Wever, Actually, his position was ambiguous. His writings may be interpreted as supporting either universal or limited possibilism.
The latter position by contrast affirms that eternal truths are necessary, but they owe their necessity to divine decree. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, , pp.
Loux Ithaca: Cornell University Press, , p. See this article for an elegant argument against middle knowledge. Eerdmans Publishing Company, , I, 15, 8. Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity , p. Both held to the unknowability of God and so also its corollary the unknowability of his goodness. II, No. Clark, For might one not feel that while the world would be better off without the vast majority of evils, this is not so for absolutely all evils?
Thus some would argue, for example, that the frustration that one experiences in trying to solve a difficult problem is outweighed by the satisfaction of arriving at a solution, and therefore that the world is a better place because it contains such evils. Alternatively, it has been argued that the world is a better place if people develop desirable traits of character—such as patience, and courage—by struggling against obstacles, including suffering.
But if either of these things is the case, then the prevention of all evil might well make the world a worse place. It seems possible, then, that there might be evils that are logically necessary for goods that outweigh them, and this possibility provides a reason, accordingly, for questioning one of the premises in the argument set out earlier—namely, premise 4 , where it is claimed that if God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
But there is also another reason why that claim is problematic, which arises out of a particular conception of free will—namely, a libertarian conception. According to this view of free will, and in contrast with what are known as compatibilist approaches, free will is incompatible with determinism, and so it is impossible even for an omnipotent being to make it the case that someone freely chooses to do what is right.
If this claim can be made plausible, one can argue, first, that God would have a good reason for creating a world with individuals who possessed libertarian free will, but secondly, that if he did choose to create such a world, even he could not ensure that no one would ever choose to do something morally wrong. The good of libertarian free will requires, in short, the possibility of moral evil.
Neither of these lines of argument is immune from challenge. As regards the former, one can argue that the examples that are typically advanced of cases where some evil is logically necessary for a greater good that outweighs the evil are not really, upon close examination, convincing, while, as regards the latter, there is a serious problem of making sense of libertarian free will, for although there is no difficulty about the idea of actions that are not causally determined, libertarian free will requires more than the mere absence of determinism, and the difficulty arises when one attempts to say what that something more is.
But although these challenges are important, and may very well turn out to be right, it is fair to say, first, that it has not yet been established that there is no coherent conception of libertarian free will, and, secondly, that it is, at least, very doubtful that one can establish that there cannot be cases where some evil is logically necessary for a greater good that outweighs it without appealing to some substantive, and probably controversial, moral theory.
The upshot is that the idea that either the actuality of certain undesirable states of affairs, or at least the possibility, may be logically necessary for goods that outweigh them, is not without some initial plausibility, and if some such claim can be sustained, it will follow immediately that the mere existence of evil cannot be incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect being.
How does this bear upon evidential formulations of the argument from evil? The answer would seem to be that if there can be evils that are logically necessary for goods that outweigh them, then it is hard to see how the mere existence of evil—in the absence of further information—can provide much in the way of evidence against the existence of God. What if one shifts to a slightly less abstract formulation of the argument from evil that is based upon the premise that the world contains a certain amount of evil, or upon the premise that the world contains at least some natural evil?
Then one is including marginally more information. But one is still assuming, in effect, that most of the detailed information about the evils found in the world is completely irrelevant to the argument from evil, and a little reflection brings out how very implausible this assumption is.
So, for example, consider a world that contains a billion units of natural evil. Is this a good starting point for an argument from evil? The answer is that, if either a deontological approach to ethics is correct, or a form of consequentialism that takes the distribution of goods and evils into account, rather than, say, simply the total amount of goods and evils, whether this fact is an impressive reason for questioning the existence of God surely depends on further details about the world.
If those billion units are uniformly distributed over trillions of people whose lives are otherwise extremely satisfying and ecstatically happy, it is not easy to see a serious problem of evil. But if, on the other hand, the billion units of natural evil fell upon a single innocent person, and produced a life that was, throughout, one of extraordinarily intense pain, then surely there would be a very serious problem of evil. Details concerning such things as how suffering and other evils are distributed over individuals, and the nature of those who undergo the evils, are, then, of crucial importance.
