Why evils

Now, add to this the observation that there is evil in the world. Setting aside for the moment the question of how a good God could create a world with evil in it, ask yourself why such a deity does not do something to help combat such evil.

Many theologians and philosophers over the centuries have asked this question and we will now look at some of the answers they have given. According to the history of this issue and contemporary concerns it is moral evil that is the crux of the problem more than natural evil. Natural evil may be conceived of as simply part of nature and not evil at all. However, there are those who think that it may be possible to accept that God accepts moral evil and such evil may have a purpose or explanation consist with the existence of a supreme being but that there could be no good reason for God to have natural evil in the Universe.

There is therefore the argument against the existence of God based on Natural Evil. Moreover, when they do wrong, they can be rightly blamed or punished for their actions. It is important to note that MSR1 directly conflicts with a common assumption about what kind of world God could have created. Many atheologians believe that God could have created a world that was populated with free creatures and yet did not contain any evil or suffering.

Since this is something that God could have done and since a world with free creatures and no evil is better than a world with free creatures and evil, this is something God should have done. Since he did not do so, God did something blameworthy by not preventing or eliminating evil and suffering if indeed God exists at all.

In response to this charge, Plantinga maintains that there are some worlds God cannot create. In particular, he cannot do the logically impossible. MSR1 claims that God cannot get rid of much of the evil and suffering in the world without also getting rid of morally significant free will.

Consider the following descriptions of various worlds. We need to determine which ones describe worlds that are logically possible and which ones describe impossible worlds. The worlds described will be possible if the descriptions of those worlds are logically consistent. If the descriptions of those worlds are inconsistent or contradictory, the worlds in question will be impossible. Is W 1 possible? In fact, on the assumption that God exists, it seems to describe the actual world.

People have free will in this world and there is evil and suffering. God has obviously not causally determined people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong because there would be no evil or suffering if he had. So, W 1 is clearly possible. What about W 2? We are creatures with morally significant free will. If you took away our free will, we would no longer be the kinds of creatures we are. We would not be human in that world.

Returning to the main issue, there does not seem to be anything impossible about God causally determining people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong. It seems clearly possible that whatever creatures God were to make in such a world would not have morally significant free will and that there would be no evil or suffering. W 2 , then, is also possible. Is W 3 possible? In W 3 God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong.

And yet part of what it means for creatures to have morally significant free will is that they can do morally bad things whenever they want to. Think about what it would be like to live in W 3.

If you wanted to tell a lie, you would not be able to do so. Causal forces beyond your control would make you tell the truth on every occasion. In fact, since W 3 is a world without evil of any kind and since merely wanting to lie or steal is itself a bad thing, the people in W 3 would not even be able to have morally bad thoughts or desires.

If God is going to causally determine people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong in W 3 , there is no way that he could allow them to be free in a morally significant sense. For if God brings it about or causes it to be the case in any manner whatsoever that the person either does A or does not do A, then that person is not really free.

God can forcibly eliminate evil and suffering as in W 2 only at the cost of getting rid of free will. Atheologians, as we saw above, claim that God is doing something morally blameworthy by allowing evil and suffering to exist in our world. They charge that a good God would and should eliminate all evil and suffering.

The assumption behind this charge is that, in so doing, God could leave human free will untouched. Plantinga claims that when we think through what robust free will really amounts to, we can see that atheologians are unbeknownst to themselves asking God to do the logically impossible.

Being upset that God has not done something that is logically impossible is, according to Plantinga, misguided. Consider W 4. Is it possible? Although there is no evil and suffering in this world, it is not because God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong. In this world God has given creatures morally significant free will without any strings attached.

If there is nothing bad in this world, it can only be because the free creatures that inhabit this world have— by their own free will —always chosen to do the right thing. Is this kind of situation really possible? Something is logically possible just when it can be conceived without contradiction.

There is nothing contradictory about supposing that there is a possible world where free creatures always make the right choices and never go wrong. But improbability and impossibility, as we said above, are two different things. It is important to note certain similarities between W 1 and W 4.

Both worlds are populated by creatures with free will and in neither world does God causally determine people to always choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong.

