The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings, Second Edition - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0268100322 ISBN 13: 9780268100322

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016

Synopsis

Of all the issues in the philosophy of religion, the problem of reconciling belief in God with evil in the world arguably commands more attention than any other. For over two decades, Michael L. Peterson’s The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings has been the most widely recognized and used anthology on the subject. Peterson's expanded and updated second edition retains the key features of the original and presents the main positions and strategies in the latest philosophical literature on the subject. It will remain the most complete introduction to the subject as well as a resource for advanced study. Peterson organizes his selection of classical and contemporary sources into four parts: important statements addressing the problem of evil from great literature and classical philosophy; debates based on the logical, evidential, and existential versions of the problem; major attempts to square God's justice with the presence of evil, such as Augustinian, Irenaean, process, openness, and felix culpa theodicies; and debates on the problem of evil covering such concepts as a best possible world, natural evil and natural laws, gratuitous evil, the skeptical theist defense, and the bearing of biological evolution on the problem.

The second edition includes classical excerpts from the book of Job, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and Hume, and twenty-five essays that have shaped the contemporary discussion, by J. L. Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, William Rowe, Marilyn Adams, John Hick, William Hasker, Paul Draper, Michael Bergmann, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen, and numerous others. Whether a professional philosopher, student, or interested layperson, the reader will be able to work through a number of issues related to how evil in the world affects belief in God.

About this title

About the Author

Michael L. Peterson is professor and chair of the philosophy department at Asbury College. He is the author of With All Your Mind, also published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It used to be widely held that evil―which for present purposes we may identify with undeserved pain and suffering―was incompatible with the existence of God: that no possible world contained both God and evil. So far as I am able to tell, this thesis is no longer defended. But arguments for the following weaker thesis continue to be very popular: Evil (or at least evil of the amounts and kinds we actually observe) constitutes evidence against the existence of God, evidence that seems decisively to outweigh the totality of available evidence for the existence of God.

In this paper, I wish to discuss what seems to me to be the most powerful version of the “evidential argument from evil.” The argument takes the following form. There is a serious hypothesis h that is inconsistent with theism and on which the amounts and kinds of suffering that the world contains are far more easily explained than they are on the hypothesis of theism. This fact constitutes a prima facie case for preferring h to theism. Examination shows that there is no known way of answering this case, and there is good reason to think that no way of answering it will be forthcoming. Therefore, the hypothesis h is (relative to the epistemic situation of someone who has followed the argument this far) preferable to theism. But if p and q are inconsistent and p is (relative to one’s epistemic situation) epistemically preferable to q, then it is not rational for one to accept q. (Of course, it does not follow either that it is rational for one to accept p or that it is rational for one to reject q.) It is, therefore, not rational for one who has followed the argument up to this point to accept theism.

In section I, I shall present the version of the evidential argument from evil I wish to discuss. In section II, I shall explain why I find the argument unconvincing. These two sections could stand on their own, and this paper might have consisted simply of the proposed refutation of the evidential argument from evil that they contain. But many philosophers will find the proposed refutation implausible, owing to the fact that it turns on controversial theses about the epistemology of metaphysical possibility and intrinsic value. And perhaps there will also be philosophers who find my reasoning unconvincing because of a deep conviction that, since evil just obviously creates an insoluble evidential problem for the theist, a reply to any version of the evidential argument can be nothing more than a desperate attempt to render the obvious obscure. Now if philosophers are unconvinced by one’s diagnosis of the faults of a certain argument, one can attempt to make the diagnosis seem more plausible to them by the following method. One can try to find a “parallel” argument that is obviously faulty, and try to show that a parallel diagnosis of the faults of the parallel argument can be given, a diagnosis that seems plausible, and hope that some of the plausibility of the parallel diagnosis will rub off on the original. For example, if philosophers find one’s diagnosis of the faults of the ontological argument unconvincing, one can construct an obviously faulty argument that “runs parallel to” the ontological argument―in the classical case, an argument for the existence of a perfect island. And one can then attempt to show that a diagnosis parallel to one’s diagnosis of the faults of the ontological argument is a correct diagnosis of the faults (which, one hopes, will be so evident as to be uncontroversial) of the parallel argument. It is worth noting that even if an application of this procedure did not convince one’s audience of the correctness of one’s diagnosis of the faults of the original argument, the parallel argument might by itself be enough to convince them that there must be something wrong with the original argument.

This is the plan I shall follow. In fact, I shall consider two arguments that run parallel to the evidential argument from evil. In section III, I shall present an evidential argument, which I feign is addressed to an ancient Greek atomist by one of his contemporaries, for the conclusion that the observed properties of air render a belief in atoms irrational. In section IV, I shall present an evidential argument for the conclusion that the observed fact of “cosmic silence” renders a belief in “extraterrestrial intelligence” irrational. Neither of these parallel arguments―at least this seems clear to me―succeeds in establishing its conclusion. In each case, I shall offer a diagnosis of the faults of the parallel argument that parallels my diagnosis of the faults of the evidential argument from evil. Finally, in section V, I shall make some remarks in aid of a proposed distinction between facts that raise difficulties for a theory, and facts that constitute evidence against a theory.

(Excerpted from The Problem of Evil, the Problem of Air, and the Problem of Silence)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268100322
• ISBN 13: 9780268100322
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 620
• Editor: Peterson Michael L.