Thus it is relevant, for example, that many innocent children suffer agonizing deaths. It is relevant that animals suffer, and that they did so before there were any persons to observe their suffering, and to feel sympathy for them. It is also relevant that, on the one hand, the suffering that people undergo apparently bears no relation to the moral quality of their lives, and, on the other, that it bears a very clear relation to the wealth and medical knowledge of the societies in which they live.
The prospects for a successful abstract version of the argument from evil would seem, therefore, rather problematic. It is conceivable, of course, that the correct moral principles entail that there cannot be any evils whose actuality or possibility makes for a better world.
But to attempt to set out a version of the argument from evil that requires a defense of that thesis is certainly to swim upstream. A much more promising approach, surely, is to focus, instead, simply upon those evils that are thought, by the vast majority of people, to pose at least a prima facie problem for the rationality of belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect person.
Given that the preceding observations are rather obvious ones, one might have expected that discussions of the argument from evil would have centered mainly upon concrete formulations of the argument.
Rather surprisingly, that has not been so. Indeed, some authors seem to focus almost exclusively upon very abstract versions of the argument. That Plantinga initially focused upon abstract formulations of the argument from evil was not, perhaps, surprising, given that a number of writers—including Mackie, H. McCloskey , and H. Aiken —58 —had defended incompatibility versions of the argument from evil, and it is natural to formulate such arguments in an abstract way, since although one may wish to distinguish, for example, between natural evils and moral evils, reference to concrete cases of evil would not seem to add anything.
But once one shifts to probabilistic formulations of the argument from evil, the situation is very different: details about concrete cases of evil may be evidentially crucial. The problem, then, is that Plantinga not only started out by focusing on very abstract versions of the argument from evil, but also maintained this focus throughout.
The explanation of this may lie in the fact that Plantinga seems to have believed that if it can be shown that the existence of God is neither incompatible with, nor rendered improbable by, either 1 the mere existence of evil, or 2 the existence of a specified amount of evil, then no philosophical problem remains.
For not only can the argument from evil be formulated in terms of specific evils, but that is the natural way to do so, given that it is only certain types of evils that are generally viewed as raising a serious problem with respect to the rationality of belief in God. To concentrate exclusively on abstract versions of the argument from evil is therefore to ignore the most plausible and challenging versions of the argument.
Consider, now, the following formulation of the argument from evil, which, in contrast to the abstract version of the argument from evil set out in section 1. As it stands, this argument is deductively valid. However it is likely to be challenged in various ways. In particular, one vulnerable point is the claim, made in the last part of statement 1 , that an omnipotent and omniscient person could have prevented those states of affairs without thereby either allowing an equal or greater evil, or preventing an equal or greater good, and when this is challenged, an inductive step will presumably be introduced, one that moves from what we know about the undesirable states of affairs in question to a conclusion about the overall value of those states of affairs, all things considered—including things that may well lie outside our ken.
But the above argument is subject to a very different sort of criticism, one that is connected with a feature of the above argument which seems to me important, but which is not often commented upon—the fact, namely, that the above argument is formulated in terms of axiological concepts, that is, in terms of the goodness or badness, the desirability or undesirability, of states of affairs.
The criticism that arises from this feature centers on statement 3 , which asserts that an omniscient and morally perfect being would prevent the existence of any states of affairs that are intrinsically bad or undesirable, and whose prevention he could achieve without either allowing an equal or greater evil, or preventing an equal or greater good.
For one can ask how this claim is to be justified. One answer that might be offered would be that some form of consequentialism is true—such as, for example, the view that an action that fails to maximize the balance of good states of affairs over bad states of affairs is morally wrong.
But the difficulty then is that any such assumption is likely to be a deeply controversial assumption that many theists would certainly reject. The problem, in short, is that any axiological formulation of the argument from evil, as it stands, is incomplete in a crucial respect, since it fails to make explicit how a failure to bring about good states of affairs, or a failure to prevent bad states of affairs, entails that one is acting in a morally wrong way. Moreover, the natural way of removing this incompleteness is by appealing to what are in fact controversial ethical claims, such as the claim that the right action is the one that maximizes expected value.
The result, in turn, is that discussions may very well become sidetracked on issues that are, in fact, not really crucial—such as, for example, the question of whether God would be morally blameworthy if he failed to create the best world that he could. The alternative to an axiological formulation is a deontological formulation.
