Resurrecting the Logical Problem of Evil

 Note; This was originally a reddit post from around a year ago. Don't read it, I think it's bad and this one is an improvement. I realize now that I've made serious errors in my original post, so I've done some semi-major editing. Further feedback is appreciated 

I will start with some preliminary remarks. Firstly, it is important to note that this argument is not completely my own, this post is heavily inspired by Richard R. La Croix's paper Unjustified Evil and God's choice, and by J.L Schellenbergs paper A New Logical Problem of Evil. Which are highly recommended reads. I've made some modifications to the argument, and made it more accessible. Second, I am not a professional philosopher, I am a college drop out who is interested in philosophy of religion. Do not present this post to theists with the implication that it has decisively refuted theism. Chances are, there are responses to this type of argument in the literature, and then responses to those responses, etc. Philosophy is hard and, believe it or not, it is not a video game! Rarely has any position been "won" through a single argument.

Introduction

Nowadays logical formulations of the problem of evil are fairly unpopular. A common talking point among theists is that the logical problem of evil is dead. And many, if not most, contemporary atheologians tend to favor evidential arguments from evil in favor of logical arguments (If you aren't aware of the distinction between logical and evidential formulations of the argument from evil, it may be worth it to check here and here). William Rowe, Michael Tooley, and Paul Draper, just to name a few. But why is that? Some insight from Alvin Plantinga who is famously credited for having refuted J. L. Mackie's logical problem of evil will be of use here. In God and other Minds he writes;

The authors referred to above take the following five propositions to be essential to traditional theism: (a) that God exists, (b) that God is omnipotent, (e) that God is omniscient, (d) that God is wholly good, and (e) that evil exists. Here they are certainly right; each of these propositions is indeed an essential feature of orthodox theism. And it is just these five propositions whose conjunction is said by our atheologians to be self-contradictory. The first point to note is that of course these five propositions do not by themselves formally entail a contradiction; to get a formally contradictory set the atheologian must add some proposition or other. But of course he cannot add just any proposition he pleases. What conditions must be met by the proposition he adds (which I shall call (f)) if his accusation is to be made good? First, the conjunction of (f) with (a)-(e ) must formally entail a contradiction. But what further condition must it meet? If (f) were necessarily true then (a)-(e ) would formally entail the denial of (f); and perhaps we could say of any proposition which formally entails the denial of a necessarily true proposition that it is self-contradictory, at any rate in a broad sense of that term. On the other hand, if (f) were an essential part of theism, then, although it would not follow that there is a contradiction in (a)-(e), there would be one in some larger set of beliefs accepted by any theist. So to make good his claim the atheologian must provide some proposition which is either necessarily true, or essential to theism, or a logical consequence of such propositions. And none of the atheologians I quoted above seems to have realized the difficulty of that task.

In other words, logical problem of evils seek to show that orthodoxly conceived theism is self-contradictory. So, the difficulty here is finding a set of propositions, that are either necessarily true or that a theist is committed to, which together jointly entail a contradiction. This is by no means an easy task, which can explain why many atheologians aren't optimistic about it's chances. To see more clearly why this is no easy task, let's look at the following standard formulation of a logical problem of evil taken from Michael Tooley's fantastic SEP article on the Problem of Evil;

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.

2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.

3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.

4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.

5. Evil exists.

6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.

7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist

This argument is certainly valid, if the premises are true then the conclusion necessarily follows. However, are all the premises necessarily true, or commitments of theism? It seems not, 4 is not a commitment of theism nor is it a necessary truth. In fact, it's unclear why, given no argument, a theist would be compelled to accept 4 at all. Some evils might entail greater goods we aren't aware of and so God would permit such evils for the sake of greater goods which entail them, such an answer may not be likely or even plausible but all the theist needs is that it is logically possible and they've at-least avoided the logical problem of evil.

The question remains; Can Plantinga's challenge to the atheologian be met? Is there a set of propositions that are necessarily true, or commitments of theism which jointly entail a contradiction? I suggest that perhaps there is.

The Argument

From here I shall present my preferred logical argument from evil, and give some brief comments and justification for the premises.

