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The Problem of Evil

Christ Pantocrator (Deesis mosaic detail)

I hope every reader of mine has had a fine Thanksgiving break and is ready for another work week. In New England, the home of the origin story of this feast, we certainly had great weather for it: weather harsh enough that we could think of ourselves as new settlers in a harsh dangerous land and show some Calvinist  fortitude in facing up to it!

 The following may have some connection to Calvinism, but not much. I'll inflict it upon you anyway. 

 A young friend of mine, in college, taking a course on the philosophy of religion, was recently assigned to write a paper about the dispute between Mackie and Plantinga over free will and the problem of evil. 

 Mackie has argued (as have many others, but the Mackie version of the case has become a focal point of recent debate) that it is logically impossible to reconcile three claims: that an omnipotent God exists; that this is also an ideally benevolent being; and that evil exists. Any theology with any hope of plausibility will have to let go of one of those three points. Mackie in his essay considers the "free will defense" as a way of reconciling the three, and gives his reasons for rejecting it. 

 Alvin Plantinga wrote a book-length reply to Mackie.

 Anyway, I'm NOT stealing from my young friend's paper. And he has already turned the paper in, so he can't steal from this, either. These are some thoughts of mine on the general subject. Regular readers of this blog may find them familiar. 

  Mackie finds the free-will solution incoherent. He replies to it that there is no contradiction between having free will and doing the right thing. Thus, there cannot be a contradiction between having free will and always doing the right thing. Finally, since there is no contradiction involved, an omnipotent God could have created a world in which people have the power of free will AND they always choose to do good. Since God didn’t create such a world, the problem of evil is still with us (or with such theists).  
Mackie says that the reason some great minds have found this bad argument persuasive is that they confuse two different meanings of the phrase “free will.” On the one hand, they consider free will a great good, the power to make up our own minds. On the other hand, though, they see free will as requiring an element of randomness in human activity. If by “free” one means “random," then one can say that of course free humans can’t always act courageously or sympathetically, just as proper coins can’t be expected always to come up heads.


Yet it is a simple confusion to think about freedom as requiring randomness and to value freedom. What is the value of a coin-flip notion of the human will? The fact of coming up heads on a particular toss is neither a good thing nor a bad thing nor is it obvious why human actions (or character traits) should ever be considered good or bad if they, too, are “sheer randomness.”  


Once the confusion about randomness is edited out, what one is left with is freedom as the power to make up our minds and act accordingly, and there is no reason why an omnipotent Being could not have created humans who would always do so perfectly, thereby acting freely as well as rightly So: the problem of evil remains unsolved.
 
Plantinga contends in response that the price for creating a world in which moral good is possible is the creation of a world in which moral evil is also possible.

This amount to arguing, in Mackie’s terms, that it is not after all a confusion to connect moral freedom with randomness. Randomness is part of a single coherent idea of freedom. Plantinga, then, is within the tradition of thought known as incompatibilism -- the idea that determinism and freedom (or, in a variant way of putting the point, determinism and moral responsibility) are mutually inconsistent. This is a traditional view famously expounded by William James in the lecture “The Dilemma of Determinism” in 1884, though Plantinga is putting it to an unJamesian use.

We have to have the randomness within our decision-making in order to believe, when we have produced a result, that things could have been otherwise. And we have to have that could-have-been-otherwise understanding in order to judge the result good and bad, or to judge our actions right and wrong. Thus, the creation of a world in which evil things could happen is part of the price even an omnipotent God has to pay in order to create a world in which good things can happen.   

Plantinga puts this argument in “modal” terms: that is, in terms of the set of possible worlds. There may indeed be a possible world in which humans endowed with free will act rightly all the time. But there is no possible world in which God created humans with free will and ensured that they would act rightly all the time. That he did the latter would imply he had not done the former.

Plantinga has the better of the argument on incompatibilism. I agree with the common intuition of James, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Robert Kane and others, that freedom implies other ways things might have been, and that this implies an element of randomness. Fortunately, quantum mechanics makes this randomness seem plausible.

Nonetheless, there are weaknesses in Plantinga’s broader case. For example, it isn’t the case that everything we consider evil follows from any intentional human action. We might well call cancer and its impact evil. Yet cancer is part of the natural world in which God has set us, not any decision of ours.

To say “some people need to get cancer in order that they can show courage” or that some people have to get cancer so others can display sympathy and other virtues, and that this justifies such evils is, at best, counterintuitive and at worst positively callous.

The best conclusion is the one that Mackie hints at early in his essay: that theists should give up on the notion of God’s omnipotence. Consider that God may just be a name for the fact (if we decide that it is a fact) that the universe has a spiritual dimension, irreducible to the observable realities of matter and physical energy. Indeed, one might reject a dichotomy between polytheism and monotheism. One might well say that God is the unitary name for this spiritual dimension of the cosmos, “the gods” is the pluralistic name for it, and that the dimension in question may be in some respects singular, in other respects plural.

Given such a conception, there is no good reason to posit the omnipotence of God. One might simply say that Rabbi Kushner has it right, in WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE. 'God does some important things, but he can’t do everything.'
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