Abstract
In this chapter, I review and relate the conclusions of the previous chapters and then consider how a traditional theist should respond.
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Notes
- 1.
I further argued that even if we drop the assumption, we still face the conclusion that what would be God’s behavior in the world parallels that of our worst villains.
- 2.
The “as needed” clause is there to indicate that whether God acts in this regard and the degree to which he does act depend on what we do.
- 3.
The other nonsentient living beings are other nonsentient living beings who either exist or would definitely exist. Nonhuman sentient living beings who just could exist, that is, possible nonhuman sentient beings, have no moral status here. This last condition (requirement) would be violated if God or ourselves attempted to intervene in the conflict between the Ichneumonidae and the caterpillars it preys upon for the purpose of preventing harm to one or the other of them.
- 4.
This is because the obligation to prevent (serious) evil has priority over the obligation to do good (which is not itself the prevention of an evil). Accordingly, it would only be possible for a God who has not failed in his obligation not to do (or permit) especially horrendous evil consequences of immoral actions to be inflicted on us to reveal himself by extending an offer of loving friendship to us (something to which we do not have a right). So we can only consider whether it would be appropriate for God to extend such an offer to us if we had assumed that God had not failed in his obligation not to do (or permit) especially horrendous evil consequences of immoral actions to be inflicted on us.
- 5.
Of course, if we were to assume that the problem of evil has not been resolved against theism (that is, if we had not yet determined that God had failed in his obligation not to do (or permit) especially horrendous evil consequences of immoral action to be inflicted on us), then it would make sense to try to raise a logical argument against the existence of God based on divine hiddenness. Of course, part of the justification for doing this would be that the main argument of my book does not work.
- 6.
This argument attempts to turn Leibniz’s theodicy into an atheodicy.
- 7.
In Chapter 12 of his The Nonexistence of God, Nicholas Evert makes some useful remarks toward offering a logical argument against theism based on the problem of evil. However, he doesn’t sketch out the theistic view sufficiently to show how such an argument would have to go. He also may have been writing too early to take into account some more recent defenses of theism with respect to the problem of evil such as that of skeptical theism (Evert 2004).
- 8.
It is worth noting that there are other purported logical arguments against the existence of God. These arguments attempt to derive a logical contradiction from some conception of a would-be divine attribute like omnipotence or omniscience. The problem with such arguments, as even some defenders of atheism have recognized, is that defenders of theism usually can find some modified conception of the divine attribute in question that avoids the contradiction at issue. See Stenger (2007, pp. 30–34). By contrast, with respect to the problem of evil, the fundamental requirements of morality, the violation of which would result in significant and especially horrendous evil, cannot be similarly just defined away. So a logical argument against the existence of God based on the problem of evil has a clear advantage over other logical arguments based on conceptions of divine attributes other than moral goodness.
- 9.
At age fourteen, I joined the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order, and, of course, was a committed theist. When I was twenty-six, I left the Christian Brothers before taking final vows in order to pursue a full-time philosophy PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh. Sometime during my graduate years at Pitt, after doing an independent study on the problem of evil, I became openly agnostic. However, it was only in 2013 after receiving a grant from the John Templeton Foundation that I was able to fully bring my years of working in ethics and political philosophy to bear on the problem of evil. This book, with its logical argument against the existence of God, is the main result.
Bibliography
Evert, Nicholas. 2004. The Nonexistence of God. New York: Routledge.
Hartshorne, Charles. 1967. A Natural Theology for our Time. La Salle: Open Court.
Schellenberg, J.L. 2015. The Hiddenness Argument. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stenger, Victor. 2007. God: The Failed Hypothesis. Amherst: Prometheus.
Whitehead, Alfred. 1926. Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan.
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Sterba, J.P. (2019). Conclusion. In: Is a Good God Logically Possible?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05469-4_9
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