(1) Evil Exists

This premise is relatively uncontroversial among both theists and atheists. At-least a commitment of Abrahamic theism is that sin exists and sin is evil. However, it may be noted that a theist could be tempted to deny this premise by suggesting that evil is merely a privation of good. But for one, this view is implausible. Surely pain is not merely a lack of some good, it is positively bad. It is bad, not in virtue of a privation, but because of it's positive phenomenal content. It is bad because humans, or at-least rational self-interested agents recognize pain as states that are intrinsically undesirable, what it's like to be brutally tortured makes me, and presumably other self-interested humans desire to avoid being in those states. The view also has problems with accounting for moral obligations, for a couple reasons. First it doesn't logically follow that if something is not good, or lacks good-making properties that I'm morally obligated to not do it. Second, it seems to be subject to a problem of moral demandiness, it's not good to choose not to be a doctor, but surely I'm not morally obligated to choose to be a doctor.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, even if evil is a privation of good, we can still run the same argument, as a logical argument from the privation of good. So it's clear a privation of good theodicy won't do.

(2) God exists

Obviously, a theist is committed to this premise.

(3) If God exists then God is omnipotent.

This is an analytic truth. In other words, it is true in virtue of the definition of God. The following premises, as well, are analytically true;

(4) If God exists then God is omniscient.

(5) If God exists then God is morally perfect.

Slightly more controversially,

(6) If God exists then God is maximally free.

God is free in the sense of not being subject to causal laws, He is omnipotent and He is the creator of causal laws, that much is clear. However, a theist might deny this by suggesting that God is necessarily morally perfect. So that while God has external and internal freedom (nothing external causes Him to act, and He is not subject to causal influences) He does not have maximal logical freedom, as there is no possible world wherein God does evil. I think there are serious issues with this position, it seems to seriously undermine omnipotence. For a good discussion, check out Wes Morriston's paper, Omnipotence and necessary moral perfection. are they compatible? For the purposes of this discussion, however, we could revise the premise to a more modest;

(6*) If God exists then God is maximally free with respect to any non-moral choices.

Now, it's unlikely but a theist might yet still deny this by claiming that all of God's choices, including His choice to create the universe are necessary. But this view is extremely implausible. For one, this completely undermines omnipotence even more severely than the denial of (6), since it entails that God cannot do otherwise than what He does at all. For two it entails modal collapse, which is to say it entails that there are no contingent truths and all truths are necessary truths. This is so because God Himself, is a necessary being, and God makes the same choices across all possible worlds. Modal collapse has alot of unpalatable consequences, the free will defense would no longer be available to the theist since there could not be libertarian free will, our modal intuitions such as "It is possible that I would have never been born" and "It is possible that my left foot would be placed 1 millimeter to the right" would all be necessarily false. Finally, one of the main motivations for theism is that it explains why there is something rather than nothing, why contingent things exist, and in particular, why the actual world exists with life, consciousness etc. But, if modal collapse is accepted, this motivation disappears it seems to me. Since the answer to those questions is "it's necessary", so why not just say that, without invoking an extra metaphysical postulate such as God?

Next;

(7) An omnipotent, omniscient person is morally perfect only if He eliminates every evil which is such that eliminating it does not entail preventing an equal or greater good.

The purpose of this premise would be to side-step any greater good theodicy/defense. At first blush, this seems to be true simply via conceptual analysis i.e from what it is to be morally perfect and omnipotent. An omnipotent, omniscient being can prevent any evil state of affairs, there is no restriction on their abilities aside from what is logically possible. A morally perfect being would prevent evil, so long as preventing it does not entail eliminating an equal or greater good. However, as Plantinga correctly points out in God and Other minds, there may be a conjunctive state of affairs E&G, where E is a lesser evil, and G is a greater good, such that G outweighs E. This state of affairs would be a greater good, and eliminating E entails eliminating E&G. Thus, by the premise, God could permit E. To quote Plantinga;

Consider any evil state of affairs E such that there is a good state of affairs G which outweighs it. G-and-E (the state of affairs that obtains just in case both G and E obtain) is a good state of affairs, and it is also a logically sufficient condition of E. Hence, any evil E which is out-weighed by at least one good G, is a logically necessary condition of a good state of affairs (G-and-E) which outweighs it. But this means that an omnipotent and omniscient being could permit as much evil as he pleased, without, under (f 3 ), forfeiting his claim to omnibenevolence, so long as for every evil state of affairs he permits, there is a greater good.