The only difference is that, in W 1 , the free creatures choose to do wrong at least some of the time, and in W 4 , the free creatures always make morally good decisions. In other words, whether there is immorality in either one of these worlds depends upon the persons living in these worlds—not upon God.

People deserve the blame for the bad things that happen—not God. Plantinga , p. The essential point of the Free Will Defense is that the creation of a world containing moral good is a cooperative venture; it requires the uncoerced concurrence of significantly free creatures. But then the actualization of a world W containing moral good is not up to God alone; it also depends upon what the significantly free creatures of W would do.

Atheist philosophers such as Anthony Flew and J. Mackie have argued that an omnipotent God should be able to create a world containing moral good but no moral evil. As Flew , p. If God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good? God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong: there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right.

Clearly, his failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being both omnipotent and perfectly good. According to Plantinga, Mackie is correct in thinking that there is nothing impossible about a world in which people always freely choose to do right. But Plantinga thinks he is mistaken in thinking that W 3 is possible and in not recognizing important differences between W 3 and W 4. People can freely choose to do what is right only when their actions are not causally determined.

We might wonder why God would choose to risk populating his new creation with free creatures if he knew there was a chance that human immorality could foul the whole thing up. Lewis , p. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other…. And for that they must be free. Of course, God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. A world containing creatures who are sometimes significantly free and freely perform more good than evil actions is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.

Now God can create free creatures, but he cannot cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if he does so, then they are not significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, he must create creatures capable of moral evil; and he cannot leave these creatures free to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so…. Plantinga , pp. According to his Free Will Defense, God could not eliminate the possibility of moral evil without at the same time eliminating some greater good.

Some scholars maintain that Plantinga has rejected the idea of an omnipotent God because he claims there are some things God cannot do—namely, logically impossible things. He reasons as follows. Can God create a round square? Can he create a stick that is not as long as itself? Can he make contradictory statements true? Omnipotence, according to Plantinga, is the power to do anything that is logically possible.

If you think God really can make a round square, Plantinga would like to know what such a shape would look like. What Plantinga would really like to see is a stick that is not as long as itself. Each of these things seems to be absolutely, positively impossible. According to orthodox theism, all of the following statements and many more like them are true. According to classical theism, the fact that God cannot do any of these things is not a sign of weakness.

On the contrary, theists claim, it is an indication of his supremacy and uniqueness. These facts reveal that God is, in St. Although much of the evil in this world results from the free choices people make, some of it does not. Cancer, AIDS, famines, earthquakes, tornadoes, and many other kinds of diseases and natural disasters are things that happen without anybody choosing to bring them about.

For instance, someone who routinely runs down pedestrians out of indifference for their well-being, and without any accompanying feelings, seems to qualify as an evil person Calder , He should be pitied rather than condemned. According to motivation-based accounts, to be an evil person is to be motivated in a certain sort of way. For instance, Todd Calder argues that to be an evil person it is sufficient to have a regular propensity for e-desires.

According to Calder, significant harm is desired for an unworthy goal if a state of affairs consisting of the achievement of the goal together with the harm would be less valuable than if the goal was not achieved and the harm was avoided Calder and See also Card, , 21 for a similar view.

A problem for motivation-based accounts is to explain why we should judge someone as evil based solely on her motivations. In other words, why judge someone as the morally worst sort of person for having certain desires if these desires do not result in significant harm?

Why not judge people as evil only if they actually cause significant harm? Haybron b, According to regularity accounts, evil persons have evil-making properties frequently, or on a regular basis See, e. An advantage of regularity accounts is that they explain the intuition that evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation Russell , For if evil persons have evil-making properties frequently, or on a regular basis, then it makes sense to say that they are the worst sorts of people and deserve our strongest moral condemnation.

However, one problem with regularity accounts is that they do not seem to be able to make sense of the fact that some evil persons only very rarely if ever have evil-making properties. For instance, Luke Russell argues that we should reject regularity accounts because they cannot accommodate the intuition that a brooding spree killer could be evil Russell , The brooding spree killer does not perform evil actions frequently or regularly.

