Class III

Notes for Class V, May 31

 

Reading: William L Rowe, "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism." Can be found at https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Rowe.pdf

 

Supplementary reading: excerpt from Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1974.

 

The class will begin with Plantinga's "free will defence," and then turn to the paper by William L. Rowe.

 

PART ONE: PLANTINGA'S FREE WILL DEFENCE

 

A: Some Background to Plantinga's Free Will Defence

 

From the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Plantinga borrowed the idea that God creates the world by freely choosing to actualize a possible world. A possible world is a way the world as a whole might be. More precisely, a possible world is a possible state of affairs which includes or precludes every possible state of affairs. For example, (a) Ukraine's being invaded by Russia and Putin's being president of Russia, is a possible state of affairs which includes Ukraine's being invaded by Russia and includes Putin's being President of Russia. It also precludes Ukraine's not being invaded by Russia and Putin's not being President of Russia. But (a) is not a possible world because there are many possible states of affairs which are neither included in or preclude by (a). For example, Justin Trudeau's being P.M. of Canada is neither included in nor precluded by (a). A possible world is a possible state of affairs which is complete in the sense that it includes or precludes every possible state of affairs. 

 

Leibniz's idea of creation is that God contemplates a very large number of possible worlds and chooses to actualize one of them. And because He is perfectly good and omnipotent, he must actualize the best of all possible worlds. In Leibniz's words, "Now this supreme wisdom [of God], united to a goodness which is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best" (Theodicy, Part One, #8). Mackie agrees with Leibniz on this point, and draws the conclusion that there is no perfectly good and omnipotent God.

 

Plantinga, however, does not accept the idea of a best possible world. "What," he asks, "is the reason for supposing that there is such a thing as the best of all possible world? No matter how marvelous a world is--containing no matter how many persons enjoying unalloyed bliss--isn't it possible that there might be an even better world containing even more persons enjoying unalloyed bliss?" (p.34) As Plantinga points out elsewhere, the order of possible worlds might be like the order of natural numbers: There is no greatest natural number because for any natural number there is always a greater one.

 

B: Mackie's Anticipation of the claim "Evil is due to human freewill" 

 

"Perhaps the most important proposed solution of the problem of evil," Mackie says, "is that evil is not to be ascribed to God at all, but to the independent actions of human beings, supposed to have been endowed by God with freedom of the will." Against this proposal, Mackie says, "I should query the assumption that [evils like cruelty] are logically necessary accompaniments of freedom. I should ask this: 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 choose 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. 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 wholly good" (p. 33).

 

C: The first step in Plantinga's Free Will Defence: "Was it within God's power to Create any possible world He pleases? This is indeed the crucial question for the Free Will Defence" (Plantinga, p. 34).

 

In the above passage, Mackie assumes that God could have actualized any world that is possible, including those possible worlds in which human beings freely choose between sinning and not sinning and always choose not to sin. The first step in Plantinga's Free Will Defence is to argue that Mackie's assumption (which had also been made by Leibniz) is mistaken: There are possible worlds containing creatures who make free choices which an omnipotent God could not actualize. 

 

To justify this first step, Plantinga asks us to consider various examples like the following: Suppose your friend Tom has a painting you covet; you offer him $500 for the painting and he does not accept your offer. Afterwards, you ask yourself, "If I had offered $600, would he have accepted the offer?" Assuming that accepting or not accepting was a free choice for Tom, there are just two possibilities,

 

a: If you had offered $600, Tom would have accepted, 

 

or 

 

b: If you had offered $600, Tom would not have accepted. 

 

One or other of (a) an (b) must be true, and whichever one is true, the other is false. Either way, there are possible worlds which, despite their being possible, God cannot actualize. If (a) is true, then God cannot actualize any possible world which is like the actual world in all relevant details except for your offering $600 and Tom freely refusing the offer. And similarly, if (b) is true, then God cannot actualize any possible world which is like the actual world in all relevant details except for your offering $600 and Tom's accepting the offer. Therefore, assuming that people make free choices, there are possible worlds an omnipotent God could not actualize. 

 

D:  The second step in the Free Will Defence

 

The second step is to establish the possibility that every possible world in which creatures get to make morally significant free choices, and never choose to sin, are among the possible worlds God could not actualize. Now whenever a person makes a morally praiseworthy free choice, it is possible that he or she should have chosen to sin instead. It follows (by a somewhat complicated argument)  that it is possible that in every possible world containing creatures who get to make morally significantly free choices, someone freely sins. Therefore, it is possible that every possible world in which people make significantly free choices and in which no one sins, is among the possible worlds an omnipotent God could not actualize. In other words, it is possible that it was not within the power even of an omnipotent God to create a world in which creatures perform morally praiseworthy actions and in which there is no moral evil.

