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Gratuitous evil and divine providence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2010

ALAN R. RHODA
ALAN R. RHODA*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, 100 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN46556-4616
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Discussions of the evidential argument from evil generally pay little attention to how different models of divine providence constrain the theist's options for response. After describing four models of providence and general theistic strategies for engaging the evidential argument, I articulate and defend a definition of ‘gratuitous evil’ that renders the theological premise of the argument uncontroversial for theists. This forces theists to focus their fire on the evidential premise, enabling us to compare models of providence with respect to how plausibly they can resist it. I then assess the four models, concluding that theists are better off vis-à-vis the evidential argument if they reject meticulous providence.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 281 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. My use of ‘He’ in reference to God is a reflection of my terminological conservatism and is not meant to imply that God has a gender or that masculine metaphors are more revealing of God's essence than feminine ones.

2. I rely on the following as representative expositions of each of the four models: theological determinism: Paul Helm Divine Providence (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993); Molinism: Thomas P. Flint Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); open theism: Clark H. Pinnock et al. The Openness of God (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995); process theism: John B. Cobb, Jr & David Ray Griffin Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia PA: Westminster Press, 1976).

3. Proponents of each model sometimes charge that the other models fail to meet this minimal definition. In what follows, I shall assume that defenders of each model can give a prima facie adequate defence against that charge.

4. The distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ actualization is from Alvin Plantinga The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 173.

5. Tuggy, Dale does so explicitly in ‘Three roads to open theism’, Faith and Philosophy, 24 (2007), 28–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. See van Inwagen, Peter ‘The place of chance in a world sustained by God’, in T. V. Morris (ed.) Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 211–235.Google Scholar He proposes that God can decree ‘either a or b’ without specifically decreeing a and without specifically decreeing b.

7. If there are irreducibly tensed facts then which possible world is actual must change as which tensed propositions are true changes. This would allow for a unique actual world at a time, but not for a unique actual world over all times. To avoid this result, some define ‘possible worlds’ in terms of propositions that never change their truth value (see Trenton Merricks Truth and Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 77), but that only secures uniqueness if completeness holds.

8. If either (b) or (c) is true (i.e. if bivalence fails for propositions about future contingents or if all propositions about future contingents are false) then the collection of all truths does not specify a complete history.

9. See Rhoda, Alan R., Boyd, Gregory A., & Belt, Thomas G. ‘Open theism, omniscience, and the nature of the future’, Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006), 432–459CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tuggy, ‘Three roads to open theism’.

10. See Hartshorne, Charles ‘The meaning of “is going to be”’, Mind (new series), 74 (1965), 46–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shields, George W. & Viney, Donald W. ‘The logic of future contingents’, in G. W. Shields (ed.) Process and Analysis: Whitehead, Hartshorne, and the Analytic Tradition (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 209–246Google Scholar.

11. See, e.g., Swinburne, Richard ‘Some major strands of theodicy’, in D. Howard-Snyder (ed.) The Evidential Argument from Evil (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 30–48.Google Scholar

12. Hasker, WilliamThe Triumph of God over Evil: Theodicy for a World of Suffering (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 180–187.Google Scholar

13. See Helm Divine Providence, 167, 201.

14. Wykstra, Stephen in‘The Humean obstacle to evidential arguments from suffering: on avoiding the evils of “appearance”’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 16 (1984), 73–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, famously argues that none of the world's evils, no matter how horrendous, constitute even prima facie evidence against theism. But this is incorrect. There is a parallel between Wykstra's insistence on the need for a positive evidential connection between what one is inclined to believe and the cognized situation inclining one to believe it and Richard Fumerton's ‘principle of inferential justification’; see his Metaepistemology and Skepticism (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). As discussions of the latter have made clear (see Rhoda, Alan R. ‘Fumerton's principle of inferential justification, skepticism, and the nature of inference’, Journal of Philosophical Research, 33 (2008), 215–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar), extreme scepticism follows unless the scope of inferential justification is suitably restricted and room is made for non-inferential justification of appearance claims apart from any positive evidential connection. But then there's no reason why one can't have prima facie non-inferential justification for believing that gratuitous evils occur.

15. Rowe, William ‘The problem of evil and some varieties of atheism’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 16 (1979), 335Google Scholar. Rowe uses the term ‘pointless evil’ in this article, but ‘gratuitous evil’ is more common in the literature, and I shall employ it throughout.

