The Argument From the World

The strongest case against goes the other way from the last two chapters. It does not begin with a concept. It begins with looking.

Three attributes are traditionally claimed: God is all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good. Now consider a child dying slowly of a disease nobody caused.

A being who could prevent it and did not is either unable, unaware, or unwilling. Unable contradicts all-powerful. Unaware contradicts all-knowing. Unwilling contradicts wholly good.

The formulation goes back to Epicurus in some form and has been sharpened for two thousand years, and the sharpening matters, because the modern version is careful about what it claims.

It does not claim that God does not exist. It claims that these three specific attributes cannot all be held together given what the world contains.

That is a much harder thing to answer than a general denial, and the difference is worth understanding as a piece of argumentative technique. If you assert that God does not exist, you have taken on a burden. If you assert that a set of claims is internally strained, you have taken on almost none: you are pointing at a tension in somebody else's position and asking them to resolve it.

The most serious reply is the free will defence. A world containing genuine freedom is better than one without it, and genuine freedom means the possibility of choosing to do harm. God could prevent every cruelty only by removing the freedom that makes goodness meaningful, and that trade is not obviously worth making.

This is a real argument, and it has a boundary you can see from a long way off.

It covers suffering that somebody chose. It has nothing whatsoever to say about an earthquake.

Natural evil is the hard half, and it is where the discussion actually lives. Disease, famine, the ordinary catastrophes of a physical world: nobody chose them, so there is no freedom being protected, and the standard defence has no material to work with.

The replies that exist here are noticeably weaker. That a lawlike universe requires physical regularities, and regularities sometimes kill. That suffering builds character, which is difficult to sustain in the case of an infant. That we cannot see the whole picture, which is true and is an appeal to ignorance rather than an answer.

Which brings us to the observation this chapter is really for.

Most serious replies to the problem of evil do not refute it. They revise one of the three attributes: they limit the power, or they reinterpret what goodness means when applied to a being of that kind, or they qualify the knowledge.

That is a concession rather than a defence, and it is a perfectly respectable move. A position that survives by being stated more carefully is in better shape than one that is simply repeated.

But it is worth naming clearly, because a conversation in which one side thinks the argument has been answered and the other thinks a premise has been quietly dropped is not a conversation that will go anywhere.