 

Plantinga provides an amusing example to back up the above argument. It involves Curley Smith, the mayor of Boston and L. B. Smedes, the director of highways. There is a proposal to build a freeway which would require destroying some valuable old buildings. Curley is opposed to the proposal, and Smedes favors it. Smedes asks Curley whether he would drop his opposition for $1 million. "Of course," is Curley's reply. Smedes then asks Curley whether he would do it for $2. "What do you take me for?" is Curley's indignant reply. "That's already settled," Smedes replies, "all that remains is to nail down your price." Smedes then offers him a bribe of $35,000 and Curley accepts. Smedes spends a sleepless night wondering whether he could have bought Curley for $20,000. Given that Curley's choice was free, Plantinga claims, either a possible world in which Curley refuses the bribe of $20,000 or one in which Curley accepts that bribe, is among the possible worlds an omnipotent God could not actualize.

 

E: Plantinga's Free Will Defence

 

Using the result of the second step, Plantingo shows that the existence of a wholly good and omnipotent God is consistent with the existence of evil. He points out that 

 

(1) God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good.

 

is consistent with

 

(2) It was not within God's power to create a world in which creatures perform morally praiseworthy actions and in which there is no moral evil.

 

and 

 

(3) God created a world in which creatures perform morally praiseworthy actions.

 

But (1), (2) and (3) together imply

 

(4) There is evil.

 

Since (1), (2), and (3) are a consistent set, (1) is consistent with (4). Not only was Mackie unable to make good his claim that (1) and (4) are inconsistent, we need no longer worry that the inconsistency of (1) and (4) could be proved in some other way.

 

F:  Two objections to the Free Will Defence

 

Plantinga's Free Will Defence has been the subject of many scholarly articles and books. One objection was discussed by Robert M. Adams in an article published in 1977, "Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil." If you have a U of T library card you can access the article at https://www.jstor.org/stable/20009657. "Middle Knowledge" was a phrase used by the Jesuits Luis de Molina and Francisco Suarez in the late 1500s for God's knowledge of what every possible free creature would do in every possible circumstance. Examples were given in section C above:

 

a: If you had offered $600, Tom would have accepted, 

 

or 

 

b: If you had offered $600, Tom would not have accepted. 

 

The first, crucial step in Plantinga's Free Will Defence depends on the idea that (a) or (b) is true. If so, then whichever one is true, God knows it to be true. "Such knowledge was called 'middle knowledge' by the Jesuits," Adams points out, "because they thought it had a middle status between God's knowledge of the merely possible and His knowledge of the actual; or between His knowledge of necessary truths, which all follow from the divine nature, and His knowledge of His own will and everything that is causally determined by his will" (Robert Marrihew Adams, "Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil," American Philosophical Quarterly, 1977, no. 2, p. 109).

 

But it's far from clear what such knowledge is supposed to be knowledge of. Whichever of (a) and (b) is true, it is not made true by God's creative will. Nor is it made true by Tom's choice, since it is supposed to be true whether or not an offer of $600 is made. In the absence of an explanation of what it means to say that (a) or (b) is true, so the objection runs, Plantinga has not established his claim that the goodness and omnipotence of God is compatible with the existence of evil.

 

A second objection, likely to be raised by a classical theist, has to do with Plantinga's picture of creation as a matter of God contemplating a very large number of possible worlds and choosing to actualize one of them. The picture is anthropomorphic, so the objection runs. Plantinga, like Leibniz, thinks of God as being an intelligent, free agent in the same sense in which any normal, adult human being is an intelligent free agent, except that God is more intelligent and powerful than any human being. But the difference between God and a human agent is not a mere matter of degree. 

 

PART TWO: WILLIAM ROWE'S "THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND SOME VARIETIES OF ATHEIEM"

 

As William Rowe makes clear in the first footnote to his seminal article, he accepts Plantinga's Free Will Defence as showing that God's being omnipotent and wholly good is consistent with the existence of evil in the created world. This rules out any attempt to show that they are inconsistent. Rowe presents a different type of atheistic argument, often called an "evidential argument" because one of its premises is put forward as a matter of observational knowledge. The argument itself is a deductive argument, but it's premises are not, like Mackie's, put forward as necessary,  a priori truths. A second important difference is that Rowe's argument relies on a premise about a particlar kind of evil namely intense suffering of a particular kind,  whereas Mackie's argument relies on the simple premise that there is evil, some evil no matter how impressive. For Mackie, a simple headache would be enough. A third difference that should be noted is that Rowe's conclusion is straightforwardly atheistic: There does not existr an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

 

Rowe sets forth his argument in two premises and a conclusion on p. 127-28. The first premise is the "evidential" or "observational" part of the argument: 

 

1. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. (Let me abbreviate this to "without thereby making things worse.")