16. For example, Michael Peterson ‘C. S. Lewis on the necessity of gratuitous evil’, in D. Baggett, G. Habermas, & J. Walls (eds) C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press); Hasker, William ‘The necessity of gratuitous evil’, Faith and Philosophy, 9 (1992), 23–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasker The Triumph of God over Evil; and van Inwagen, Peter ‘The magnitude, duration, and distribution of evil’, in idem God, Knowledge, and Mystery (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 96–122Google Scholar.

17. Hasker writes: ‘[T]here is no necessary connection between the seriousness of an evil and its gratuitousness’; ‘The necessity of gratuitous evil’, 27.

18. Rowe's famous example in ‘The problem of evil and some varieties of atheism’ is of a fawn, mortally injured in a fire, which lies helpless for days in agonizing pain before finally dying.

19. Marilyn McCord Adams Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2.

20. See Richard Swinburne The Coherence of Theism, revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 180. No theist would disagree as far as this goes, but many would charge that it doesn't go far enough since it fails to rule out the possibility of unknowable truths.

21. To accommodate the idea that God is timelessly eternal we should understand ‘antecedently’ in terms of explanatory, not temporal, priority. The key issue is whether information about what would happen if God did A was available to inform God's decision whether to do A. A ‘no’ answer could mean either that there is no such fact of the matter or that there is but that it wasn't antecedently knowable.

22. See, e.g., Prior, Arthur N. ‘Identifiable individuals’, in P. Hasle et al. (eds) Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 81–92Google Scholar; and Adams, Robert M. ‘Actualism and thisness’, Synthese, 57 (1981), 3–42.Google Scholar

23. I invite any readers who think otherwise to make the necessary adjustments to (9). Such refinements will only help my overall project.

24. Peterson ‘C. S. Lewis on the necessity of gratuitous evil’, 188.

25. See Chrzan, Keith ‘When is a gratuitous evil really gratuitous?’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 24 (1988), 87–91.Google Scholar

26. Hasker The Triumph of God over Evil, 196.

27. Hasker (ibid., 194) documents a case from the civil rights struggle in the American South in which this line of thinking apparently did lead to moral apathy on the part of a segregationist minister.

28. Ibid., 197.

29. van Inwagen ‘The magnitude, duration, and distribution of evil’, 103.

30. Ibid., 103–104.

31. Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Howard-Snyder, Frances ‘Is theism compatible with gratuitous evil?’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 36 (1999), 128Google Scholar.

32. Judisch, Neal ‘Theological determinism and the problem of evil’, Religious Studies, 44 (2008), 178CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Judisch emphasizes that the problem of reconciling creaturely freedom (in any sense) with theological determinism has nothing to do with whether God's causal contribution to creaturely actions is direct or indirect or whether it is ‘vertical’ (part of God's creative and sustaining activity) or ‘horizontal’ (part of the historical sequence leading up to the action).

33. Paul Helm Eternal God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 162.

34. William Hasker Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God (London: Routledge, 2004), 111.

35. This is the main suggestion considered by both Helm The Providence of God, and by Trakakis, Nick ‘Does hard determinism render the problem of evil even harder?’, Ars Disputandi, 6 (2006)Google Scholar, URL=<http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000259/article.pdf>.

36. Romans, 3.8.

37. For a similar objection, see Plantinga, Alvin ‘Supralapsarianism or “O felix culpa”’, in P. van Inwagen (ed.) Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 21–22Google Scholar.

38. Presumably most who've been saved from burning buildings would have preferred that they never caught fire in the first place.

39. Hasker Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God, 115.

40. Ibid., 116–117. Molinists might, however, propose an account of the afterlife according to which all who initially respond to trials in ways non-conducive to soul-making eventually come around.

41. Plantinga ‘Supralapsarianism or “O felix culpa”’.

42. But not all. God can and sometimes does efficaciously bring things about.

43. Adjust (2*) accordingly.

44. For a well-developed justification of this claim from an open theist perspective, see Hasker The Triumph of God over Evil.

45. Hasker, William ‘The problem of evil in process theism and classical free will theism’, Process Studies, 29 (2000), 194–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Adjust (2*) accordingly.

47. I thank Jennifer Bernstein, Greg Boyd, Robin Collins, Kevin Diller, Tom Flint, John Hare, Bill Hasker, Matthew Lee, and Mike Rea for helpful comments.