She plans and fantasizes about her attack, and then performs evil actions sporadically or all at once. Thus, Russell argues, if brooding spree killers can be evil, as we think they can be, then we should reject regularity accounts. So the question becomes, are there persons who are comparable to brooding spree killers in that they have evil feelings or desires sporadically or infrequently rather than on a regular basis?

It seems that there might be cases of this sort when opportunities for evil feelings and desires are scarce. For example, we can imagine that an evil person might fail to have evil feelings and desires because she has been stranded on a deserted island.

After many years without potential victims and needing to focus all of her attention on survival, she might lack evil feelings and desires due to a poverty of stimulus. This would mean that she is no longer an evil person on affect and motivation based regularity accounts.

However, it seems that we should say that she is still an evil person if she is still disposed to have evil feelings and desires in the sense that her evil feelings and desires would immediately return if she were presented with a victim.

If so, we should reject affect and motivation based regularity accounts. Most theorists writing about evil personhood adopt dispositional accounts See, e. Broadly speaking, dispositional accounts contend that someone is an evil person if, and only if, she is disposed to have evil-making properties. A potential problem for dispositional accounts is that they seem to conflict with the intuition that evil persons are rare since most of us are disposed to have evil-making properties in certain sorts of situations Russell , For example, assuming for the moment that evil actions are evil-making properties, Stanley Milgram has shown that most of us are disposed to perform evil actions specifically, administering potentially lethal electric shocks to innocent people when in certain experimental conditions i.

But if most of us are disposed to perform evil actions in these situations then it seems that on the dispositional account of evil personhood, most of us are evil, and thus, evil is not rare. To make sense of the rarity of evil personhood, Luke Russell proposes a restricted dispositional account according to which someone is an evil person if, and only if, she is strongly disposed to perform evil actions in only autonomy-favoring conditions Russell , 72— Peter Barry argues for a similar view [See Barry , 82—90].

According to Russell, although most of us are strongly disposed to perform evil actions in Milgram scenarious, since Milgram scenarios are not autonomy-favoring conditions, most of us are not evil persons. But if we do not have a disposition to perform evil actions on an on-going basis, then we do not really have a strong disposition to perform evil actions, or at least, one could argue, not in the sense implicitly meant by the basic dispositional account.

But we might reject this reasoning and argue instead that most of us are susceptible to becoming evil persons in these environments, and so, need to be wary of these environments. In addition to arguing for regularity or dispositional accounts on the one hand, and action-based, affect-based, or motivation-based accounts on the other, theorists have argued for several additional theses concerning evil personhood.

According to the fixity thesis, evil persons have particularly fixed, or durable, characters such that it is very difficult to go from evil to non-evil, and changes of this sort rarely occur. See also, Barry , 82— Todd Calder has argued against the fixity thesis. Imagine that Darlene has a highly fixed disposition to perform evil actions that she does little to resist.

Geoff also has a disposition to perform evil actions, but this disposition is not highly fixed because he is indifferent about whether he should be disposed to perform evil actions and is, in general, capricious and unprincipled. If so, the characters of evil persons need not be highly fixed Calder b, According to the consistency thesis, evil persons have evil-making properties, or are disposed to have evil-making properties, consistently, or almost all of the time. By this he means that evil people almost always lack empathy and concern for others, and they are in no way motivated to help others or to do what is morally right.

Some theorists contrast the consistency thesis with the extremity thesis according to which evil persons have some set of character traits to an extreme degree, e. The extremity thesis is consistent with most theories of evil personhood. The consistency thesis is more controversial. Critics of the consistency thesis argue that it is too restrictive Calder , 22—27; Russell , Imagine that Bob loves to torture children and does so frequently, but that Bob also displays genuine compassion for the elderly, perhaps by volunteering at a long-term care facility on a regular basis.

According to the consistency thesis, Bob is not an evil person because he does not have evil-making characteristics consistently. And yet most people would want to say that torturing children for fun on a regular basis is enough to make Bob an evil person Calder , 22— According to the mirror thesis an evil person is the mirror-image of a moral saint.

Several theorists who write about evil personhood endorse this thesis and use it to argue for their theories Barry ; ; Haybron b. This argument makes an implicit appeal to the mirror thesis. Luke Russell rejects the mirror thesis, arguing that while moral saints are morally admirable in all respects, some paradigmatic evil persons possess some morally admirable traits, such as courage, commitment, and loyalty, which help them achieve their immoral goals Russell , — Since evil persons need not be bad in every respect and moral saints must be good in every respect, we should reject the mirror thesis.