 

In the original form of the argument, Rowe offers an imaginary instance of such suffering in a young deer. He thereby leaves himself open to the objection that the suffering of non-rational animals does not raise a "problem of evil" of the same importance as the suffering of human beings. Perhaps for that reason, he replaced the example in a later version of the argument with the more shocking example of a young girl who was raped and murdered by her mother's boyfriend.

 

That there are instances of intense suffering is an obvious fact of life. But what reason can Rowe offer for the claim that some of them could have been prevented by an omnipotent and omniscient being without thereby making things worse? Rowe's imaginary example is described with details which are supposed to make clear that he fawn's intense suffering could have eliminated without making things worse. The fawn dies in a forest fire in an isolated place without anyone knowing about its suffering. It lies in agony for several days before dying. "So far as we can see," Rowe says, "the fawn's intense suffering is pointless" (p. 130). [Following Rowe, I will say that an instance of suffering is pointless" as shorhand for "could have been prevented by and omnipotent . .. worse."]

 

But is Rowe justified in moving from an imaginary example to what happens in the real world? What he could say is, "Things like that happen." And perhaps his readers will accept that as true. A more serious problem  is that it's a big leap from saying "So far as we can see, there are instances of intense suffering which are pointless," to saying "In fact there are instances of intense suffering which are pointless." Here Rowe offers an argument. He assumes that the fact that as far as we can see this instance of suffering is pointless confirms to a small, perhaps very small degree the claim that this instance of suffering is pointless. Given that assumption, he can call  upon a theorem of probability theory which says that if the probability that each student in a class of twenty has covid-19 is 1 per cent, then the probability of some student in the class has covid-19 is 20 per cent. (In general if the probability that one event will happen is x and the probability that a different event will happen is y, then the probability that one or other of the two events will happen is x+y. But there are very many cases of intense suffering, Rowe thinks, which as far as we can see are pointless. So, the probability that at least one of the cases really is pointless is very great, great enough that we can be sure that there is at least one instance of intense suffering that is pointless. And one such instance is all Rowe's argument needs. (see Rowe, p. 131.)

 

Rowe's second premise is of quite a different kind:

 

2. An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. 

 

Rowe begins his defence of (2) by pointing that it says precisely that an OG (an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being) would permit an instance of intense suffering only if preventing it would have a certain cost. It does not say that if an instance of intense suffering is not pointless, then OG would permit it. (2) does not say that an OG would permit instances of intense suffering simply because preventing them would have such a cost. "Someone might hold, for example, that no good is great enough to justify permitting an innocent child to suffer terribly. Again, someone might hold that the mere fact that a given good outweighs some suffering and would be lost if the suffering were prevented, is not a morally sufficient reason for permitting the suffering. But to deny either of these views is not to deny (2)." So understood, Rowe says, (2) "seems to express a belief that accords with our basic moral principles, principles shared by. both theists and nontheists. If we are to fault the argument for atheism, therefore, it seems we must find some fault with its first premise" (p. 129).

 

 3. Rowe adds two interesting comments on his argument. First, he states what he thinks is the theist's best response to the argument. Second, he says that the atheism which his argument, if sound, establishes is a "friendly atheism.

 

The theist's best response, in Rowe's view, is to use what he calls "the G.E. Moore shift' (p. 133-35). This sort of response to a deductive argument like Rowe's is to grant the argument's validity, grant the truth of some of its premises, deny its conclusion, and conclude that the other premise is false. Recall Rowe's claim, quoted just above, "If we are to fault the argument for atheism, therefore, it seems we must find some fault with its first premise." If that is right, then to use the G.E. Moore shift would be to grant Rowe's second premise (which he thinks is above reproach), say that Rowe's conclusion is false, and conclude that P1 is false. 

