The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

68 The Global Argument from Evil
Since I find the distinction artificial and unhelpful, I am, of course,
not going to allow it to dictate the form that my discussion of the
argument from evil will take. I am, as it were, jumping right into
the evidential problem (so-called; I won’t use the term) without any
consideration of the logical problem. Or none as such, none under the
rubric ‘‘the logical problem of evil’’. Those who know the history of
the discussions of the argument from evil in the Fifties and Sixties of
the last century will see that many of the points I make, or have my
creatures Atheist and Theist make, were first made in discussions of the
logical problem.
All right. Theist’s response will take the form of an attempt to present
one or more defenses, and his hope will be that the response of the
audience of agnostics to this defense, or these defenses, will be, ‘‘Given
that God exists, the rest of the story might well be true. I can’t see any
reason to rule it out.’’ What form could a plausible defense (a defense
having a real chance of eliciting this reaction from an audience of neutral
agnostics following an ideal debate) take?
One point is clear: A defense cannot simply take the form of a story
about how God brings some great good out of the evils of the world, a
good that outweighs those evils. At the very least, a defense will have to
include the proposition that God was unable to bring about the greater
good without allowing the evils we observe (or some other evils as bad or
worse). And to find a story that can plausibly be said to have this feature
is no trivial undertaking. The reason for this lies in God’s omnipotence.
A human being can often be excused for allowing, or even causing,
a certain evil if that evil was a necessary means, or an unavoidable
consequence thereof, to some good that outweighed it—or if it was a
necessary means to the prevention of some greater evil. The eighteenthcentury
surgeon who operated without anesthetic caused unimaginable
pain to his patients, but we do not condemn him because (at least if he
knew what he was about) the pain was an unavoidable consequence of
the means necessary to a good that outweighed it—saving the patient’s
life, for example. But we should not excuse a present-day surgeon who
had anesthetics available and who nevertheless operated without using
them—not even if his operation saved the patient’s life and thus resulted
in a good that outweighed the horrible pain the patient suffered.
A great many of the theodicies or defenses that one sees are insufficiently
sensitive to this point. Many undergraduates at the University
of Notre Dame, for example, seem inclined to say something like the
following: if there were no evil, no one would appreciate—perhaps