In response, Peter Brian Barry argues that on plausible conceptions of moral sainthood, i. While most theorists writing about evil focus on evil action and evil character, there has also been some discussion of evil institutions.

For a recent contribution to this literature which makes explicit reference to evil collectives, see Scarre According to Claudia Card, an institution, in sense 2 , i. For instance, genocide is an evil institution since significant suffering and a loss of social vitality result from its normal and correct operation without moral justification Card , — Her classification of marriage and motherhood as evil has been particularly controversial.

According to Card, marriage and motherhood are evil institutions because it is reasonably foreseeable that their normal, or correct, operation will lead to intolerable harm in the form of domestic abuse without justification or excuse Card , — Card argues that there is no moral justification for the intolerable harm that results from the institution of marriage since nothing prevents us from abolishing marriage in favour of other less dangerous institutions.

Critics argue that even if Card is correct that it is reasonably foreseeable that the institution of marriage will lead to intolerable harms, it is too heavy-handed to call marriage an evil institution. For instance, Todd Calder has argued that an institution should be considered evil only if intolerable harm is an essential component of the institution. Since suffering and a loss of social vitality are essential components of genocide, genocide is an evil institution.

But since spousal abuse is not an essential component of marriage, marriage is not an evil institution Calder , 27— Augustine, Saint evil: problem of Kant, Immanuel: moral philosophy Kant, Immanuel: philosophy of religion moral motivation moral responsibility moral skepticism Nietzsche, Friedrich: moral and political philosophy Plato: middle period metaphysics and epistemology Plotinus reasons for action: internal vs.

Calder SMU. This entry gives an overview of answers to these questions found in the literature. Evil-Skepticism Versus Evil-Revivalism 1. The History of Theories of Evil 2. Contemporary Theories of Evil Action 3. Haybron b, 4. Evil Institutions While most theorists writing about evil focus on evil action and evil character, there has also been some discussion of evil institutions. Bibliography Aharoni, E. Kiehl, and W. Allison, H.

Anglin, B. Arendt, H. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics , M. Ostwald trans. Augustine, Confessions , H. Chadwick trans. Stothert trans. Dods ed. Bar On, B. Barry, P. Bernstein, R. Brink, D. Burt, D. Calder, T. Haybron ed. Veltman and K. Norlock eds. Card, C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clendinnen, I. Cole, P. Coyel, J. De Wijze, S. Driver, J. Duff, A. Eagleton, T. Feinberg, J. Formosa, P. Garcia, E. Garrard, E. Goldberg, Z. Haksar, V. Hare, R.

Haybron, D. Held, V. Sterba ed. Jones, D. Kane, G. Kekes, J. Kant, I. Gregor Trans. Greene and H. Hudson trans. Kramer, M. The claim in question is an interesting one, and a thorough evaluation of it would involve consideration of some deep issues in epistemology. Fortunately, it does not seem to make any real difference in the present context whether or not the claim is true.

The reason emerges if one considers the epistemology of perception. But direct realists as much as indirect realists admit that there can be cases where a person would be justified in believing that a certain physical state of affairs obtained were it not for the fact that he has good evidence that he is hallucinating, or else subject to perceptual illusion. Moreover, given evidence of the relevant sort, it makes no difference whether direct realism is true, or indirect realism: the belief in question is undermined to precisely the same extent in either case.

The situation is the same in the case of religious experience. Swinburne , —8 argued in support of the conclusion that theism does need a theodicy. In doing so, however, he noted one minor qualification—namely, that if one could show, for a sufficiently impressive range of evils that initially seemed problematic, that it was likely that an omnipotent and omniscient person would be morally justified in not having prevented them, then one might very well be justified in believing that the same would be true of other evils, even if one could not specify, in those other cases, what the morally sufficient reason for allowing them might be.

