The Saint-Making Theodicy II: Positive Phase

Abstract

The last chapter concerned the defeat of evil. Given theism’s capacity to defeat evil from within its value system, evil will not count against God’s existence. For theism is only in tension with indefeasible evil (which is probably a better way to characterize what has been called “gratuitous” evil). And we have no evidence whatsoever that there is any indefeasible evil. However, though this is our theodical foundation, it is not enough to fully answer the Bayesian argument from animal suffering. For, on the face of it, the suffering is just what we’d expect given naturalism. And failing to predict the opposite of the data is not on par with predicting the data. So in this chapter, I take the considerations of the last chapter and present in Section 7.1 the fine-tuning argument for theism from evil. Its structure is much like the fine-tuning argument for theism from the initial conditions of the universe. In Section 7.2, I make its application to the Bayesian problem of evil from animal suffering perfectly explicit. In Section 7.3, I consider whether there is any evidence that the amount of suffering observed is definitely beyond the range of expectation. I finish, in Section 7.4, with some exploratory reflections on how we can assess what worlds to expect based on what kind of story the lives of the sufferers amount to.