2 - Darwinian Evil and Anti-Theistic Arguments

Summary

This chapter comprises dicussion of both informal and formal arguments against belief in the God of theism. Informal arguments rely on an “anyone-can-see” atheistic intuition about nature, unveiled in Darwinian terms. Formal arguments rely on an atheistic inference made from evidence – from the configuration of evolutionary evils suffered by animals in the natural realm, past and present. A successful God-justifying account will have to weaken the atheistic force of these arguments, if not mitigate them altogether. The author proposes that the prospects for success are poor, so long as we approach the problem of God and evolutionary animal suffering on conventional ethical norms for the moral agency of God in creating species. He looks ahead to proposing that aesthetics will play a major role in his own approach to both the teleological and moral aspects of the Darwinian Problem.