1. There exist horrendous evils that God would have no justifying reason to permit.
2. God would not permit an evil unless he had a justifying reason to permit it.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.
We noted that Rowe thinks that most people--theists and atheists alike--are inclined to affirm premise 2, and so on his view most of the critical attention is devoted to premise 1.
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| PVI |
He thinks that premise 2 relies upon something like the following moral principle:
(MP) If one is in a position to prevent some evil, one should not allow that evil to occur--not unless allowing it to occur would result in some good that would outweigh it or preventing it would result in some other evil at least as bad.
van Inwagen thinks that MP is false. He thinks that MP is subject to multiple counterexamples. Here's one:
Case 1: You are an official who has the power to release any prisoner at any time. Blodgett is serving a ten year sentence for felonious assault. Near the end of his sentence, he appeals to you to let him out a day early. Should you?
Commentary: According to van Inwagen, MP entails that you should release Blodgett a day early from prison. After all, by releasing Blodgett a day early, you are preventing an evil (another day in prison), and denying Blodgett's appeal and requiring him to stay one more day so as to serve out his entire sentence does not result in some outweighing good (additional crime deterrence or greater balance of justice) or prevent some comparably bad evil.
But, van Inwagen thinks, you have no such duty to grant Blodgett his appeal. MP implies otherwise. So, MP is false.
Case 2: Any welfare state.
Commentary: According to van Inwagen: "In a welfare state, for example, we use taxation to divert money from its primary economic role in order to spend it to prevent or alleviate various social evils. And how much money, what proportion of the gross national product, shall we--that is, the state--divert for this purpose? Well, not none of it and not all of it (enforcing a tax rate of 100 percent on all earned income and all profits would be the same as not having a money economy at all). And where we draw the line is an arbitrary matter. However much we spend on social services, we shall always be able to find some person or family who would be saved from misery if the state spent (in the right way) a mere $1,000 more than it in fact plans to spend. And the state can always find another $1,000 and can find it without damaging the economy or doing any other sort of harm."
In other words, MP seems to imply that any enacted welfare state tax and distribution policy is wrong. After all, in any case, the state is in a position to prevent some evil (the misery of some additional individual or family) and there is no additional outweighing good that is accomplished or some more heinous evil prevented by allowing that evil (the misery of that additional individual or family), but the state allows that evil anyway.
So how does this all apply to evil?
Here's how William Hasker summarizes van Inwagen's reply:
"Van Inwagen contends that in general there is no minimum number of horrors that must be permitted in order to make human beings aware of the evils of their present state. (If n horrors would suffice to accomplish a certain purpose, then n - 1 horrors would accomplish the same purpose.) God cannot prevent all horrors, because that would frustrate his plan for reuniting human beings with himself."
Now here's the key:
"But wherever God draws the line on the number of horrors permitted, it will be an arbitrary line. In view of this, the moral requirement that God should prevent every horror that does not lead to a greater good is unsound and should be rejected." (http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25239-the-problem-of-evil/)
Bottom Line: van Inwagen thinks principle MP is false. But, he contends, premise 2 of Rowe's argument relies upon something like MP. So, he concludes, we have good reason to reject premise 2 of Rowe's argument.
What do you make of all this? Is van Inwagen right that Rowe's premise 2 relies upon something like MP? Is van Inwagen right that MP is false? What do you make of his objections to MP? Are there other (perhaps better) objections to MP? If so, what are they?
Interact with each other!
8 comments:
In view of God’s omniscience and omnipotence, when saying that God would not do something, it seem safe to say that he is bound by his moral character. So, why would God not permit an evil unless he had a justifying reason to permit it? Because permitting an evil without a justifying reason is morally wrong. Unless we rely on some kind of moral principle, like MP, it’s difficult to see why this would be the case. So, it makes good sense to say Rowe's premise 2 relies upon something like MP.
As was mentioned, van Inwagen’s objections to MP rely on some kind of principle of vagueness. When we think about the precise point along the color spectrum at which orange becomes red, it’s clear that our concepts of orange and red are very vague. And so, there is actually no precise point where making red slightly more orange decisively makes it orange. Instead, there are range on both sides where the distinction is clear, but somewhere in the middle the boundary is vague. If we had to choose a point it would be arbitrary. In a similar way, we might think that the distinction between a just and unjust length of time of a prison sentence is vague. And so, the precise length is arbitrary.
The case of the official with the power to release the prisoner shows that MP is false and so, we don’t have good reason to affirm Rowe’s premise 2.
A potential objection to this line of thought is to say that appeals to vagueness do not work in cases involving God because of his omniscience. In other words, we see concepts as vague because of our limited, finite perspective. But God sees things as they actually are. So, God since God understands the concept of orange-ness and red-ness perfectly, God would actually be able to say at what precise point one becomes the other. In the same way, God would be able to say exactly what length of a prison sentence would be just. So, while MP does not apply in all cases, MP actually does apply to God. So, we should affirm Rowe’s premise 2.
On the other hand, maybe our vague concepts have nothing to do with our finitude, but instead the vagueness is inherent in the concepts themselves. That is, red-ness is a vague concept, even when understood maximally. If this is the case, then the van Inwagen’s two examples do give us good reason to think that MP doesn’t apply to God, and we should reject Rowe’s premise 2.
Thoughts?
--Bayer
Bayer: Perhaps we see concepts as “vague” not out of our own finitude, but out of an improper simplification. Redness and orangeness seem vague only because we’re trying to use them to describe things that are not fully red or orange. So although there isn’t a precise point where red becomes orange, each point on the continuum from red to orange does have a definitive amount of redness and orangeness. Even finite humans can see that distinction.
