The Argument from Evil Makes the Existence of the God of Christianity Unlikely

Allow me to begin by thanking my opponent for setting time aside to have this debate with me. It is my hope that people find this dialogue to be informative and intellectually stimulating, even if they profoundly disagree with the views that I will be defending shortly. The argument InquireTruth presents in his opening round is fairly straightforward. Simply put, he maintains that humans are not in any sort of a position to say that gratuitous suffering and pointless premature deaths probably occur. I think he has done this dialogue a tremendous service by outlining relevant issues in epistemology. So, I will try to proceed where he left off. Among other things, it is my position that (P1) is a reasonable inference. C1: The evidential argument from evil is valid. Thankfully, my opponent agrees that my argument is valid. Consequently, no further arguments are necessary here. C2: Gratuitous suffering and pointless premature deaths probably occur. In his opening round, my opponent cites the work of Daniel Howard-Snyder in order to argue against the problem of evil. For those that may be unaware, the position Snyder relies on is known as "skeptical theism." This philosophical position maintains that it is not reasonable for humans to conclude that they would know what morally sufficient reasons a God would have for allowing evil to exist in the world. As such, someone like Snyder would maintain that the logical inference made in (P1) cannot reasonably be established by humans. The thrust of my opponent's argument goes something like this. Human beings, possessing only limited cognitive abilities and a finite, fallible understanding of the world, have no reason to suspect they would understand the reasoning of an omniscient, omnipotent being. Like Synder, other philosophers such as Stephen Wykstra and William Alston have defended a similar viewpoint. In particular, Alston has maintained that "the extent to which God can envisage reasons for permitting a given state of affairs exceeds our ability to do so by at least as much as Einstein's ability to discern the reason for a physical theory exceeds the ability of one ignorant of physics."[1] Additionally, he has defended a second line of analogy that involves the game of chess. Essentially, Alston argues that we should no more expect to know whether God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil than a chess novice would be able to understand why a chess grand master makes a particular move in a chess game.[2] Despite the apparent plausibility of these sorts of analogies, they all suffer from a fatal flaw. It is perfectly reasonable to expect that a loving God would want to comfort his creation and let them know that their tremendous suffering is for a good purpose. William Rowe makes this point exceedingly well when he writes the following: "Being finite beings we can't expect to know all the goods God would know, any more than an amateur at chess should expect to know all the reasons for a particular move that Kasparov makes in a game. But, unlike Kasparov who in a chess match has a good reason not to tell us how a particular move fits into his plan to win the game, God, if he exists, isn't playing chess with our lives. In fact, since understanding the goods for the sake of which he permits terrible evils to befall us would itself enable us to better bear our suffering, God has a strong reason to help us understand those goods and how they require his permission of the terrible evils that befall us."[3] Rowe's conclusion here seems overwhelmingly plausible given God's desire to care for us. In keeping with this line of reasoning that Rowe Defends, I feel inclined to create my own analogy to help make this point clearer. Imagine, for example, you had to perform an emergency appendectomy on someone in order to save their life. If you were doing this, you wouldn't just tie the person down to a table and proceed to cut them open without explaining to them what's going on. A loving person would reassure the patient in this instance that their suffering will be for the greater good and that they are being cared for. For these reasons, it is rational to suppose that if God had morally sufficient reasons to allow so much seemingly gratuitous suffering and death in the world, we would know about them. C3: The objections to the argument from evil are without merit. It would seem as though my opponent, albeit implicitly, takes a shot at the plausibility of (P2). Indeed, he seems to suggest at one point that the argument I presented is question begging. Now, despite what he has suggested, I don't deny that Christian theology predicts that there will be evils in the world. What I am arguing is that "gratuitous" (i.e., unjustified) suffering and pointless deaths are incompatible with Christianity. To quote myself from my opening round, "Gratuitous suffering and pointless premature deaths cannot occur if God is indeed all loving and all merciful. If God exists, all evils must be morally justified and cannot therefore be gratuitous." So, unless my opponent believes that unjustified evils are compatible with theism, I think this point being raised about Christian theology is not really relevant. My opponent makes another point in his opening round about the 'progress of knowledge.' As I will address further in (C4), I think the sort of radical skepticism my opponent relies on in this objection simply isn't warranted. For example, it's true to say that there is much that we don't know about biology. Nevertheless, what are the odds that one day we will discover that DNA is not the basis of genetic inheritance? As the neuroscientist and author Sam Harris amusingly quips, they are practically zero.[4] If given all available evidence, some evils appear to be clearly gratuitous, then there is hardly any reason to suppose that we will one day discover that they have a moral justification. C4: Skeptical theism violates good theories in epistemology. Skeptical theism violates some of our most basic, plausible and promising theories in epistemology. In particular, the principle of credulity states that, all other things being equal, things are the way they appear.[5] Sure, it is possible that God might have morally sufficient reasons for allowing the Holocaust and tsunamis that kill tens of thousands of children. It is also possible that my opponent and I are living in the Matrix. However, there are simply no good reasons to think that either of these scenarios are true. If many evils appear to be clearly gratuitous, then my opponent isn't on any kind of solid epistemic ground to say that we can't know that these evils aren't gratuitous. Accordingly, it is reasonable to suppose that this argument, (C4), explodes my opponent's main case. | Conclusion | In summary, I don't think we've seen any good reasons why we should doubt that some instances of suffering and death are gratuitous. As Rowe points out, there are good reasons why we should expect to know about God's morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil if he existed. Likewise, the skeptical theism that my challenger relies on runs contrary to very plausible principles in epistemology. Given this state of affairs, it is still perfectly reasonable to conclude that God probably doesn't exist. Sources: 1. Alston, William P. 1996. "Some (Temporarily) Final Thoughts on the Evidential Arguments from Evil," in Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp.311-32. 2. Howard-Snyder, Daniel. The Evidential Argument from Evil. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. p. 319 3. Rowe, William L. 2001b. "Reply to Howard-Snyder and Bergmann," in Rowe (ed.), God and the Problem of Evil, pp.155-58. 4. Harris, Sam. The End of Faith Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. P. 76. 5. http://www.iep.utm.edu...