What Swinburne says here is surely very reasonable, and I can see no objection in principle to a defense of this sort. The problem with it is that no theodicy that has ever been proposed has been successful in the relevant way—that is, there is no impressive range of undesirable states of affairs where people initially think that the wrongmaking properties of allowing such states of affairs to exist greatly outweigh any rightmaking properties associated with doing so, but where, confronted with some proposed theodicy, people come to believe that it would be morally permissible to allow such states of affairs to exist.

Indeed, it is hard to find any such cases, let alone an impressive range. What are the prospects for a complete, or nearly complete theodicy? Others, including many theists, are much less hopeful. Plantinga, for example remarks:. What types of theodicies that have been proposed? An exhaustive survey is not possible here, but among the most important are theodicies that appeal, first, to the value of acquiring desirable traits of character in the face of suffering; secondly, to the value of libertarian free will; thirdly, to the value of the freedom to inflict horrendous evils upon others; and fourthly, to the value of a world that is governed by natural laws.

One very important type of theodicy, championed especially by John Hick, involves the idea that the evils that the world contains can be seen to be justified if one views the world as designed by God to be an environment in which people, through their free choices, can undergo spiritual growth that will ultimately fit them for communion with God:. Is this theodicy satisfactory? There are a number of reasons for holding that it is not.

First, what about the horrendous suffering that people undergo, either at the hands of others—as in the Holocaust—or because of terminal illnesses such as cancer? One writer—Eleonore Stump—has suggested that the terrible suffering that many people undergo at the ends of their lives, in cases where it cannot be alleviated, is to be viewed as suffering that has been ordained by God for the spiritual health of the individual in question b, More generally, there seems to be no reason at all why a world must contain horrendous suffering if it is to provide a good environment for the development of character in response to challenges and temptations.

The world could perfectly well have contained only human persons, or only human persons plus herbivores. Thirdly, the soul-making theodicy also provides no account of the suffering that young, innocent children endure, either because of terrible diseases, or at the hands of adults.

For here, as in the case of animals, there is no soul-making purpose that is served. It is very hard to see that it would. Some people die young, before they have had any chance at all to master temptations, to respond to challenges, and to develop morally.

Others endure suffering so great that it is virtually impossible for them to develop those moral traits that involve relationships with others. Still others enjoy lives of ease and luxury where there is virtually nothing that challenges them to undergo moral growth.

A second important approach to theodicy involves the following ideas: first, that libertarian free will is of great value; secondly, that because it is part of the definition of libertarian free will that an action that is free in that sense cannot be caused by anything outside of the agent, not even God can cause a person to freely do what is right; and thirdly, that because of the great value of libertarian free will, it is better that God create a world in which agents possess libertarian free will, even though they may misuse it, and do what is wrong, than that God create a world where agents lack libertarian free will.

One problem with an appeal to libertarian free will is that no satisfactory account of the concept of libertarian free will is yet available. Thus, while the requirement that, in order to be free in the libertarian sense, an action not have any cause that lies outside the agent is unproblematic, this is obviously not a sufficient condition, since this condition would be satisfied if the behavior in question were caused by random events within the agent.

So one needs to add that the agent is, in some sense, the cause of the action. But how is the causation in question to be understood? Present accounts of the metaphysics of causation typically treat causes as states of affairs. If, however, one adopts such an approach, then it seems that all that one has when an action is freely done, in the libertarian sense, is that there is some uncaused mental state of the agent that causally gives rise to the relevant behavior, and why freedom, thus understood, should be thought valuable, is far from clear.

But then the question is whether there is any satisfactory account of causation where causation is not a relation between states of affairs. But even if the difficulty concerning the nature of libertarian free will is set aside, there are still very strong objections to the free-will approach. First, and most important, the fact that libertarian free will is valuable does not entail that one should never intervene in the exercise of libertarian free will.

Indeed, very few people think that one should not intervene to prevent someone from committing rape or murder. On the contrary, almost everyone would hold that a failure to prevent heinously evil actions when one can do so would be seriously wrong. Secondly, the proposition that libertarian free will is valuable does not entail that it is a good thing for people to have the power to inflict great harm upon others. So individuals could, for example, have libertarian free will, but not have the power to torture and murder others.

Thirdly, many evils are caused by natural processes, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and other weather conditions, and by a wide variety of diseases. Such evils certainly do not appear to result from morally wrong actions.