This is helpful, this will serve us. Clearly, just because the conjunctive state of affairs E&G entails E, and E&G is a greater good, surely it remains the case that a morally perfect being would not permit E, if it is the case that the being can actualize G without actualizing the conjunctive state of affairs E&G. For if we suppose it does, then any evil is justifiable, including murder, rape, and genocide, so long as we can trivially, and arbitrarily create a conjunctive state of affairs which is a greater good, and includes the evil as one of it's conjuncts. This is absurd. What this shows, following Plantinga's suggestion, is that the premise must be revised to;

(7*) An omnipotent, omniscient person is morally perfect only if He eliminates every evil which is such that for every equal or greater good which entails it, there is a greater good which does not entail it.

This premise might yet still be disputed on the grounds of the free will defense as Plantinga states;

This assumption is by no means self-evident, however, and apologists for traditional theism have often denied it; they have suggested that perhaps there are certain good states of affairs that an omnipotent God cannot bring about without permitting evil, despite the fact that these goods are not a logically sufficient condition of any evil at all. This suggestion on their parts is sometimes called the free will defense

So, God would not be morally blameworthy for failing to eliminate evil just in case eliminating the evil entails preventing the possibility of an equal or greater good, that being, creatures with morally significant freedom. I think the free will defense is a failure even against the logical problem of evil see here, for more details. However, we can actually side-step the free will defense all together by revising the premise to;

(7'') An omnipotent, omniscient person is morally perfect only if He eliminates every evil which is such that for every equal or greater good that entails it, He does not thereby eliminate a greater good which does not entail it, or the possibility of a greater good which does not entail it.

Then (1)-(5) and (7'') jointly entail.

(8) ) Every evil state of affairs is such that for any equal or greater good that entails it, it's not the case that there is a greater good or possibility of a greater good which does not entail it.

Next we've got;

(9) If God did not create there would be nothing but God

This should be fairly straightforward. A commitment of orthodoxly conceived theism is to take God to be the (ex nihilo) creator of the universe. So there was a state of the world, logically prior to God's act of creation, wherein only God existed, and if God had not created that would be this world. Perhaps some abstracta existed prior to God's act of creation as well, but that is neither here nor there for our purposes.

(10) God is the greatest possible good.

This is a commitment of Anselmian theism. God's goodness is the greatest possible goodness, higher than any possible earthly or humanly goods.

From (9) and (10) it follows

(11) If God had not created there would be nothing but the greatest possible good.

Next we've got;

(12) God is not morally obligated to create a world with evil.

Unlike much of the other premises, this one is less immediately obvious. However, this premise seems plausibly to be a commitment of orthodoxly conceived theism for a few reasons.

For one, it may be argued a maximally great being would be the ground of moral obligations otherwise they would not be maximally great. So that moral obligations just are constituted by God's commands, or by God's telos for human beings or some other such story. God is the ultimate ground of moral obligations, His will or desire or nature is logically prior to them not vise versa. If God were not the ground of all moral duties, and there are independent duties which bind God, then surely God is not the greatest being conceivable, since we can imagine a greater being which does satisfy such a description.

For two, suppose we grant that God can be bound by obligations, still, it doesn't seem like prior to creation God can be bound by obligations. Obligations arise not in a vacuum, but to others. For example, I have an obligation to the government, and to the people of the country I live in, to pay taxes, I have an obligation to my employer, I have an obligation to respect other peoples privacy, autonomy, and property. But all of my obligations are obligations to others. Yet, prior to creation there is nobody which exists to be the object of God's obligation. God would not be wronging anyone by not creating them, since they would not yet exist!

For three, even if God has obligations prior to creation, it seems highly implausible that, in particular, God would be obligated to create a world with evil. Why would God have to create a world with evil, rather than a world with nothing but positive axiological value?

Finally, I raise a challenge to the theist who would reject this premise with a dilemma. Is God's moral obligation to create this world contingent or necessary? If it is necessary, then this seems to undermine omnipotence, since God necessarily cannot not create. It seems utterly bizarre for a being that is omnipotent to have no choice but to create, an omnipotent being should have complete control over their actions and the possibilities they can actualize. If it is contingent, then that is puzzling, prior to creation nothing but God existed, so what possible reasons could God have in possible worlds where He exists prior to creation, such that in some possible worlds He is obligated to create, and in others He is not? It seems there could be nothing which could account for the difference in God's obligations. Further, it seems like moral obligations are the kinds of things which must be necessary, plausibly, if it's true I ought not torture babies all else equal, then there is no possible world where it's not the case that I ought not torture babies all else equal.

