Deductive Evil Disproofs of the Existence of God
(1) Evil and Omnipotence
(2) The Problem of Evil
(3) Plantinga on the Free Will Defense
(4) A Sound Logical Argument from Evil
(5) Unjustified Evil and God’s Choice
1. Evil and Omnipotence
by J.L. Mackie
In this brilliant and beautifully argued paper Mackie gives the best presentation of the soul-making solution to the problem of evil that I’ve seen anywhere. Of course, he is not entirely happy with it, but that I will try to remedy here. Let us first see what he has for us.
Let us call pain and misery ‘first-order evil’ or ‘evil (1)’. What contrasts with this, namely, pleasure and happiness, will be called ‘first-order good’ or ‘good (1)’. Distinct from this is ’second-order good’ or ‘good (2)’, which somehow emerges in a complex situation in which evil (1) is a necessary component – logically, not merely causally, necessary. (Exactly how it emerges does not matter: in the crudest version of this solution, good (2) is simply the heightening of happiness by the contrast with misery; in other versions it includes sympathy with suffering, heroism in facing danger, and the gradual decrease of first-order evil and increase of first-order good.) It is also being assumed that second-order good is more important than first-order good or evil, in particular that it more than outweighs the first-order evil it involves. (The Impossibility of God, 67)
The first objection to this that Mackie advances is that goods of the second order are merely means to the goods of the first order. Suppose so. It may still be the case that they are essential means to those goods. Thus, temporary struggles during which second-order goods are created should in the end foster first-order goods. In other words, overcoming evils (of whatever order) results in virtues which are essential for any kind of human happiness. Mackie is right to say that he “should not press this objection.” (68)
The allegedly “fatal” difficulty, however, is that the human response to first-order evils can itself be evil (in which case it will be an evil of the 2nd order). “This would include malevolence, cruelty, callousness, cowardice, and states in which good (1) is decreasing and evil (1) increasing.” (68) And the same reasoning would apply to discredit the notion that the purpose of the (n)th order evil is to promote (n + 1)st order good.
But wait, Mackie is not done with the solutions to the problem of evil. For we can now say that higher-order evil is due to human free will. In other words, evil (1) is the physical evil designed to encourage second-order goods. But second-order evils, such as those described above, are no longer physical but moral. Although these evils can result in physical pain and suffering for others, nonetheless for their perpetrator they are moral evils. Thus, physical evil is reducible to moral evil.
To explain why a wholly good God gave men free will although it would lead to some important evils, it must be argued that it is better on the whole that men should act freely, and sometimes err, than that they should be innocent automata, acting rightly in a wholly determined way. Freedom, that is to say, is now treated as a third-order good and as being more valuable than second-order goods (such as sympathy and heroism) would be if they were deterministically produced, and it is being assumed that second-order evils, such as cruelty, are logically necessary accompaniments of freedom, just as pain is a logically necessary precondition of sympathy. (68ff)
Inspired, isn’t it? Mackie immediately objects that an omnipotent God could create humans who, though possessing free will, always chose the good. “If there is no logical impossibility in a man’s freely choosing the good on one, or on several, occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion.” (69) My reply is that there is indeed no logical impossibility of never committing a sin, but given that humans live, on average, for something like 80 years and start out as infants with only miniscule amounts of love, knowledge, and power, having to acquire those by growing up in a tremendously complex world and to become highly complex human beings, mistakes are practically inevitable.
But why should it be so? “[W]hy, we may ask, should God refrain from controlling evil wills? Why should he not leave men free to will rightly, but intervene when he sees them beginning to will wrongly?” (70) The first answer is that God does intervene by bestowing grace, by affecting either what a person loves, or his knowledge of the means to what he loves, or his strength to overcome the hurdles on the way to his goals. It can be difficult to recognize that one is receiving grace; e.g., Aquinas writes that “a man may, of himself, know something, and with certainty; and in this way no one can know that he has grace.” (ST, II-I, 112, 5) So God stays hidden, even as He uplifts men: “work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” (Phil 2:12-13)
Secondly, controlling evil wills would seem to entail destruction of the natural laws, according to which human nature operates on its own.