If that is right, then an appeal to free will provides no answer to an argument from evil that focuses upon such evils. Some writers, such as C. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, have suggested that such evils may ultimately be due to the immoral actions of supernatural beings Lewis, , —3; Plantinga, a, If that were so, then the first two objections mentioned above would apply: one would have many more cases where individuals were being given the power—much greater than the power that any human has—to inflict great harm on others, and then were being allowed by God to use that power to perform horrendously evil actions leading to enormous suffering and many deaths.

In addition, however, it can plausibly be argued that, though it is possible that earthquakes, hurricanes, cancer, and the predation of animals are all caused by malevolent supernatural beings, the probability that this is so is extremely low. The fact that agents could be free in a libertarian sense even if they did not have the power to inflict great harm upon others has led at least one philosopher—namely, Richard Swinburne—to argue that, while free will is valuable, precisely how valuable it is depends upon the range of actions open to one.

This variant on the appeal to libertarian free will is also open to a number of objections. First, as with free will theodicies in general, this line of thought provides no justification for the existence of occurrences that not only appear, upon cursory inspection, to be natural evils, uncaused by any agents, but where, in addition, the very closest scientific examination supports the conclusion that there are no grounds for postulating anything beyond purely physical events as the causes of the occurrences in question.

Secondly, if what matters is simply the existence of alternative actions that differ greatly in moral value, this can be the case even in a world where one lacks the power to inflict great harm on others, since there can be actions that, rather than inflicting great suffering on others, would instead benefit others enormously, and which one could either perform or intentionally refrain from performing.

Thirdly, what exactly is the underlying line of thought here? In the case of human actions, Swinburne surely holds that one should prevent someone from doing something that would be morally horrendous, if one can do so. But why should this be so? One answer might be that if one intervened too frequently, people would come to believe that they did not have the ability to perform such actions.

But, in the first place, it is not clear why that would be undesirable. People could still, for example, be thoroughly evil, for they could still very much wish that they had the power to perform such terrible actions, and be disposed to perform such actions if they ever came to have the power.

In the second place, prevention of deeply evil actions could take quite different forms. People could, for example, be given a conscience that led them, when they had decided to cause great injury to others, and were about to do so, to feel that what they were about to do was too terrible a thing, so that they would not carry through on the action. In such a world, people could surely still feel that they themselves were capable of performing heinously evil actions, and they would contemplate performing such actions, but in the end their sense of the great wrongness of the actions would triumph over their selfish reasons for wanting to perform the actions in question.

This type of theodicy is also exposed to serious objections. First of all, the occasional occurrence of miraculous intervention, including events that clearly appeared contrary to natural laws, would not render effective human action impossible, since humans would see that such miraculous occurrences were extremely rare. Secondly, and relatedly, consider a world where the laws of physics, rather than being laws that admit of no exceptions, are instead probabilistic laws.

Effective human action would still be possible in such a world, provided that the relevant probabilities were sufficiently high. But if so, then effective human action would be no less possible in a world with non-statistical laws where there were occasional miraculous interventions. Thirdly, many of the greatest evils could have been prevented by miraculous interventions that would not have been detected.

Consider, for example, interventions to prevent natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes, including the earthquake in China in that killed around , people, or tsunamis, such as the one in that hit 12 Asian countries, and killed over , people.

Or consider the interventions that would be needed to prevent pandemics, such as the Black Death in the Middle Ages, which is estimated to have killed between 75 million and million people, or the flu pandemic, which killed between 50 million and million people. Similarly, consider great moral evils, such as the Holocaust. Fourthly, what natural evils a world contains depends not just on the laws, but also on the initial, or boundary conditions.

Thus, for example, an omnipotent being could create ex nihilo a world which had the same laws of nature as our world, and which contained human beings, but which was devoid of non-human carnivores. Or the world could be such that there was unlimited room for populations to expand, and ample natural resources to support such populations.

Fifthly, many evils depend upon precisely what laws the world contains. An omnipotent being could, for example, easily create a world with the same laws of physics as our world, but with slightly different laws linking neurophysiological states with qualities of experiences, so that extremely intense pains either did not arise, or could be turned off by the sufferer when they served no purpose.