Here the idea is that rather than employing concepts that focus upon the value or disvalue of states of affairs, one instead uses concepts that focus upon the rightness and wrongness of actions, and upon the properties—rightmaking properties and wrongmaking properties—that determine whether an action is one that ought to be performed, or ought not to be performed, other things being equal.
When the argument is thus formulated, there is no problematic bridge that needs to be introduced connecting the goodness and badness of states of affairs with the rightness and wrongness of actions.
How is the argument from evil best formulated? As an incompatibility argument, or as an evidential argument? In section 1. That formulation involved the following crucial premise:. The problem with that premise, as we saw, is that it can be argued that some evils are such that their actuality, or at least their possibility, is logically necessary for goods that outweigh them, in which case it is not true that a perfectly good being would want to eliminate such evils.
The thrust of the argument was then that, first of all, an omniscient and omnipotent person could have prevented the existence of such evils without thereby either allowing equal or greater evils, or preventing equal or greater goods, and, secondly, that any omniscient and morally perfect person will prevent the existence of such evils if that can be done without either allowing equal or greater evils, or preventing equal or greater goods.
The second of these claims avoids the objections that can be directed against the stronger claim that was involved in the argument set out in section 1. But the shift to the more modest claim requires that one move from the very modest claim that evil exists to the stronger claim that there are certain evils that an omniscient and omnipotent person could have prevented the existence of such evils without thereby either allowing equal or greater evils, or preventing equal or greater goods, and the question arises as to how that claim can be supported.
In particular, can it be established by means of a purely deductive argument? Consider, in particular, the relevant premise in the more concrete version of the argument from evil set out in section 1. If one had knowledge of the totality of morally relevant properties, then it might well be possible to show both that there are no greater evils that can be avoided only at the cost of the evil in question, and that there are no greater goods that are possible only given that evil.
Do we have such knowledge? Some moral theorists would claim that we do, and that it is possible to set out a complete and correct moral theory.
But this is certainly a highly controversial metaethical claim, and, as a consequence, the prospects for establishing a premise such as 1 via a deductive argument do not appear promising, at least given the present state of moral theory. This is a serious question, and it may well be that such knowledge is ruled out.
But as will become clear when we consider evidential versions of the argument from evil, it may well be that one can have justified beliefs about the rightness and wrongness of actions. If a premise such as 1 cannot, at least at present, be established deductively, then the only possibility, it would seem, is to offer some sort of inductive argument in support of the relevant premise. If the argument from evil is given an evidential formulation, what form should that take? There appear to be four main possibilities that have been suggested in recent discussions.
The first, which might be called the direct inductive approach, involves the idea that one can show that theism is unlikely to be true without comparing theism with any alternative hypothesis, other than the mere denial of theism. At the heart of this first approach, which was set out by William Rowe, is the idea that one sound type of inductive inference is what might be referred to as instantial generalization, where this is a matter of projecting a generalization that has been found to hold in all cases that have been so far examined to all cases whatever.
The second, which can be labeled the indirect inductive approach, argues instead that theism can be shown to be unlikely to be true by establishing that there is some alternative hypothesis—other than the mere negation of theism—that is logically incompatible with theism, and more probable than theism.
This approach, which was originally used by David Hume in one of his arguments in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , and which has been set out and defended in a detailed way by Paul Draper, can be viewed as involving an inference to the best explanation, a type of inductive inference that was discovered by C. Pierce, and which is now very widely accepted.
The third approach, which has been advanced by William Rowe, involves what might be referred to as a Bayesian approach, and it differs from the first two approaches in that it does not involve either instantial generalization or inference to the best explanation, or, indeed, any sort of inductive inference. The idea, instead, is to start out from premises that are themselves substantive probabilistic claims, and then to show that it follows deductively from those premises, via axioms of probability theory, that it is unlikely that God exists.
The fourth and final approach, which has been set out by Michael Tooley, involves the idea of bringing a substantive theory of inductive logic, or logical probability, to bear upon the argument from evil, and then to argue that when this is done, one can derive a formula giving the probability that God does not exist relative to information about the number of apparent evils to be found in the world.
The basic idea behind a direct inductive formulation of the argument from evil is that the argument involves a crucial inductive step that takes the form of an inductive projection or generalization in which one moves from a premise concerning the known moral properties of some state of affairs to a conclusion about the likely overall moral worth of that state of affairs, given all its moral properties, both known and unknown.