Thirdly, God cannot unilaterally decide what sort of person you want to be. You have to make your own identity. That’s why God cannot crudely interfere with the process of self-making. Mackie argues that “there would be a loss of value if God took away the wrongness and freedom together. But this is utterly opposed to what theists say about sin in other contexts.” (70) Here I confess I have no idea what he is talking about. Who would want his own freedom to be taken away so long as he no longer sins? The key is to learn not to make mistakes in life and to retain your freedom, not to turn into a machine.
2. The Problem of Evil
by J.L. Mackie
This paper is an elaboration of the previous one. Here are some highlights:
Our author writes that one way in which particular evil may be required for the universal good is through sheer contrast: “in a musical work, for example, there may occur discords which somehow add to the beauty of the work as a whole.” (76) To illustrate this, I’ll reach to popular culture and present the following speech from the movie Troy:
| Achilles: |
|
I’ll tell you a secret… something they don’t teach you in your temple. The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. |
Mackie calls those evils that are justified by some higher-order good absorbed evils. But, he argues, there are many unabsorbed evils in the world. And perhaps there are. My reply will be analogous to the difference between act and rule utilitarianism. The adherents of the former may accuse the adherents of the latter of “rule worship” or insufficient concern for actual utility or happiness. But rule utilitarianism is an eminently defensible theory. Hence God, too, may allow some evils in order to preserve the causal structure of the world. The rules or laws, according to which the world works, are essential to our very existence; and the good of man’s ability to act, of the ends-means connections, outweigh the evils that might occur because of the general character of these rules. In other words, the universal goodness of the presence of causality itself in the world precisely absorbs, to use Mackie’s terminology, those evils that come from the particular and unfortunate workings out of those rules. Thus, the general good of having abundant water for drinking, swimming in, etc. may lead to a particular evil of drowning. But that evil would nevertheless be absorbed. Further, to underscore the point made earlier, some evils are due to human agency, such that physical evil morphs into moral evil, and are absorbed by the third-order good of freedom of the will.
Mackie considers a way of sidestepping the problem of evil as follows:
Theists, Rolf Gruner says, “would be wiser still if they not only admitted evil but emphasized it as crucial. For it is no overstatement to say that their faith depends on it. All religious belief is connected with the manner in which men see themselves and the world, and where the ‘tragic sense’ of life is lacking and the consciousness of indigence, deficiency and transitoriness absent, religion will be unknown. Perfect beings in a perfect universe have no need of it, nor apparently have those for whom evils are avoidable defects to be pradually eliminated by man’s growing perfection… the strongest believers have usually been those who have had the firmest conviction of the reality of evil, and many or most of them have never made any attempt at theodicy.” (79)
This is a very bad attempt to solve the problem of evil. For “in a perfect universe,” as I pointed out in Part I, faith in the blessed is vision, hope is comprehension, and charity is fruition. Faith as such therefore no longer exists in heaven. At best, Gruner is presenting a soul-making theodicy, such that the virtue of faith is attained through struggle with adversity whose first-order pain and evil then become essential to the faith’s second-order good. And Mackie is certainly correct in saying that even though it may be true that “some of the firmest believers feel no need for a theodicy, … one is still needed if their position, and that of theism generally, is to be made rationally defensible.” (80)
Mackie is also right to point out that sin followed by repentance may cause joy to heavenly beings (Lk 15:7), but “it does not follow that the father prefers on the whole to have a prodigal son who ultimately returns than to have a constantly well-behaved one or that the housewife would be better pleased on the whole to have lost the coin and found it again than never to have lost it. Perhaps these, odd though they are, would be comprehensible human reactions; even so, it would be hard to transfer them to a supposedly omniscient god…” (80)
Yet the supposed “paradox of omniscience” is solvable in the familiar way by saying that grace (God’s “control” of our actions) builds on nature. In a way, in order to influence us, God has to use the “user interface” which He Himself created. He can’t, for example, turn one into a pillar of salt, for such a “miracle” entails a wholesale destruction of the person and a creation ex nihilo of the pillar, rather than a transformation which preserves identity through change.
A discussion of free will follows. Now I regard the will as an intellectual appetite which either desires something as examined by the power of judgment or enjoys something already obtained. Free-will, in contrast with the will, is the power of choice. If I desire x, that which desires is the will; but that which chooses (the pursuit of) x while setting aside y and z is the free will. But both will and free will are the same power. Now what causes a man to will something? Who knows? And who cares? We all desire different things somehow and for some reason. That may as well be a brute fact. The value of freedom is not, obviously, the variety of good and evil; it is the variety of the good. To each, as it were, his own; each person reflects the divine nature in his own unique way.
