Solving the problem

To solve the problem would constitute denying any of the premises within the argument. I will only provide a very cursory summary here, since many of the most relevant of these issues will be discussed in later chapters, but the most plausible solutions are as follows:

2.3.1 God does not exist

Perhaps the most plausible and therefore easiest solution, but not one that many theists are going to be willing to accept. It remains a ‘solution’, in that it would resolve the inconsistency present in the set of premises by denying one of the premises; namely, the one that says that God exists.

2.3.2 God is not maximally-good

Problematic for most theists. Remember that this premise does not specify (yet) what God’s goodness amounts to. All it says is that whatever ‘goodness’ is, God has it (or perhaps is it) maximally. To deny this is to say something that runs contrary to swaths of theological tradition.

2.3.3 God is not maximally -powerful

Perhaps slightly less problematic than denying God’s maximal-goodness, and certainly an option that many theologians have been willing to consent to. Perhaps ‘process theology’⁸ is the best example of this, but John Bishop has also defended a view along these lines.⁹ In any case, this would impose more severe limits on God’s power than the already limiting stipulation of ‘no non-logical limits’, and we might want good reason to accept the truth of this new limitation, other than as an ad hoc response to the challenge of the problem of evil.

2.3.4 God is not a moral agent

To my mind this is by far the most plausible solution for a theist, one that is taken up by many theologians, theists, and atheists. D. Z. Phillips argues effectively for the conclusion that we should not think of God as sharing our moral community.¹⁰ Similarly, Brian Davies says: ‘Theologians have taught that God is good without holding that his goodness is that of a morally good agent.’¹¹ This is a solution that has sound theological mandate: The Bible is quite happy to say that God’s ways are not our own.¹² It might seem dubious, therefore, that I have labelled this premise as being ‘essential to theism’. The justification for this claim comes from the observation that to deny that God is a moral agent is to equivocate absolutely between what we are willing to say of God in this context (i.e., the context of the problem of evil) and what we are willing to say of God in other contexts. That is, if even once God is described as ‘acting’, and operates with ‘reasons’ that are (broadly understood) ‘moral’, then God is a moral agent. Theological tradition is replete with examples of God’s being understood as acting in this way. If God ‘creates’ and sees creation as ‘good’, then we seem to have an example of this kind. Even limiting ourselves to the context of the problem of evil, we can find many similar examples: God ‘forgives sins’, God ‘compensates for suffering’, perhaps God even ‘punishes wrongdoing’. Given the range of examples readily available to

8 See, for example, Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, ed.

by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978).

9 John Bishop, ‘Evil and the Concept of God’, Philosophical Papers, 22 (1993), 1-15.

10 D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, Kindle edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005).

11 Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 48.

12 ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.’ Isaiah 55.8-9, The Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

us to justify the claim that God is a moral agent, it seems that we must therefore either commit to God’s being a moral agent, or else dismiss all of these instances in which God is purported to act morally.

2.3.5 Event x is not ‘evil’; i.e., it is not the case that it ought not to have been permitted by anyone who had the power to do so

Another popular option. Theodicists from Augustine to Leibniz have been willing to commend the horrors of the world as misunderstood harmony.¹³ It is this option that constitutes the central focus of my thesis, and so I will leave discussion of it for elsewhere.

Suffice to say that any theodicy, in response to my full-fledged formulation of the problem of evil, will deny premise 10. That is, specifically, they will deny the evaluative claim that the event x ought to have been prevented. Event x was permissible, not needing to be prevented, because there was/is a morally sufficient reason for permitting it. I will say more on this throughout my thesis.

2.3.6 God could not have prevented event x

There is one final ‘plausible’ solution that I ought to mention, for completion’s sake, but I do not think it is very plausible. This is the claim that God, though maximally-powerful, could not have prevented the event x. Although this sounds like it might be similar to the theodical response of Plantinga et al., in that they claim that God could not prevent x without the loss of some greater good or permission of some evil equally bad or worse, it is in fact very different. The crucial difference between my formulation and others is that mine leaves no room for God’s being incapable of preventing x due to some moral or logical necessity, whilst x remains something that can be used as a basis for the problem of evil. I have ruled that out by limiting God’s power to what is logically possible, and combining that claim with the uncontroversial moral premise that ‘ought implies can’. That is, if you are incapable of doing something, then you cannot be under any moral obligation to do that thing. Given that we have specified that x is something that ‘ought to be prevented by a being who had the power to do so’, to now claim that God could not prevent x is to claim that God could not prevent x simpliciter. Moral reasons are entirely beside the point. That is, we specify that God should prevent this x, and this judgement is dependent upon the precursor of God’s capability

13 Consider the quotation that opened this chapter, from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man.

of being able to act to prevent x. We cannot judge that He should unless we judge that He can. To say that God cannot prevent x is to rule x out as being something that God should prevent.

Likewise, to deny premise 12 is to make premise 10 redundant, since that premise specifies that the event x ought to have been prevented by ‘anyone who had the power do so’.

But if God does not have that power, then who would?! If it is not the case that God has the power to prevent x, then it is a rather empty statement to assert that it ought to have been prevented ‘by any being who had the power to do so’; that set would surely be empty!

Given the examples of God’s power that are evident in scripture, and the act of creating the world, it would seem deeply implausible to now claim that God could not, say, bring it about that a small shower prevents a forest fire...or indeed prevent the lightning bolt from striking the tree in the first place. A being that can turn water into wine can surely turn a mistakenly placed peanut into something that would not be harmful for the unfortunate nut allergy sufferer who is about to eat it. Or, indeed, prevent the peanut from being mistakenly placed in the first place, or give the nut allergy sufferer a sixth sense for the presence of nuts, or outlaw nut allergies generally... I have no special reason for focussing on nut allergies, but it is as good an example as any to identify the levels of efficient causation involved in any tragedy, any stage of which could be subject to intervention by a sufficiently powerful being.

To say that God could not do any of these things, and yet still call Him ‘maximally-powerful’, such that He is capable of creating an entire universe, is, frankly, nuts.

Note, therefore, that the only way we could plausibly deny that God could have prevented x is to claim that it is logically impossible that God prevent x. Without good reason for this claim, it remains deeply implausible. (NB: Justification by appeal to ‘greater goods’

or ‘soul-making’, etc., is irrelevant here, for those issues are subsumed within the judgement that x ‘ought not to be’. If x is justified by appeal to greater goods then x ‘ought to be’, just as my temporary yet necessary pain at the dentist ‘ought to be’ (it ought not to have been prevented by any being who had the power to do so, given that it is a necessary by-product of my dental health) due to the prevention of subsequently poorer dental health, and the unavoidable nature of the temporary pain on the way to that goal. Those x that are justified by greater goods are not the x that we are using in this argument.)

2.3.7 Conclusions

The two most plausible solutions to my problem of evil, besides atheism, are to claim that God is not a moral agent or to claim that x is not ‘evil’ in the specified sense; that is, it is not an evil that ought to be prevented, all things considered. The purpose of my formulation of the problem of evil is to force the theist (with the force of a logical must) to take one of these two options. Either option is fraught with problems of a peculiarly moral kind, and it is these moral issues that will form the central focus of my thesis.