be false if my story,
my ‘‘defense’’, is true. If, therefore, my audience reacts to my story
about God and evil as I hope they will, they will immediately draw the
conclusion I want them to draw: that, for all they know, at least one of
the premises of the argument from evil is false. 7
Some people, if they are familiar with the usual conduct of debates
about the argument from evil may be puzzled by my bringing the notion
‘‘a very real possibility’’ into my fictional debate at this early point. It
has become something of a custom for critics of the argument from
evil first to discuss the so-called logical problem of evil, the problem of
finding a defense that satisfies no stronger condition than this, that it
be free from internal logical contradiction; when the critics have dealt
with this problem to their own satisfaction, as they always do, they go
on to discuss the so-called evidential (or probabilistic) problem of evil,
the problem of finding a defense that (among certain other desirable
features) represents, in my phrase, a real possibility. If defense counsels
followed a parallel strategy in courts of law, they would first try to prove
that their clients’ innocence was logically consistent with the evidence
by telling stories (by presenting ‘‘alternative theories of the crime’’)
involving things like twins separated at birth, operatic coincidences, and
mental telepathy; only after they had shown by this method that their
clients’ innocence was logically consistent with the evidence, would they
go on to try to raise real doubts in the minds of jurors about the guilt
of their clients.
As I said in the first lecture, I find this division of the problem
artificial and unhelpful—although I think it is easy to see why it arose.
It arose because the earliest attempts to use the argument from evil
to prove the non-existence of God—I mean the earliest attempts by
analytical philosophers—were attempts to prove that the statement
‘God and evil both exist’ was logically self-contradictory. And various
philosophers, most notably Nelson Pike and Alvin Plantinga, attempted
to show that these supposed proofs of logical self-contradiction were far
from convincing. 8 The debate evolved fairly quickly out of this early,
‘‘logical’’ stage into a discussion of a much more interesting question:
whether the statement ‘God and evil both exist’ could be shown to be
probably false or unreasonable to believe. Discussions of the problem of
evil even today tend to recapitulate this episode in the evolution of the
discussion of the argument from evil.