The Problem of Evil (Alvin Plantinga’s point of view)
This is my first post about a philosophical book. Alvin Plantinga is considered by many the most influential Christian philosopher alive, so this is going to be a hard task. He splits the book in two parts: the first one to respond to atheological (atheist?) arguments; the second to provide a theological argument for the existence of God. This text will focus only on the first part where he talks about the problem of evil and freedom of the will. One good thing to differentiate, right in the beginning of the book, is the following:
“Now belief in God is not the same thing as belief that God exists, or that there is such a thing as God. To believe that God exists is simply to accept a proposition of a certain sort — a proposition affirming that there is a personal being who, let’s say, has existed from eternity, is almighty, perfectly wise, perfectly just, has created the world, and loves his creatures. […] Belief in God means trusting God, accepting Him, committing one’s life to Him. To the believer the entire world looks different.”
For many philosophers, the biggest problem for the belief that God exists is that the existence of evil makes it unreasonable. This is an indeed classical problem in philosophy and it relates to our daily lives, since everyday we are presented with the real and close existence of evil. David Hume questions famously that: if God is perfectly benevolent and also omnipotent, why is there evil in the world? Plantinga calls the answer to such questions a theodicy, which Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.” That is what the author tries to do in the following chapters.
What the well-known Christian philosopher argues is that “The fact that the theist doesn’t know why God permits evil […] shows little or nothing relevant to the rationality of belief in God.” However, the theist should still be able to show why this is not contradictory. Citing John Mackie, in his book “Evil and Omnipotence,” he says:
“In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions; the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere and cannot consistently tently adhere to all three.”
Plantinga then goes on to define what is a contradictory set of propositions, which can be formally contradictory, i.e. the members of the set can be shown contradictory by the use of the laws of logic; or we can have an implicit contradictory set of propositions, which means that adding a necessary proposition p to the set makes it a formally contradictory set. From now on, the book becomes more and more technical, but this definition is important as it is the basis for some other thoughts we will see.
That said, we see the problem of evil consists of saying the set of propositions {God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; evil exists} is informally contradictory, which means it is assuming some other propositions are necessarily true and added to this set will make it contradictory. And which propositions are these? “There are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do” and “A good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.” But are they really necessarily true? Let’s start with the first one:
“Most theologians and theistic philosophers who hold that God is omnipotent, do not hold that He can create round squares or bring it about that He both exists and does not exist. These theologians and philosophers may hold that there are no nonlogical limits to what an omnipotent being can do, but they concede that not even an omnipotent being can bring about logically impossible states of affairs or cause necessarily false propositions to be true.”
Here we can see that God, despite being omnipotent, has some things He can’t bring into existence. A clever thought by the author is also that if you concede God is able to bring into existence even logically impossible states, why are you concerned about the contradiction pointed by Hume? This contradictory state could be created by God, then. Nevertheless, that is not the case for most theologians, so we are let with the second proposition cited earlier “A good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.” Is this necessarily true? Giving some examples, Plantinga also argues this proposition can be false:
“It is entirely possible that a good person fail to eliminate an evil state of affairs that he knows about and can eliminate. This would take place, if, as in the present example, he couldn’t eliminate the evil without bringing about a greater evil.”
Augustine says that for God to create a top-notch universe it requires the existence of free, rational, and moral agents. However, some of these creatures will do wrong. That’s where Plantinga starts to do what he calls “The Free Will Defense”, i.e. maybe there is some kind of good that God is only capable of bring into existence if He permits evil to also exist. Plantinga shows with various thought experiments that maybe there are some creatures that can not be significantly free but do no wrong, no matter what is the world that God creates, this is what Plantinga calls “transworld depravity.” This does not show that God could not create a world with none of these types of creatures, and the author acknowledges that, and so the philosopher goes on to remember that it is not within the theist to prove this is the case, but merely to show it is possible. I think, here, Plantinga goes too fast to dismiss the atheist arguments, but let’s move on since he says right after that we still have one problem to solve.
“The world, after all, contains a great deal of moral evil; and what we’ve seen so far is only that God’s existence is compatible with some moral evil. Perhaps the atheologian can regroup; perhaps he can argue that at any rate God’s existence is not consistent with the vast amount and variety of moral evil the universe actually contains.”
He continues to say that the theologian do not need to show that God is not able to create a world with a better mix of good and evil, but that it is possible that God can’t create such a world. So he concludes that even with the vast amount of moral evil in the world, the Free Will defender is still in a good place. But then he goes further: and what about natural evil? That seems to be a more difficult question to answer.
The author has two main responses for this. The first one is that it is entirely conceivable that some natural evils will make some people produce more good, i.e. it is possible that these natural evils are actually bringing more good to the mix than their own quantity of evil. The second response is based on Augustine’s argument and it is not a consensus among Christian philosophers, but I personally think it is a good philosophical argument, considering what Plantinga says that we just need to show the set is not contradictory, i.e. it is possible that all these propositions are true at the same time.
Given that Theologians usually agree in the existence of Satan and, as Augustine points, much of them consider evil to be caused by the actions of Satan in these world, it is possible that natural evil is due to the action of significantly free nonhuman creatures (e.g. demons). That is a strange argument, considering we are usually presenting the argument for people who don’t believe in God, but Plantinga makes sure to emphasize we are just giving an alternative, a possibility for the set to not be contradictory. Free Will defenders are not aiming to prove this is true, as not even theologians are certain about this issue.
“Another possibility is that the existence of evil, or of the amount of it we find (perhaps coupled with other things we know) makes it unlikely or improbable that God exists. And, of course, this could be true even if the existence of God is consistent with that of evil.”
Plantinga sees that arguments to the improbability of God’s existence will fail for similar reasons as arguments for the contradiction of theologians beliefs: they assume there is such thing as a best possible world, which is not at all clear; they also assume God could create any world, despite of logical impossibilities in it. Again, I think he is too fast to dismiss atheist claims here. Finally, he spends just one paragraph talking about the pastoral or religious problem of evil:
The theist may find a religious problem in evil; in the presence of his own suffering or that of someone near to him he may find it difficult to maintain what he takes to be the proper attitude towards God. Faced with great personal suffering or misfortune, he may be tempted to rebel against God, to shake his fist in God’s face, or even to give up belief in God altogether. But this is a problem of a different dimension. Such a problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care.
In this last quote we see that, even though we have rational discussions about this problem, it is usually the case that people find it troubling because they need pastoral care, not philosophical arguments. Let’s keep that in mind whenever we approach someone to talk about this. I didn’t spend time talking about other atheological arguments presented by Plantinga, since he is also very quick on them. As I said in the beginning, I have also not covered the theological arguments, which may come in a future post.
Please, comment below on what you found interesting from Plantinga’s thoughts or some responses to the arguments you may want to present. I am trying to always post something whenever I finish some book, but sometimes I do not cover the whole book, as it was the case here. On the other hand, there are some books I’m planning to write another post, like Miracles (by C.S. Lewis) and Center Church (by Timothy Keller) — I’m not promising anything, though. Next book (which I’m almost finished) is Tactics, by Greg Koukl. You can follow me on Twitter, @heltonduarte, as I’m trying to post something useful from my readings regularly.