I don’t understand Mackie’s rejection of Plantinga’s free will defense based on everyone’s transworld depravity. It may be logically possible for every person not to sin, but it is not in practically possible, given God’s aim of having creatures who make themselves.
3. Plantinga on the Free Will Defense
by Hugh LaFollette
This article is fairly technical, which is why I will summarize it very briefly and then reply to it. Interested readers should refer to the book itself, p. 97.
Consider, [Plantinga] says, some human, Maurice, who will at some time t in the near future, be free with respect to some insignificant action – like having oatmeal for breakfast. That is, at time t, he will be free to take oatmeal, but also free to take something else, say, shredded wheat. “Next suppose we consider S’ a state of affairs that is included in the actual world and includes Maurice’s being free at time t to take oatmeal and free to reject it.” This S’, Plantinga tell us, includes neither Maurice’s taking nor rejecting the oatmeal. … God knows that one of the following conditionals is true:
8) If S’ were to obtain, Maurice will freely take the oatmeal.
or
9) If S’ were to obtain, Maurice will freely reject the oatmeal. (99)
Suppose that S’ obtains and (God knows that) 8) is true there. Then the world W’ in which Maurice will freely reject the oatmeal, though possible, is “unfeasible” for God. For if God leaves things be, then Maurice will freely take the oatmeal and W’ will not be actualized; if God forces Maurice to reject the oatmeal, our hero’s decision will no longer be free, and once again W’ will not be actualized. LaFollette argues that to say that S’ obtains, 8) is true, and each of the two W’ possibilities occur is to utter a logical contradiction. (He says it’s meaningless, as though contradictions were meaningless; did our author not read his Quine?) And contradictions indicate impossible not merely unfeasible worlds. The issue here turns on how best to reconcile God’s foreknowledge and contingent events. If we say that God knowledge depends on or is determined by creaturely actions, then LaFollette has no case: it could have happened that W’ occurred and then God would have known something different, namely that Maurice would freely not take the oatmeal. (This solution does not entail any potency in God; God does not have to “wait” for creatures to act before He knows what they will do. God knows contingent things through His perfect predictive power rooted, as always, in His knowledge of His own essence and therefore of how all things imitate that essence.)
In other words, 8) is true because W’ does not occur; but if it were to occur, then 8) would be false and God would have known that. It is certainly true that the conjunction of S’, 8) and W’ is impossible, but that is irrelevant, because 8) and W’ will never occur together; 8) is a variable that is counterfactually dependent on the occurrence or non-occurrence of W’. By knowing 8) by prediction, God foreknows what Maurice will as a matter of fact do. But if that is so, then it is not within God’s power to cause Maurice to freely choose not to have oatmeal, yet the world in which this happens is clearly a possible one.
(Now parenthetically, I believe that it is within God’s power to cause anyone to freely choose anything. That power is called grace. However, it seems to me that the reason why God does not bestow grace more often is that doing so might endanger the recipient’s personal identity.)
LaFollette’s analysis of the argument from transworld depravity is way off mark. What Plantinga actually argues is that ∀(x)(x has committed even a single moral evil ⊃ ◊(x has transworld depravity)) or, equivalently, ∀(x)(x has committed even a single moral evil ⊃ ◊□(x is depraved)) or, from the S5 system of modal logic, ∀(x)(x has committed even a single moral evil ⊃ □(x is depraved)) or, simply,
(a) ∀(x)(x is depraved ⊃ □(x is depraved)).
Plantinga does not say that it is possible that (a) is true in the sense that it is true in some possible world; in that case LaFollette’s criticisms would indeed be valid. Rather, (a) is possibly true in the sense that we do not know whether it is true in the actual world. There is really no evidence either for (a) or against (a), but (a) is conceivable, and that is sufficient to demonstrate the compatibility of 1) God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good and 5) The actual world contains moral evil. In other words, we can say that based on our current knowledge of things, it is not appropriate to confidently affirm that 1) and 5) contradict each other.
In addition, LaFollette claims that Plantinga’s proof entails
15) It is necessarily true that: no significantly free possible human can produce moral good without also producing moral evil.