Both counterexamples seem to fail when this distinction is considered. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say the point of sending a person to prison is deterrence. Let’s also suppose that God is traditionally omniscient, able to see the future in some way. For any amount of time a person is in prison, there is some definitive amount of deterrence. If a ten-year prison sentence entails maximal deterrence in some instance, then it would indeed seem wrong to give an eleven-year sentence in that case. But a nine-year, eleven-month sentence would have less deterrence. So to let the prison out a month early, we would have to balance the deterrence lost with the evil prevented. Here, finitude does seem to be an issue: we don’t know how much deterrence any amount of time will entail. But God does seem to know. So God should give the perfect sentence and not modify it.
Likewise with the welfare state example. For any amount of taxation, a certain number of people will be hurt and a certain number helped. It’s just not the case that “another $1000” can be found without doing any sort of harm. Finding another $1000 may do relatively little harm on a grand scale, but then it also does relatively little good on the grand scale. It’s only when comparing the harm on a grand scale to the good on a local scale as this example does that there seems to be a problem. But $1000 of taxation could do harm on a local scale equivalent to the harm on the grand scale. Thus, MP doesn’t seem to be threatened by these examples.
Rowe assumes that most people will accept the second premise of his argument from evil to atheism where he says that God would not permit unjustified evil to occur. Unlike some who try and argue that God can somehow justify all the evils that he permits and then reject this argument, Peter Van Inwagen doesn’t agree with the second premise because it implies a moral principle that is a contradiction. The principle is one which states that if an evil is about to occur that is preventable and cannot be justified by some outweighing good, then it is obligatory of persons in a position to thwart that evil from occurring. However, if an official were to actually live by this principle than they would be morally required to alleviate the harm occurring to the prisoner and let them out of jail early. The number of years that the prisoner was sentenced to were arbitrary and so the official would have to release the prisoner early to lessen the amount of evil without detracting from the good that would ensue. This would mean that there was no limit to the number of days that the official could reduce from the prisoner’s sentence, until finally the sentence is nonexistent.
Similarly, if God were to be required to abide by this moral principle which Rowe seems to want to put in place, then there would be no limit to the amount of evil that God had to prevent. According to this rule, if he does not prevent all evil then he is making an arbitrary decision on what evil to prevent or not, which Van Inwagen rejects as false, and in turn Rowe’s argument is false.
The moral principle argument is shaky at best. It seems to assume that an evil that occurs cannot be evil in itself, but instead it must have a negative or positive consequence. It would affirm that our deeds can be measured by the amount of good or bad consequences that they bring about. And although it is true that people seem to live in this way and make their moral judgments based on the products of their actions, there are some choices that exist that cannot be predetermined by the consequences of the choice that must be made. Often people cannot know previous to their actions whether or not, what they did could turn out to have a negative side effect and cause some evil for someone else. And if it were to bring about harm to another person they would then be morally culpable for the evil occurring to another.
~Rachel
...That being said, I find it hard to accept van Inwagen's claim that there is no non-arbitrary line to be drawn regarding the amount of evil. Perhaps it may be that there are a wide range of options for God when determining how much evil can exist without jeopardizing his plans, but it still seems to me that in that case, God would simply start with a situation where there is not enough evil, then add evil in tiny increments until his purposes are fulfilled- voila, a minimum amount of evil. What form that evil takes can very well be variable, but it seems to me that for there to be no solid minimum amount of evil implies that there must be a point or set of points where whether or not God's purposes are fulfilled is uncertain.
Alex LaBreche
Uhh... what happened to the rest of my comment?
-Alex LaBreche
Well... here's the first half of my earlier comment:
It seems to me that perhaps the fact that we can be uncertain at all about whether or not the amount of evil is vague may be enough to give us cause to doubt Rowe's claim. The amount of appropriate evil need not be inherently vague for us to doubt Rowe; if we have no way of knowing that there is a non-arbitrary line to be drawn regarding evil, then Rowe's claim cannot be proven by cause of relying on an unprovable premise.
Alex LaBreche
I haven't quite figured out how my thoughts fit into this argument, or what premise exactly I'm denying (yes, maybe I'm just denying the conclusion). I wonder why Peter Van Inwagen (and I suppose everyone, for that matter) sees the evil in the world as a finite number, or a certain line that God draws either arbitrarily or non-arbitrarily. In my opinion, I don't see the total amount of evil in the world as a specific "amount" that God allowed; I don't see it as God drawing a line somewhere, saying: "I will allow N amount of evil in the world, not N+1 or n-1, but N exactly." Instead, can we not see it as God deciding: "I will allow humans to freely choose their actions, and unfortunately many actions will be sinful and result in terrible evils." So it's not so much God drawing a line in how much he will "allow", but rather God giving humans that choice at the origin of the world, and the amount of evil that occurs is merely a result (thinking of evil as a sort of domino effect, as opposed to a "line" God draws).
Unfortunately, I don't think this accounts very well for evils that don't seem to be caused by human action, such as natural disasters or bambi getting struck by lightening in the forest. Nevertheless, I feel as though there is something inherently wrong about viewing the amount of evils in the world as a particular amount allowed by God, as opposed to a specific amount created/caused by us.
-Kim Small
I also agree with Kim.
If God were to pick and choose how many evils are allowed in the world in order to accomplish His purposes there would be no such thing as "free will" because God had ordained and essentially forced every act of evil done by a human being. God is capable of working out "His plan" even despite our mistakes/evils and somehow He is able to bring good out of those and sometimes the good is obviously greater than any good that could have come without the evil that ending up producing it. Other times, it's not as clear what good comes out of the evil. God is aware of every single evil but to say that He ordained every single one, again, cuts at the core of this idea of "free will".
It is interesting how every single discussion we have seems to go back to this topic of free will...
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