Or additional physical laws of a rather specialized sort could be introduced that would either cause very harmful viruses to self-destruct, or prevent a virus such as the avian flu virus from evolving into an air-born form that has the capacity to kill hundreds of million people. Finally, this theodicy provides no account of moral evil. But, as we have seen, no satisfactory justification appears to be available. The four types of theodicies considered so far all appeal to beliefs and evaluative claims that the theodicist thinks should be acceptable, upon careful reflection, to anyone, including those who are not religious.

Of course, if the religious beliefs to which one appeals, taken together, entail the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect person, such a theodicy would be question-begging.

But one can choose a subset that, even if it entails the existence of a very powerful and knowledgeable creator—or even an omnipotent and omniscient one—does not entail the existence of God. There are many religions, and even within a given religion, very significant differences in the religious beliefs of people, and very different beliefs to which one might appeal, so there are many different religious theodicies that can be constructed.

Here I shall focus only on one general type. I think, however, that it will illustrate the kinds of objections that arise. The religious theodicy in question is as follows.

First, human beings, rather than having arisen through a process of natural evolution, were brought into existence by the creator of the universe. He placed the first two human beings in a perfect world, free of suffering and death. Those human beings, however, freely chose to disobey a command of the creator, and the result was the Fall of mankind, which meant not only that the first two humans became subject to suffering and death, but that all of their descendants did so as well.

The creator, however, lovingly engaged, several generations later, in a rescue operation, in which he, in the person of his son, became incarnated as a human being, and by undergoing a sacrificial death, made it possible for the creator to forgive every human who accepted this sacrifice, and who would then enjoy eternal beatitude living in the presence of the creator.

It is not, of course, a full theodicy, since it does not account for the suffering of non-human animals, at least before the Fall. Thus viewed, how successful is it? To be successful, a theodicy must appeal only to beliefs that it is reasonable to accept. Do the beliefs involved in the above story qualify? It would seem not. First of all, among the crucial beliefs is the belief that human beings, rather than coming into being via a natural process of evolution, were specially created.

In setting out the story, I have not specified how that was done. There are very good reasons for rejecting both of these accounts, since the evidence that humans are descended from earlier primates is extremely strong indeed. Fairbanks his book Relics of Eden , and which includes such as things as the evidence that human chromosome number two resulted by fusion from two primate chromosomes, together with facts about 1 transposable elements, including retroelements, 2 pseudogenes, and 3 mitochondrial DNA.

In the light of such evidence, it is not surprising that many Christian philosophers have accepted the hypothesis of common descent, and have adopted some form of theistic evolution, in which the creator intervened at some point to transform some earlier primates into members of a new species, Homo sapiens. But while this version of special creation is an improvement, given the very close relations between human and chimpanzee DNA, and the fact that known mechanisms of chromosome rearrangement render the transition from some non-human species to Homo sapiens not at all improbable, the postulation of divine intervention at that particular point does not seem plausible.

Secondly, the story postulates not just a special creation, but also a special creation in which humans, initially, were not subject to suffering or death.

Given, among other things, that that period was a very short one, one cannot offer positive historical evidence again the existence of such a short period that involved only two humans.

But the belief is surely a remarkable one that can be viewed as likely only if it is supported by evidence. The evidence that can be offered, however, consists entirely of the creation story in Genesis, so that question is, how reliable is such evidence?

To answer that question, one can see what other stories one finds in Genesis. One striking story is that of Noah—who apparently lived around years ago—according to which there was a worldwide flood that killed all animals on Earth, except for those that were on the ark.

But there are excellent reasons for believing that such a story is very unlikely to be true, both in the light of the number of animal species that currently exist, and in the light of the evidence—attempts by authors such as Whitcomb and Morris in their book The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications to argue otherwise notwithstanding—that there has not been any world-wide flood in the past years.

In addition, those who view Genesis as a source of important truths do so because it is part of the Bible. So one can also ask about the reliability of the Bible when it testifies to remarkable events. In many cases, of course, there is no way of checking whether those remarkable events actually took place, but when there is, one finds that there is good reason to believe that the event in question did not take place.