(13) If God is not morally obligated to create a world with evil, and God is free with respect to any non-moral choices, then there is a possible world where God did not create a world with evil.

This is true, in virtue of what it is to be free. As noted in my brief discussion of (6), freedom here includes logical freedom (the ability to do otherwise in some possible worlds).

It then follows from (6`), (12), and (13).

(14) There is a possible world where God did not create a world with evil

Next;

(15) If there is a possible world where God did not create a world with evil, the greatest possible good does not entail the existence of any evil.

This is trivially true, given (11), and the definition of entailment. E.g P entails Q iff there is no possible world where P obtains and Q does not obtain.

From 14 and 15 we get;

(16) The greatest possible good does not entail the existence of any evil.

Finally, we have;

(17) If evil exists, and the greatest possible good does not entail the existence of any evil, then there is some evil which is such that for any equal or greater good that entails it, there is a greater good or possibility of a greater good which does not entail it.

This is a long and scary-sounding premise, but it can be shortened to;

(17') (1) & (16) entails ~(8)

The premise is true because what it means to be the greatest possible good, is that there is no good greater than it. So, since the greatest possible good entails no evil, it follows that any possible greater good any evil state of affairs entails, will just be a lesser good compared to the greatest possible good. So for every good that entails, or is possibly instantiated by any evil state of affairs, there is a greater good, namely, God, which does not entail it.

Then, (1) (16) and (17) jointly entails;

(18) There is some evil which is such that for any equal or greater good that entails it, there is a greater good or possibility of a greater good which does not entail it.

Using first order predicate logic (19) can be translated to ∃xPx where P is the property of being an evil state of affairs which is such that for any good that entails it, there is a greater good or possibility of a greater good which does not entail it. ∃xPx is logically equivalent to, ~∀x~Px. Which is the negation of (8), which would be ∀x~Px. So we have successfully generated a contradiction.

Conclusion


It seems Plantinga's challenge can plausibly be met, we have here a formally contradictory set containing nothing but necessary truths, and claims which are essential to orthodoxly conceived theism. The theist could only consistently deny the conclusion on pain of rejecting one of the premises. In other words, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6'), (7'), (9), (10), (12), (13), (15), and (17). The strength of this argument, I think, is it's immunity to greater good type objections, and the fact that it survives the free will defense (due to premise 7``). If such responses are not available to the theist here, then we must ask, what resources does the theist have to challenge this argument? There are probably some not-totally-crazy, rejoinders available to the theist that I have missed, I do not wish to make a strong claim here. But at-least I hope to have shown that the logical problem of evil is not dead.

I will end my concluding section by pre-empting one last objection that I've seen theists use in response to this type of argument. A theist may argue that while a world where God exists sans creation might entail the exemplification of all the great-making qualities qua being, this does not entail that all the great-making qualities qua world are exemplified. A great-making quality qua world might entail something like a diversity of beings. So God would be doing better by actualizing such a world rather than the world where God exists alone. It's unclear what premise this objection is addressing. But, first, it just seems to me that what the objector here is calling "great-making qualities qua world" is just going to be lesser goods. Since, after-all, the greatest possible good obtains sans creation. But it's hard to see how the addition of lesser/finite goods, can improve a world where infinite goodness, and the greatest possible goodness is already exemplified. Second, when we consider the world where God exists alone, it's difficult to see how the theist can claim that such a state of affairs can be improved, afterall, the world is coextensive with God, it refers to nothing over and above God Himself, and surely God cannot be improved. Third, I would think that on the theists view such created worldly goods are not good in themselves, they are only good in virtue of resembling God or God's telos that He created for them. If that's right then what sense does it make to say the addition of created worldly goods adds to the greatness of a state of affairs wherein God, whom maximally resembles God and God's telos, already exists? So, if the theist wants to affirm that such goods add value that wouldn't be there sans creation, then it looks to me that they could do so only on pain of denying that God is the greatest possible good, and denying that God is the ground of all good which seems to be contrary to orthodoxly conceived conceptions of God. Finally, even if God can improve the world by creating stuff other than Himself, by premise 7, it seems there wouldn't be any point at which He would be justified in doing that, since for any state of affairs He could create which contains evil, even if the evil entails a greater good, there will always be a greater good which does not entail the evil, which is God himself.