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Does the Empirical Problem of Evil Prove that Theism is Improbable?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

James Beilby
James Beilby
Affiliation:
Department of TheologyMarquette UniversityMilwaukee, WI 53233
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Extract

Is (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?1

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 1996 , pp. 315 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 David, Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (ed. Aiken, Henry D.), p. 66. New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1966.Google Scholar

2 Primarily Alvin Plantinga's free will defence. See his Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.Google Scholar

3 Also significant have been Keith Chrzan, Michael Martin, and Bruce Russell.

4 William Alston, William Hasker, Michael Peterson, Alvin Plantinga, Bruce Reichenbach, Stephen Wykstra, et al.

5 For the purposes of this paper, I shall assume that (B) is true. For arguments against (B) see Plantinga, Alvin, ‘The Probabilistic Argument from Evil’, Philosophical Studies 35 (1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 1–53; and Peterson, Michael, Evil and the Christian God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982):Google Scholar chs. 4 and 5.

6 William, Rowe, ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’. In Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (ed. Robert, Audi and William, Wainwright), pp. 228–229. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986.Google Scholar

7 Throughout this paper I will be referring to probability in the epistemic as opposed to the objective sense. I believe that construing the probabilities referred to by the EAE in the objective sense is problematic simply because it is very difficult to assign objective probabilities in cases such as these. As such, phrases such as ‘P(A/B) < 0.5’ are to be read as ‘A has less than neutral probability on B’ or, more colloquially, ‘A is improbable on B’.

8 Rowe, ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’, p. 244.

9 Admittedly, not all theists would deny the existence of gratuitous evil. For example, see Michael, Peterson, Evil and the Christian God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982)Google Scholar: chs. 4 and 5; and William, Hasker, ‘The Necessity of Gratuitous Evil’, Faith and Philosophy, IX (January 1992), pp. 23–44.Google Scholar

10 Stephen, Wykstra, ‘The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of “Appearance”’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, XVI (1984), pp. 73–94.Google Scholar

11 William, Alston, ‘The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition’, Philosophical Perspectives, V (1991), pp. 29–67.Google Scholar

12 Alston, ‘The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition’, p. 30.

13 Wykstra, , ‘The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of “Appearance”’, pp. 87–91.Google Scholar

14 Since it is not part of this paper to prove the truth of the AT, for brevity's sake I have summarized and condensed Alston's discussion on this matter. See Alston, pp. 59–60.

15 This point is acknowledged by Rowe himself as being one of the reasons why he does not endeavor to show that (A) is something that can be known with certainty, following from our knowledge of the existence of evil and certain truths concerning omnipotence. See ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’, pp. 229–32.

16 Alston, ‘The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition’, p. 61.

17 Rowe, ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’, p. 239.

18 Ibid.

19 Of course, not all atheists would grant that a noetic system which includes the proposition ‘O exists’ would be coherent. Rowe, however, does believe that some theists are rationally justified in believing that God exists. See his ‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’, American Philosophical Quarterly, XVI (October 1979), pp. 335–41.Google Scholar

20 Rowe, ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’, p. 238. Rowe has suggested that there is no reason to believe that humans could not have access to these outweighing goods antecedent to their obtaining. This, however, begs the question against the agnostic thesis because if the agnostic thesis is true, we would have no way of ascertaining whether (or the degree to which) these outweighing goods have obtained.

21 Rowe's version of the AT is the following:

(8) The goods for the sake of which O must permit vast amounts of human and animal suffering will be realized only at the end of the world. Ibid., p. 239. While I shall assume that this example parallels the AT, whether or not (8) does accurately express the intuition articulated by the AT seems debatable.

22 Ibid., p. 240, n. 16.

23 Ibid.

24 Mike Rea helped clarify my thinking on this point.

25 For the purposes of this paper, following Alvin Plantinga, I shall define a ‘defeater’ as the following:

D is a defeater of B for S if S's noetic structure N includes B and is such that any human being (1) whose cognitive facilities are functioning properly in the relevant aspects, (2) whose noetic structure is N, and (3) who comes to believe D but nothing else independent of or stronger than D would withhold B (or believe it less strongly). See his ‘Naturalism Defeated’ (unpublished), p. 32.

26 John, Pollock, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. (Towato, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986).Google Scholar

27 Plantinga, ‘Naturalism Defeated’, p. 32.

28 Rowe, ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’, p. 243.

29 Perhaps, it may be objected that the AT is part of the theist's noetic system and therefore should be considered an expansion on RST. This, however, is unwarranted because even (A2), the belief that apparently gratuitous evil exists, is part of the theist's noetic system.

30 Positively stated, P[RST/(E & AT)] > P(RST/E).

31 Rowe, ‘The Empirical Argument from Evil’, p. 229.

32 This paper has benefited from the comments of David Clark, Paul Eddy, Rick Mattson, Alvin Plantinga, Mike Rea, and Bruce Reichenbach.