One would surely expect non-Biblical records of such events if they had really taken place, but there are none. Finally, the religious theodicy that we are considering also involves a number of very problematic moral claims. First, we are asked to believe that there is nothing morally problematic about a morally good deity making it the case that if one of the first two humans disobeys some command, all of the many billions of descendants of that human will, as a consequence, be subject to suffering and death to which they would not otherwise be exposed.

Secondly, we are also asked to believe that a morally good deity is unable to forgive people their misdeeds unless he becomes incarnate in the form of his son and suffers a sacrificial death. Thirdly, while, according to this story, those who accept the sacrifice made on their behalf have all their tears wiped away and enjoy eternal happiness in the presence of God, those who do not accept the sacrifice fare considerably less well, and suffer eternal torment in hell.

So we are being asked to believe that such eternal punishment is not morally problematic. In short, the religious theodicy that we have been considering in this section is very implausible, not only on scientific and historical grounds, but on moral grounds as well. The question, accordingly, is whether there is some religious theodicy that is not exposed to scientific, or historical, or moral objections. Confronted with such a case, it is natural to think that a satisfactory response will involve arguing that it is plausible that the terrible occurrence in question itself has some hidden property that makes it the case that allowing it to happen is not morally wrong all things considered.

But as Peter van Inwagen has argued—most recently in The Problem of Evil —there is a very different possibility, and one that he thinks is much more promising. The basic idea is as follows. First of all, one begins by focusing upon abstract formulations of the argument from evil, and one attempts to put forward a story that makes it plausible that the existence of, say, a great amount of horrendous suffering in the world, is actually desirable because there is some great good that outweighs that suffering, and that can only be achieved if that amount of suffering is present, or some greater evil that can only be avoided if that amount of suffering is present.

This story might either be a theodicy-style story that specifies the great good in question, or a defense-style story, which does not do so. Secondly, if that story provides a satisfactory answer to an abstract version of the argument from evil that focuses upon the existence of horrendous suffering, one can then turn to concrete versions of the argument from evil, and there the idea will be that God had good reason to allow a certain amount of horrendous suffering, and the terrible case of Sue is simply one of the cases that he allowed.

God could very well have prevented it, and had he done so, he would have eliminated an occurrence that was bad in itself, all things considered. But had he done so, he would have had to have allowed some other horrendous evil that, as things stand, he prevented, and the reason that he would have had to do that would be to ensure that the global property of there being a certain amount of horrendous evil in the world was instantiated—something that was necessary to achieve a greater good, or to avoid a greater evil.

In short, defenses and theodicies that are based upon this idea, rather than appealing to the idea that apparent evils are not evils in themselves, all things considered, once all local properties—all properties that those events themselves have—are taken into account, appeal, instead, to the idea that there are global properties whose instantiation is important, and that can only be instantiated if there are events that are evil in themselves.

Does this shift from local properties to global properties help? It would seem that it cannot. Consider against the case of Sue. An advocate of the evidential argument from evil claims that no matter how carefully one examines the case, and thinks about it, considering, as one does, all of the rightmaking and wrongmaking properties of which one has any knowledge, the conclusion is that the wrongmaking properties of allowing what happened to Sue clearly outweigh any rightmaking properties of allowing that event.

But what exactly is the global wrongmaking property in question? The answer, surely, is that no one has knowledge of any such wrongmaking property. But surely no one knows, or even has any reason for believing, that this is the case. The situation as regards an appeal to global properties is, in short, as follows. In response, the possibility of a relevant, morally significant global property is introduced.

But this is a mere possibility, since there is no relevant morally significant global property of which one has knowledge, let alone which one has good reason to believe is present in the case in question. So the possibility of a relevant global property is simply that: a mere possibility, and as such it gets dealt with in the way that all unknown morally significant properties, both rightmaking and wrongmaking, and both local and global, are dealt with in, for example, the logical probability version of the evidential argument from evil set out above in section 3.

In revising this piece, I took into account some helpful suggestions and critical comments that I received from other philosophers. I very much appreciate such feedback. Some Important Distinctions 1. Inductive Versions of the Argument from Evil 3. Attempted Total Refutations 5. Attempted Defenses 6.