But that indeed does not follow, because there may be people who never do evil, for example, Mary the Mother of God. Therefore, it is not a consequence of Plantinga’s proof that every possible person suffers from transworld depravity; only those who are actually depraved. In other words, 15) is avoided given the antecedent of (a).
4. A Sound Logical Argument from Evil
by Quentin Smith
Smith begins by considering three distinct concepts of freedom. First, there is external freedom: “A person is externally free with respect to an action A if and only if nothing other than… herself determines either that she perform A or refrain from performing A.” Then there is internal freedom: “A person is internally free with respect to an action A if and only if it is false that his past physical and psychological states, in conjunction with causal laws, determine either that he perform A or refrain from performing A.” Finally, there is logical freedom: “A person is logically free with respect to an action A if and only if there is some possible world in which he performs A and there is another possible world in which he does not perform A.” (107)
I agree with Smith that God is externally free and logically determined with respect to a “wholly good life,” (107) but I am not sure that God is internally free, given that He has no “past” physical and psychological states, being outside of time, that He is identical with His nature, and that He is simple. It may, in fact, be that God is internally determined (though still quite unpredictable to finite minds) which causes Him to be logically determined (with respect to a wholly good life). Moreover, God has no power to sin (108), because such a thing would lessen His perfection and destroy His pure actuality. But these are minor points.
Recall that Plantinga argues that it is conceivable that
(a) ∀(x)(x is depraved ⊃ □(x is depraved)).
In order to refute him then one must show that
(b) ∃(x)(x is depraved & ◊(x is 100% righteous)).
I argued in the previous section that such a thing is logically possible yet practically impossible given the desirability of a world in which humans make themselves. Further, even if it is possible for (b) to be true for some individual, the question is whether on the whole the balance of good vs. evil would the greatest. Perhaps by actualizing world S in which person P is fully righteous would have caused a hundred other humans to be eternally damned. So, God chose to create world S’ in which P does commits some moral evil but these hundred others are saved. In other words, the attempt to create the best possible world surely involved for God some heavy utilitarian calculations.
At this point our author’s argument takes a bizarre turn. Why, he asks, couldn’t God have created men necessarily good or logically determined with respect to good acts? The obvious answer is: if God could not create beings who would be always actually righteous (because of their transworld depravity), then a fortiori, he could not create beings who would be necessarily righteous. Smith argues “for the stronger claim that there is a different sort of creature, rational persons who are internally-externally free but logically determined to do what is right and… there is a possible world containing only them and God. This stronger claim is needed to withstand Plantinga’s criticism that it is possible that if God created the persons in question, they would choose to do some wrong acts, even though they might not have.” (115) Did our author imagine that the stronger claim can better “withstand” criticism (it’s stronger and tougher, after all) if the weaker claims fails? Buddy, it’s the other way around!
But perhaps Smith raises the issue of whether there could be rational creatures who would have such a nature that they would be necessarily good for the following reason: if God is logically determined toward good, why couldn’t He make humans (or call them whatever) who would be exactly like Him in goodness? The answer to that is: God begot only one Son who is equal to the Father in all respects. Note also that in God one perfect attribute necessarily entails the other two, e.g., omnipotence entails omniscience and perfect goodness. And, lack of any of the three attributes entails the lack of the other two. So, humans cannot be made equal to God. Now can created beings ever be truly safe from the lure of evil? Yes, they can but only in heaven where the process of self-making will cease. They can never be fully safe while away from God, away from beholding Him as He is.
Smith has the final objection. Humans, he says, did not need God’s infinite love, knowledge, and power to lead perfectly good lives, but could have had sufficient (though finite) love, knowledge, and power to always do good. I am not sure that such a thing would not have interfered with self-making. For a gradual process of “concrescence,” to use Whitehead’s term, including of acquisition of moral knowledge and the will to use it, is how God chose to create us. Why? Why us in addition to angels? “It was God’s good pleasure and, hopefully, yours.”
