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Does Theism Need a Theodicy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Richard Swinburne
Richard Swinburne*
Affiliation:
Oriel College, University of Oxford, OxfordOXl 4EW, Great Britain
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Extract

To many atheists the existence of evil seems to provide a conclusive argument against the existence of God. God is by definition omnipotent and perfectly good; a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can, an omnipotent being can remove any evil he chooses, so if there is a God there will be no evil, but there is evil, hence there is no God. Theists normally challenge this argument by challenging the premiss that a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can. The theistic defence is usually put as the defence that many evils are logically necessary conditions of greater goods, and hence a perfectly good being may allow them to occur in order to bring about the greater good; so a perfectly good being may well allow some evils to occur.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 287 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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References

1 What follows for the next two pages is a condensed view of the position advocated in my The Objectivity of Morality,’ Philosophy 51 (1976) 5-20.

2 I wrongly asserted in earlier writing The Existence of God [Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979] 254f.) that negative seemings are no evidence at all of how things are; I now correct that to an assertion that, as such (in advance of detailed empirical evidence about them), negative ‘seemings’ on empirical matters give much shakier support to claims about how things are not that do positive ‘seemings’ to how things are. It remains the case that ‘It seems to me that there is a God’ is much better grounds for supposing that there is than ‘It seems to me that there is no God’ is for supposing that there is no God (where both ‘seemings’ report apparent perceptions of things contingent). For if there is a God, one causal chain from God to me would not be unexpected; but if there is no God, a bundle of causal chains from all the places or states of affairs where there is no God to me is a very dubious large-scale position.

3 Lakatos, I. ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’ in Lakatos, I. and Musgrove, A. eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Wykstra, Stephen J. ‘The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of “Appearance,”’ International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984) 73-93CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Nozick, R. Philosophical Explanations (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981)Google Scholar, chapter 3. See especially p.172 and p.199.

6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981), chapter 2

7 What follows is the briefest of summaries of a position for which I have argued at length elsewhere. See especially my The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979) in particular chapter 3, and An Introduction to Confirmation Theory (London: Methuen 1973). This summary is, however, necessary in order to defend the view that the existence of apparent evil affects the probability of the existence of God.

8 Philosophical Studies 35 (1979) 1-53

9 One such difficulty arises where we have an infinite number of exclusive and exhaustive hypotheses; in many such cases, Plantinga suggests (see his pp. 25-30), it would be intuitively plausible to ascribe equal intrinsic probability to each. but then given the usual spelling out of the axioms of the calculus, the prior probability of each member of such a set will be 0. H the intrinsic probability of a hypothesis is 0, its posterior probability on any evidence will also be 0, and no such hypothesis can be confirmed by evidence. Plantinga suggests that any set of the form: H0, ‘there are no A’s’; H1, ‘there is just 1 A’; H2 ‘there are just 2 A’s’ … and so on, conforms to this pattern. For there is, he claims, nothing to choose between such hypotheses on grounds of content or simplicity. They all have equal content and are equally simple, he suggests; and he gives an example of such a set when ‘A’ = ‘horse.’

Plantinga’s example is a bizarre one. The hypotheses between which we seek to make a judgment in science, history or other fields of inquiry, have a fuller explicit structure which makes their relative simplicity easier to assess. But if we do take his hypotheses by themselves we find when we look at them more closely that they are committed to more than their form explicitly reveals. H0 is quite different from the others; the postulation of nothing is always simpler than the postulation of something. As regards the others - their explicit claims concern only horses. But (of logical necessity) horses cannot exist on their own. To be a horse, something has to take in food and air, and get rid of waste products. Plausibly too, it has to have a relatively short finite life. The various hypotheses H1, H2 … are committed to (and so implicitly postulate) whatever else is necessary for them to be true (e.g., H2 is committed to the existence of food and air for two horses, some causal mechanism which caused the existence of two horses, any other horses which were caused to exist having been eliminated). The simplicity of a proposition is a matter of the simplicity of the world whose existence it entails, and the relative simplicity of the hypotheses about horses turns on the relative simplicity of the further biological assumptions which would need to hold if the theory is to be true. That being so, I suggest that a simpler story can be told of how there comes to be a horse population of modest size on one planet, than of how there comes to be a solitary horse somewhere in the universe, or of how there comes to be a universe swarming with horses (e.g., by means of qualitatively identical horse-generating mechanisms on each of many distant planets). When we give some filling to such bizarre examples, judgments of relative simplicity become plausible, which do not yield Plantinga’s negative conclusions.

10 My concern in The Existence of God was to show that the existence of God was probable (in the objective sense) on generally accessible evidence, and so that a belief that there is a God was on that evidence rational2. I argued that there were no evils which could serve no higher good, nor even evils which made it improbable that there was a God or even lowered that probability from what it was on other evidence.