 

There is nothing wrong with Rowe's logic here. Rowe summarizes the situation by saying, "What the theist then says about (1) is that he has rational grounds for believing in the existence of the theistic God, accepts [the second premise] as true, and sees that he has rational grounds for rejecting [the first premise]. Having rational grounds for rejecting (1), the theist concludes that the basic argument for atheism is mistaken" (p. 134-35). Notice that Rowe's certainty about his atheism depends crucially on his certainty that his second premise is above reproach. So in his view, the theist is left with the conclusion that there are in fact no pointless instances of intense suffering, no instances which God could have prevented without making things worse.

 

Finally, Rowe says that his is a "friendly atheism." What does he mean? He distinguishes "three major positions [regarding the rationality of the theist's belief]": (1) unfriendly atheism, the position that no one is rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists; (2) indifferent atheism, the position of an atheist who has no position on whether any theist is or isn't rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists; and (3) friendly atheism, the. position of an atheist who believes that some theists are rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists. "I propose," he says, "to discuss and defend the position of friendly atheism" (p. 135). 

 

Rowe first points out that one may well be in a position in which he believes that p is false and that others are rationally justified in believing that p is true. For example, Tom is the last surviving passenger of a passenger plane which has crashed in the Pacific ocean. Bobbing up and down in his life jacket, he muses that some of his friends will by now have learned that his flight crashed with no survivors, and therefore believe, quite rationally, that he is no longer alive. Tom himself, of course, rationally believes, indeed knows, that their belief is false.

 

Rowe describes his own view further as "paradoxical friendly atheism": "I don't mean to rest my case [for friendly atheism] on what some human beings might reasonably have believed in eleventh or thirteenth century. The more interesting question is whether some people in modern society, people who are acquainted with the usual grounds for belief and disbelief . . .  are yet rationally justified in accepting theism. . . . Friendly atheism becomes paradoxical, however, when the atheist contemplates that the theist has all the grounds for atheism that he, the atheist has, and yet is rationally justified in maintaining his theistic belief. But even so excessively friendly a view as this perhaps can be held by the atheist if he also has some reason to think that the grounds for theism are not as telling as the theist is justified in taking them to be" (p. 136-37). Rowe ends the discussion with a footnote (on p. 137) citing a relevant example.

 

4. Some points at which Rowe's argument is open to criticism: 

 

Perhaps the main point at which Rowe's argument is open to criticism is his confidence that his second premise (2) is true. Recall that after briefly clarifying the meaning of (2), he says that (2) "seems to express a belief that accords with our basic moral principles, principles shared by. both theists and nontheists." That is the sum and substance of his defence of the second premise, a defence he thinks will be accepted by all reasonable theists. 

 

But that defence is not accepted by all reasonable theists. Classical theists, in particular, would say that we cannot discern how God would act in creating the world by reflecting on how a morally good human being would react when faced with a decision to prevent or permit intense suffering. Whether such a person acts in a morally good way depends on whether his or her actions are in agreement with moral principles he or she did not create. But God 's goodness does not depend on His acting in agreement with principles not of His own making. Nor does not have to act in certain ways in order to be good. God is perfectly good just by being. 

 

Rowe's defence of his first premise is also open to criticism, and has indeed been the point most frequently attacked in the literature. Rowe says that if it seems to him (and perhaps to most people) that an OG (an omnipotent omniscient and wholly good being) could not have prevented an instance of intense suffering without thereby losing an outweighing good or causing an evil equally bad or worse, then it is probable at least to some degree that an OG could not have prevented the intense suffering without producing those results. But there are plausible reasons for denying that, 

 

x. It seems to me that such and such is not present in a given situation

 

always makes it probable to some extent that

 

y. such and such is in fact not present in that situation.

 

Whether such reasoning has some force depends on whether it is likely that I would have noticed the "such and such" if it were present. If the "such and siuch" in x and y were an elephant the reasoning would have some force. But if the "such and  such" were an amoeba, it would have no force. For if an amoeba were present it is certain that I would not have noticed it. 

 

Now consider Rowe's fictitious case of the young deer. Rowe says, "So far as we can see, the fawn's intense suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good . . ." (p. 130). He does not pause to ask, "if there were some point to the suffering, what is the likelihood that we would be aware of it?" If the liklihood is unknown, then the story does nothing to support the first premise. But as William Alston has pointed out, "We are in no position to estimate the extent to which the possibilities we can envisage for divine reasons for permitting evils even come close to exhausting the possibilities open to an omniscient being" (William P. Alston, in The Evidential Argument from Evil, edited by Daniel Howard-Snyder, 1996, p. 318).

 

In sum, although Rowe's argument is valid, neither premise is obviously true or supported by a good argument.