5. Unjustified Evil and God’s Choice
by Richard R. La Croex
La Croex expends far too many words in an argument that could be expressed very simply: In order for evil not to exist, God could have refrained from creating the world; further, since God is the greatest good, no reality was added to God as a result of creation, so why did God create? Perhaps it would be better if He had not:
[O]n the theist’s own view prior to creation there was nothing missing from the perfect value of God which would call for creation. One possible approach to a satisfactory apologetic of creation, for example, might be to point out that if God had not created, then there would be no human free will or human moral good. But this kind of an approach would require a further premise to the effect that a created, hierarchy of value adds to the overall value and, hence, God created. It would follow from this, however, that created value adds to God’s value and, hence, that God is not the greatest possible good because His goodness can be increased by the addition of created value. (124)
Which would be bad. Now it is part of the Christian doctrine that in creating God did not act in the sense which praxeology attaches to this term. God is perfectly happy with or without creation. He created then out of self-giving love. To take the Thomistic view of this matter, God loves in the sense of willing good to His creatures: “the love of God infuses and creates goodness.” (ST, I, 20, 2) God “loves all things by an act of the will that is one, simple, and always the same.” (ST, I, 20, 3) God has known creatures from eternity “in their proper natures” (ST, I, 20, 2, ad 2), and so loved us even logically prior to creation.
Two questions arise here. First, are existing creatures loved more than mere essences existing in the mind of God (cf. the ontological argument)? In other words, there are actual entities, possible entities in God’s mind which are destined to become actual logically prior to creation, and possible entities which will never be actualized. What does God love how? The first are loved with the same intensity of the act of will as the second, for God loves creatures inasmuch as He loves and delights in Himself and sees them imitate His own goodness; yet they are loved more than the second, if we mean that more good is willed to existing things than to non-existing ideas. In fact, God loves all things as deeply as He loves Himself. The third, I think, are loved, again, with the same intensity, yet less good is willed to them than to either the first or the second, for the first are actual, the second are potential to being instantiated, while the third are neither.
Second, does God love a greater number of things because He created? Yes, if we mean “actual” things; no, if we mean “all” things which include potential and merely possible things. This is because all things pre-exist in God Who knows them perfectly through His essence.
Further, if evil is a privation of good, then whatever God has created is metaphysically good, despite whatever defects it may have. That people generally act morally, seek righteousness, and often succeed at these tasks means that there is moral goodness in the world. And most of us think that life is worth living despite its hardships. So, there is the goodness of happiness, too. Thus, if God had not created, much would be lost.
But does creation add “value” to God? Well, value for whom? For God? I’m honestly loathe to attribute values to God, but perhaps by “value” La Croex means “metaphysical worth.” Even if no more “value” or worth can be added to God’s, nevertheless, what can be added are things that have value or worth. We can take a clue from Whitehead and say that every existing thing is an actual entity, and here God is on par with creatures (although Aquinas would say that God is more actual than any created thing). God is as “natural” as a hydrogen atom.
Alternatively, we can solve this problem by noticing a distinction between
a being, an entity, an individual, on the one hand, and any state of affairs which involves that individual. The distinction is a fundamental and quite simple one. I am an individual being, my Pelikan 800 fountain pen is an individual entity, and we are both involved in the state of affairs of my writing this sentence with my Pelikan 800 fountain pen. Likewise, we must carefully distinguish between the state of affairs of that fountain pen’s existing and the object which is that fountain pen.
With this sort of distinction clearly in mind, we can clarify exactly what the central claim of perfect being theology is: It is that God is to be thought of as the greatest possible being. And this is a claim that docs not entail the separate proposition that the state of affairs of God’s existing alone is the greatest possible state of affairs. … we can acknowledge that the state of affairs consisting in God’s sharing existence with our created universe is greater than the state of affairs of God’s existing in pristine isolation or solitude. But from this, it does not follow that there is any being or individual greater than God. This would be the case only if God and the created universe could be thought of as parts of a larger object, God-and-the-world, which could be assigned a value as a distinct individual, additively derived from the values of its parts. And this is prohibited for at least two reasons. First, there is no natural principle of unity in accordance with which God and the created universe would together compose one object. Second, it is just conceptually precluded by perfect being theology that God ever be considered a part of a larger and more valuable whole, an entity distinct from, but partially composed by, God. With all this in mind, we can affirm the positive value, even the great positive value, of the created universe, without thereby posing any threat to the conception of God as the greatest possible being, and without any risk of contradiction arising in connection with that conception. (Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God, 143)
And if we are talking about value for humans and for the rest of God’s creatures, then certainly it has been added to.