When the argument from evil is formulated in this way, it involves five premises, set out at steps 1 , 3 , 5 , 7 and 9. Statement 1 involves both empirical claims, and moral claims, but the empirical claims are surely true, and, setting aside the question of the existence of objective rightmaking and wrongmaking properties, the moral claims are surely also very plausible.
The other four premises, set out at steps 3 , 5 , 7 and 9 , are plausibly viewed as analytic truths. As regards the logic of the argument, all of the steps in the argument, other than the inference from 1 to 2 , are deductive, and are either clearly valid as they stand, or could be made so by trivial expansions of the argument at the relevant points.
The upshot, accordingly, is that the above argument appears to stand or fall with the defensibility of the inductive inference from 1 to 2. The crucial questions, accordingly, are, first, exactly what the form of that inductive inference is, and, secondly, whether it is sound.
A familiar and very common sort of inductive inference involves moving from information to the effect that all observed things of a certain type have a certain property to the conclusion that absolutely all things of the type in question have the relevant property.
Could the inductive step in the evidential argument from evil perhaps be of that form? Let us consider, then, whether that view can be sustained.
When this is done, the above inference can be compactly represented as follows:. For the reason given, it is not a cogent criticism. But a criticism of type B is entirely proper to advance against any inductive inference of the sort we are considering. Let us consider, then, the relevance of this distinction. But, by contrast, it is not true that this is so if one rejects, instead, the inference to 1. Compare the situation with a very long conjunction: given any particular conjunct, it may be likely that that conjunct is true, while being very unlikely that every conjunct, and hence the conjunction as a whole, is true.
This is important, moreover, because it is 1 that Rowe needs, since the conclusion that he is drawing does not concern simply the next morally relevant property that someone might consider: conclusion Q asserts, rather, that all further morally relevant properties will lack property J. Such a conclusion about all further cases is much stronger than a conclusion about the next case, and one might well think that in some circumstances a conclusion of the latter sort is justified, but that a conclusion of the former sort is not.
One way of supporting the latter claim is by introducing the idea of logical probability, where logical probability is a measure of the extent to which one proposition supports another Carnap, , 19—51, esp. Is it impossible, then, to justify universal generalizations? The answer is that if laws are more than mere regularities—and, in particular, if they are second-order relations between universals—then the obtaining of a law, and thus of the corresponding regularity, may have a very high probability upon even quite a small body of evidence.
So universal generalizations can be justified, if they obtain in virtue of underlying, governing laws of nature. The question then becomes whether Q expresses a law—or a consequence of a law. If—as seems plausible—it does not, then, although it is true that one in justified in holding, of any given, not yet observed morally relevant property, that it is unlikely to have property J, it may not be the case that it is probable that no goodmaking or rightmaking property has property J. It may , on the contrary, be probable that there is some morally relevant property that does have property J.
This objection could be overcome if one could argue that it is unlikely that there are many unknown goodmaking properties. For if the number is small, then the probability of Q may still be high even if Q does not express a law, or a consequence of a law.
Moreover, I am inclined to think that it may well be possible to argue that it is unlikely that there are many unknown, morally relevant properties.
But I also think that it is very likely that any attempt to establish this conclusion would involve some very controversial metaethical claims. As a consequence, I think that one is justified in concluding that such a line of argument is not especially promising. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , Hume contended that it was not possible to arrive at the conclusion that the world had a perfectly good cause—or a perfectly evil one—starting out simply from a world that consists of a mixture of good and bad states of affairs:.
But if this is right, and the hypothesis that the first cause or causes of the universe is neither good nor evil is more probable than the hypothesis that the first cause is perfectly good, then the probability of the latter must be less than one half.
Hume advanced, then, an evidential argument from evil that has a distinctly different logical form from that involved in direct inductive arguments, for the idea is to point to some proposition that is logically incompatible with theism, and then to argue that, given facts about undesirable states of affairs to be found in the world, that hypothesis is more probable than theism, and, therefore, that theism is more likely to be false than to be true.
More than two centuries later, Paul Draper, inspired by Hume, set out and defended this type of indirect inductive argument in a very detailed way. It then follows, provided that the initial probability of T is no greater than that of HI, that T is more likely to be false than to be true. By substitution in 1 , we have:. So far, this is simply a matter of probability theory. But now Draper introduces two substantive claims. The first is that the a priori probability of the hypothesis of indifference is not less than the a priori probability of theism, so that we have.
