The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument from Evil 69
no one would even be aware of—the goodness of the things that are
good. You know the idea: you never really appreciate health till you’ve
been ill, you never really understand how great and beautiful a thing
friendship is till you’ve known adversity and known what it is to have
friends who stick by you through thick and thin—and so on. Now
the obvious criticism of this defense is so immediately obvious that
it tends to mask the point that led me to raise it. The immediately
obvious criticism is that this defense may be capable of accounting
for a certain amount of, for example, physical pain, but it certainly
doesn’t account for the degree and the duration of the pain that many
people are subject to—and it doesn’t account for the fact that many
of the people who experience horrible physical pain do not seem to be
granted any subsequent goods to appreciate. If, for example, the final
six months of the life of a man dying of cancer are one continuous
chapter of excruciating pain, the ‘‘appreciation’’ defense (so to call it)
can hardly be said to provide a plausible account of why God would
allow someone’s life to end this way. (Admittedly, this is not a conclusive
point: the Notre Dame undergraduate will probably add to his or her
defense at this point the thesis that the sufferer better appreciates the
goods of Heaven because of his earthly sufferings.) But I have brought
up the ‘‘appreciation’’ defense—which otherwise would not be worth
spending any time on—to make a different point. It is not at all
evident that an omnipotent creator would need to allow people really
to experience any pain or grief or sorrow or adversity or illness to enable
them to appreciate the good things in life. An omnipotent being would
certainly be able to provide the knowledge of evil that human beings in
fact acquire by bitter experience of real events in some other way. An
omnipotent being could, for example, so arrange matters that at a certain
point in each person’s life—for a few years during his adolescence,
say—that person have very vivid and absolutely convincing nightmares
in which he is a prisoner in a concentration camp or dies of some
horrible disease or watches his loved ones being raped and murdered
by soldiers bent on ethnic cleansing. Whether such dreams would be
‘‘worth it’’, I don’t know. That is, I don’t know whether people in a
world in which nothing bad ever happened in reality would be better
off for having such nightmares—whether the nightmares would lead
to an appreciation of the good things in their lives that outweighed the
intrinsic unpleasantness of having them. But it seems clear that a world
in which horrible things occurred only in nightmares would be better
than a world in which the same horrible things occurred in reality, and