So we have. Finally, Draper assumes as a substantive premise that the hypothesis of indifference is logically incompatible with theism:.
There are various points at which one might respond to this argument. First, it might be argued that the assumption that the hypothesis of indifference is logically incompatible with theism is not obviously true.
For might it not be logically possible that there was an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect being who created a neutral environment in which evolution could take place in a chancy way, and who afterwards did not intervene in any way? Draper supports it by arguing that whereas the hypothesis of theism involves some ontological commitment, the Hypothesis of Indifference does not.
But, on the other hand, the latter involves a completely universal generalization about the absence of any action upon the earth by any nonhuman persons, of either a benevolent or malevolent sort, and it is far from clear why the prior probability of this being so should be greater than the prior probability of theism.
Nevertheless, the objection does bring out an important point, namely, that the argument as it stands says nothing at all about how much below 0. Fourthly, objections can be directed at the arguments that Draper offers in support of a third substantive premise—namely, that introduced at 6. Some of the objections directed against this premise are less than impressive—and some seem very implausible indeed, as in the case, for example, of Peter van Inwagen, who has to appeal to quite an extraordinary claim about the conditions that one must satisfy in order to claim that a world is logically possible:.
Nevertheless, given that the argument that Draper offers in support of the premise at 6 involves a number of detailed considerations, very careful scrutiny of those arguments would be needed before one could conclude that the premise is justified. Finally, rather than attacking the argument itself, one might instead argue that, while it is sound, the conclusion is not really a significant one.
For what matters is not whether there is some evidence relative to which it is unlikely that theism is true. What matters is whether theism is improbable relative to our total evidence. The question then is whether the appropriate revision of the first substantive premise is plausible. That is, do we have good reason for thinking that the following statement is true:.
A Draper-style argument is one type of indirect inductive argument from evil. It is important to notice, however, that in formulating an indirect inductive argument from evil, one need not proceed along the route that Draper chooses.
If one explains the fact that the world contains an impressive mixture of desirable and undesirable states of affairs by the hypothesis that the creator of the world was an omnipotent, omniscient, and indifferent deity, then nothing more needs to be added. By contrast, if one wants to explain the mixed state of the world by the hypothesis that the creator of the world was an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect deity, one needs to postulate the existence of additional, morally significant properties that lie beyond our ken, and ones, moreover, that are so distributed that the mixed appearance does not correspond to what is really the case.
A theistic explanation is, accordingly, less simple than an indifferent deity explanation, and therefore, provided that one can argue that the a priori probability of the latter hypothesis is not less than that of the former, one can appeal to the greater simplicity of the latter in order to conclude that it has a higher posterior probability than the theistic hypothesis. It then follows, given that the two hypotheses are logically incompatible, that the probability of the theistic hypothesis must be less than one half.
We have just considered the Bayesian-style argument offered by Paul Draper. The term omnipotence refers to the idea that God is all-powerful. There are many stories in the Bible which reveal the power of God. It states how God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Even Christians who do not believe this story to be literally true will still accept that it shows God's power over the world. Some Christians are known as literalists. This is because they believe the accounts from the Bible to be the truth, and stated exactly as they happened.
Others, known as non-literalists , believe the accounts may be more mythical. Despite how the accounts are interpreted, they still portray the power or omnipotence of God. The term omnibenevolence refers to the idea that God is an all-loving being.
Omnipotence: A God that is just all-powerful can do anything he pleases. There could be conceptual issues with this, as if God is truly all-powerful, then he might be able to do the impossible, even the logically impossible.
Except, once again, for free will. If God is all-powerful, then maybe we are only acting if he makes us or allows us to. Omnipresence: There is no problem with God being all-present. Albert Einstein espoused the interesting view that God is the laws of physics and the order in the universe. In this sense, God is in everything and everywhere. This might lead to a less-traditional version of God, but it is not logically impossible or incoherent.
Thus, it turns out that God can be infinite, but only in one way. If God is infinite in more than one way, then a contradiction emerges for either his existence or our existence. However, there is one more response that can be made to my claims: if God is infinite in any one way, then he is infinite in every way; that having any one of these traits automatically entails the others. Regardless, this is still consistent with my main claim: God can only be one type of infinite to be rationally consistent.
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